Monday, June 25, 2012

The CCE Conundrum

The entire enterprise of organized education, with its lakhs of schools, millions of teachers and thousands of department workers who constitute its bureaucracy at the national, state, district and sub district levels, who strive to make education happen in our country, can be said to be driven at different points in time and in various ways by a few fundamental questions. These questions actually flow from one to the other, and they are all interlinked. Each question can generate many different and debatable responses, with these debates often going back hundreds of years at least. There are no clear answers even today, and that is what makes the task of educating children that much more fascinating and complex. Everybody can have an opinion here. That is the best as well as the most frustrating part.

The questions

The first and obvious question is: Why should children go to school? This has to do with what we usually term as educational aims or more specifically, the aims of schooling. These aims can be many and often and they can be at cross purposes, if you will. Ultimately, the aims we choose are also a reflection of the kind of world or society we want to create. There is this belief that education has a role in the creation of that society, that schools have a social role. The Naxals, for instance, will have a conception of educational aims that will be very different from the aims a capitalist or industrialist would articulate. The two worlds are quite different – the collision of these worldviews is perhaps at the heart of the Maoist problem. That is a separate debate I don’t want to get into right now.

The second question is: What should they be doing there (in school)? How should they pass their time there? This usually boils down to the question of what children should learn, since schools claim that they teach children this and that – the passing on of knowledge is seen as central to what schools do. As part of this learning, what kinds of experiences would we want children to get at school? Again, the responses are bound to be divergent, depending on who is responding and under what conditions the response is being made. If a natural disaster strikes, for example, there are often shrill cries for including disaster preparedness in the curriculum. If there is a communal conflagration, then secular elements get emphasized. And so it goes. It is a long list. And it is controversial, as we have seen in the recent instance of the tamasha that has been generated over the inclusion of the Ambedkar cartoon in a textbook prepared by NCERT.

I can give another example. Some years back in Jammu and Kashmir, it was decided that English would become the medium of instruction in all schools from grade 1. The story that did the rounds was that the Education Minister was very upset one year with the 10th standard exam results of the state. Someone suggested to him that this was because children were not getting an English medium education! And that is how an education policy was influenced. The point here is that what children should learn gets decided often in convoluted ways that seem to defy reason sometimes.  

Related to what is the question of how children should be taught. If getting good marks and cracking the exams is the idea, then everyone will apply their minds to beat the exam. There will be mock exams and the like, and the experts who have cracked it earlier will have tutorial sessions with the hopefuls. Bihar’s ‘Super 30’ is a classic example, where year after year children from disadvantaged backgrounds are coached to crack the entrance to the IIT. If ‘developing critical thinking’ is a key aim, then teaching methods as well as content will be different. Getting good grades in the exams may then become a peripheral concern. Of course, it can be argued that the two are not mutually exclusive. So the second question is the one that is concerned also with the methods of teaching and learning.

The third question is: How do we know if we are moving in the direction we want to go…? This is really at the heart of the assessment of the schooling experience. What should we do to find out if any child who is subjected to this system called school, is actually becoming what has been envisaged under question 1 above…? This is a complex one for it may be difficult to limit the response to the period of schooling. Given the vagaries of human nature, many things may happen after an individual has moved out of the institution of schooling. (Note here that we use the word school to indicate the various stages of formal, organized education.)

Question 3 is inextricably linked to question 1 – if this is what we want for our children from school, we need to do something with them which will move them in this direction and, further -- we have to develop a system which will enable us to find out if we are moving in the direction sought. These aspects are all intimately linked with each other, and cannot be seen in isolation.

I would like to mention here that the preparation of teachers is at the heart of the education enterprise and we will not be able to move an inch if teachers are not prepared enough to address the above questions in their day to day practice. And since we have not yet reached a stage where machines are teaching children (if one goes by what hard core proponents of IT sometimes have to say with regard to the potential they see in digital technologies for education, it would seem as there is no other alternative but to substitute teachers with machines), we may still consider the teacher challenge as the central one in education. 

The question of assessment

I will primarily address question 3 and the difficulties that come with it. Not because questions 1 and 2 are not important. They are, but at the moment, we are a bit obsessed with question 3, thanks to the emphasis on ‘Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation’ (CCE) in the Right to Education Act. Perhaps very few of the many Education Acts enacted by countries across the world mention exactly how children should be taught, and how what they have learnt should be assessed. Ours does. I will come to this a little later.

