Formalized just this August, Phase 1 of the Department of Education (DepEd)’s Matatag Curriculum was launched for School Year (S.Y.) 2024-2025, mandating schools nationwide to adopt the Matatag syllabus for Grades 1, 4, and 7.
Moreover, MHCS curriculum alterations were introduced for the current school year: the improved Chinese Curriculum and the Aralinks Coding Education (ACE) subject, aiming to promote a more innovative, 21st-century competency-focused student lifestyle while ensuring an interactive, beneficial, and educational journey.
DepEd Matatag
Following the elapse of DepEd’s Most Essential Learning Competencies (MELC) curriculum—designed to focus only on the most invaluable competencies given the limits of the pandemic, DepEd Matatag was introduced to transition students back to their face-to-face lessons.
The Matatag curriculum focuses on decongesting competencies; placing heavy importance on retaining only the key topics, and providing more time for teachers to tackle the lessons in their entirety without the pressure of time.
This is in stark contrast to that of its predecessor, the K-12 curriculum that was implemented pre-pandemic. Where the K-12 curriculum failed to balance the number of competencies with the limit of time and to consider external factors such as cancellation of classes and lack of resources, the Matatag curriculum amends these issues to provide Filipinos with more quality education.
In Makati Hope, the Matatag Curriculum was implemented this S.Y. in Grades 1, 4, and 7, as DepEd requires. The faculties have collaborated to combine the current curriculum MHCS offers with the DepEd-mandated curriculum. In this process, the administration discovered that Makati Hope has already been teaching these mandatory competencies and more than that.
“We found out that we are teaching more than what the Matatag curriculum is actually expecting us to do. In terms of curriculum, we are not way behind [what] Matatag is expecting of us, actually, it’s way beyond. So that’s what we’re doing,” Elementary and High School Academic Head Kristin Basco highlighted.
According to Basco, there is no need to worry about lagging in Matatag’s curriculum, as Makati Hope exceeds Matatag’s competency expectations, especially in Science and Mathematics.
Chinese Curriculum Revamped
The decision to update the Chinese curriculum into a more practical and suitable study for all students—may they be Chinese, Filipino, or from a different culture—was finalized for this S.Y. “Years of the old Chinese curriculum are now in the past, we must keep up with the times,” Chinese Academic Head Rebecca Wang shared.
Having learned from more than 15 years of the old Chinese textbook, a generational change had to be made. Following other schools in the Philippines, MHCS changed their Chinese learning content through the introduction of a new textbook in which all topics are interconnected, allowing students to fully comprehend the lessons.
Additionally, oral learning is in with the new, while written learning is out with the old, seeing as how oral learning is proven more beneficial based on students’ feedback worldwide, as stated in numerous articles such as Du Chinese Blog, GoEast Mandarin, and more.
With the main change being the textbooks and their editions, students will be introduced to more practical content. Thus, learning the Chinese language becomes a smoother process for students. This implies a finer Chinese education for Makati Hope students in which their Chinese communication and understanding would be refined.
Aralinks Coding Education Launch
Last year, the school administration launched the “Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-strong curriculum,” envisioning Makati Hope’s future as a school on par with other educational institutions technology-wise.
Basco and MHCS Ortigas Campus School Head Teresa Lopez brainstormed different ways to realize this dream, eventually deciding to partner with Phoenix’s Aralinks Coding Education (ACE), which was centralized on a coding education that many other schools offer as well.
While ACE may seem similar to Makati Hope’s ICT subject, which already offers coding lessons for Grades 2 and up, these two subjects have completely different goals and outputs.
“But here, the coding really is directed towards a particular application or output. So you can see [the] actual output of what you have [coded]. It’s a little bit different from the coding in ICT because there, your focus is to familiarize yourself with the various languages, so you see the output but it’s not very colorful. There’s no actual use for it, versus an application. Because if it’s an application, you can actually see what your coding looks like,” Basco clarified.
For Grades 5 to 12, the first quarter of the S.Y. will be dedicated to the onboarding for the ACE subject. During this period, students will familiarize themselves with the coding processes. For the rest of the quarters, subject teachers will collaborate to create joint performance tasks that will be encoded into either MBlock or MIT App Inventor, which are the partner applications in this curriculum.
During this age, younger generations possess varying levels of appreciation for technology. Some only see the exterior of technology—the applications and sites they use daily, such as social media; while others see and appreciate the interior—the codes and functions required for the applications to function. Makati Hope aims to “spark that seed” in students to enable them to appreciate technology for what it truly is.
MHCS hopes for its students to not only consume technology but also to design and create their own applications and outputs. This will be an invaluable skill in their futures—no matter the career, from business to marketing to architecture.
But to Basco, this skill is more than that. “What really my vision for students making use of technology like this, is for them to be able to use it for social enterprise, for the betterment of the community, and [allow them to] envision technology [as a tool that] can be used in order to help to the community—not just for money-making, not just for business, but rather social values. Hopefully, that’s the dream. But this year we spark that interest in you.”
Story by Chesca Chua and Sarina Estinar
Comments