Schools as a learning institution : moving from teaching and management to a learning and leadership approach

Abstract

An attempt has been made to investigate the quality of teaching and learning in our schools. Our guiding principle has been that, for a school to be an effective institution, it has to move away from an emphasis on shallow learning, which is principally aimed at passing exams, to a deeper learning, which would enable students to become independent and life-long learners. To carry out our investigation, two different questionnaires were constructed, one for teachers and the other for students. These were respectively distributed among a number of teachers and students chosen at random from the secondary and post-secondary schools in Gozo. From the results that emerged, it is quite clear that our system takes little consideration of what the student himself wishes to learn. In fact, it is the teacher who decides how and what the student learns, because as the students themselves have declared, they are rarely or never consulted. It has also emerged that teaching mostly consists of the teacher’s transmitting vast amounts of facts and data which are memorized by the students to be faithfully reproduced during examinations. Summative assessment is still the predominant practice for measuring students’ attainment. Finally, the concept of multiple intelligences is practically inexistent, with the consequence that many students feel ostracized in the classroom.