Perhaps the easiest way of developing a system of finding out if children have moved in the directions we want them to go, (or, in more direct terms, to find out if they ‘have made the cut’) is to have exams. This is what we have been doing for a long, long time, with great effect. It feeds our collective anxiety and it has spawned a huge industry. Many years ago, when I was in school and later in the pre-university course (11th and 12th std.) we often heard that so and so college or school in Bangalore was the ‘best’, or provided ‘good education’. Then we would hear some name or the other of faculty members who were ‘fantastic’ and whose tuition classes if you attended would guarantee you good marks in the public exams and a passport to a better life.

It dawned on me much later that this entire discussion of best schools and colleges was more or less centred round how many ranks they obtained in public exams, and what percentage their ‘best students’ got in those exams. ‘Good education’ therefore got focused on questions two and three – for instance, what were the best methods of teaching which would lead to great marks? What kind of exams would ensure that children would make the cut? Now, exam performance is not the same as academic excellence, which is a much broader idea. Further, it certainly cannot be equated to ‘good education’, which can and does mean many more things. But a certain dominant interpretation of ‘good education’ can make it look as if exam performance is the main thing involved. Ultimately, every other consideration falls by the wayside. So it may not be uncommon to hear parents and teachers compare two schools and say one is better than the other since it churns out good results every year. It does not matter how those results are churned out and if children have understood (for instance) what they have studied -- or if they have inculcated along the way, a love for learning. They are treated much like the race horses which get whipped every now and then to run faster and faster and cross the finishing line. 

I must delve a little more on exams -- the system of exams with their marks can result in certain amusing and painful results and realities. When I was in 12th standard with a science combination, we had two clear options – engineering or medicine. The IT industry had still not entered the scene in Bangalore in a big way in 1987 when I cleared my 12th std. exams. The Call Centres and various other options that this thing called IT has spawned were still far away. So our teachers kept egging us on to do either engineering or medicine. It was made to look as if life would not be worth living if we didn’t become engineers or doctors. Since Karnataka those days (more so now) had a greater number of engineering colleges than colleges that made you doctors, the cut off percentage for engineering was lower than that of medicine. Those aspiring to become doctors had to study that wee bit harder and they had to get well above 95% or 97% if they had to secure a merit seat in a reasonably good medical college.

So, we had a system which decided who would build bridges and design machines and who would look after people’s lives, based just on a mischievous combination of their exam marks! No other attributes necessary to these professions were considered. And that is how I became an engineer, only to leave the profession some years later. The system has not changed a bit since those days.

The second thing about exams, which some argue is very practical, is that they play the role of the perfect filter for the educational system. Not everyone who starts out in school stays long enough ends up doing the same things. Imagine if they did! There is the rural-urban divide, there is the boy-girl divide and then there is a divide depending on which community you come from and where you are located. The system then resembles a pyramid, and children keep routinely falling off it as they try and negotiate its steep and treacherous climb. Only a few get to the pinnacle. This, the exams achieve perfectly. Don’t just ask what happens to the ones who fall off the pyramid. They do not get the goodies that the others get. They get this message that they are second rate performers, relegated to some menial jobs. Knowing fully well that we have a system that produces inequality, we still go on saying that education is the fundamental right of every child -- as if by just saying it things will fall in place!            

CCE as Saviour

This limited approach has been the cause of some concern for many years – that we have the grandest of educational aims, enshrined in the various documents that we have routinely produced for more than a hundred years, but had the narrowest and harmful ways of ascertaining if we were moving in the directions we wanted to go. Of course, there are problems with the kinds of textbooks that the state produces, as well as the ways in which teachers are prepared. Along with this, no one had cracked the puzzle of assessment – how can we put in place a system which reflects the educational aims that we set out to achieve?

In the nineties, much before the struggles for instituting a law that recognizes education as a fundamental right in our country occurred, we started hearing about ‘Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation’ (CCE). The usual lament was: ‘How can we just go on with a system that pronounces judgment on that one day and within those few hours…? We need to have a system that is fairer and which just doesn’t rely on marks at the end of the day…’ To add to this was the other refrain that the current system was not looking at the child as a ‘whole’ – exams, at best, tested short term memories whereas the child was much, much more than a person who was expected to give standard answers and repeat what was taught. So the terms ‘continuous and comprehensive’ came into being.

The idea behind the term continuous was that a child’s learning must be assessed continuously instead of only relying on term end tests and exams. This cumulative assessment would then provide a truer picture of the child’s abilities, difficulties etc. and would also provide the teacher useful reference points to intervene in case there were difficulties that needed to be addressed. The idea behind the term comprehensive was that we were assessing children only on the subject matter areas – math, language, science and so on. Would this provide a complete picture of the child’s abilities? Was education all about learning only these subjects? Obviously not! So went the arguments for an alternative or more comprehensive way of finding out where children were going. ‘Comprehensive’ was then understood in terms of expanding our understanding of what children could actually do, other than engaging with and learning the ‘core’ subject matter, other than just reading, writing and arithmetic – things we made them do.

I remember the jokes that usually did the rounds. ‘What’s the fuss anyway?’ Someone asked. ‘All this is important if teaching takes place in the first place!!’ Indeed, that was one concern which many were just not prepared to look at in the eye. Where was teaching happening? Survey after survey showed how little children learned, even on the most basic aspects of reading, writing and arithmetic (the three R’s, as we called it) even after 5-8 years of schooling. We talked about teacher absenteeism, non-teaching duties of the teacher and the poor quality of teacher preparation. What was the point of erecting a grand plan for evaluation with ill equipped teachers who could not even manage the basics? We seemed to have assumed that the basics were all in place, and that schools were now prepared to do this CCE. But there was also this argument that this examination paranoia was mostly applicable to urban areas fuelled by unhealthy competition.

Anyway, in workshops, meetings and many formal and informal interactions, we kept hearing this clarion call for CCE. It was seen as a part of what was broadly termed as ‘education reform’ – the set of policies and actions that were needed at all levels to improve the education that children got which we were all unhappy about. Many years passed, but CCE didn’t find the light of day. There may have been smaller experiments and pilots but these did not end up influencing day to day practice on a larger scale.

Meanwhile, document after document lamented our insensitive system of assessment which stifled all creativity and created distress instead. Much was written about it in 2005, the year that saw yet another National Curriculum Framework document being prepared. There were these ‘position’ papers – 21 in all, that elaborated the main document. One of them was entirely about examination reforms – how to make exams more appropriate for the ‘knowledge society’ of the 21st century, and so on. The position paper on ‘Curriculum, Syllabus and Textbooks’ carried, in the end a very angry and powerful quote from the Scottish pilot turned educator, David Horsburgh thanks to whose efforts in a small school in Andhra Pradesh many states are now attempting to follow ‘Activity Based Learning’ based on his ideas (that is a different story altogether!):

‘…evaluation has been one of the most important forces in the gradual degeneration of all school education…the whole antiquated evaluation process, should as speedily as possible be hurled lock, stock and barrel out of the windows of our educational system in just the same way as the chamber pots were emptied in eighteenth century London…’          

CCE travelled some distance before it we saw it appear as part of law – the Right to Education (RTE) Act, in 2009. The Act stated in no uncertain terms that in order to find out what a child was learning, one had to do it continuously and in non-threatening ways and not just use term end tests and exams. You could talk to the child and get her involved in assessing what she had learnt, observe from a distance the various things that the child did and note them, provide descriptive feedback, give exercises of different kinds (useful things that we do very little about), or you could resort to some paper-pencil activity that was really engaging (again, something teachers don’t do much of).

All these methods could be employed together or separately – but they had to be done again and again, and not just once or twice in a year to brand the child in any which way. One had to build up some sort of a history to construct a more complete picture. And then, the whole process had to be ‘comprehensive’ – one had to look at the ‘whole’ child, something that we are woefully lacking in at the moment.

            It is interesting to see the initial scramble that results when anything becomes a law. Suddenly, something changes in the air. The RTE Act, which came into being after a tortuous journey, became the reference point of sorts after August 2009. In workshop after workshop, we started hearing statements like this one, which we started using in our various interactions as well: “This is not a scheme…it is a law. And do you know what will happen if this law is violated…? You can be punished -- Ye Dandaneeya hai!!” Further, we understood that the compulsion and responsibility of providing education is on the Government, and that Government alone is answerable -- as if it was not all these years!

It will be interesting to see how the government gets ‘punished’ as we go along. In any case, we have a poor track record of punishing or taking the government to task on the several promises it has made over all these decades to its people.  

While the Act has several provisions along with clear timelines and targets, parameters related to quality come into effect immediately. So we can start taking the government to task right away, and fill the court rooms with all sorts of pedagogical cases! There will be interesting court cases, I’m sure, if one takes the judicial route as the last resort to change the educational system. I’m not sure if this will alone work. And judges will then need to be educated about child centred education and the like. We can prepare primers for this.

The aspect of Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation sits squarely within the notion of quality of education because this is what helps us find out, using various ways, the inherent abilities and potential of the child, and also if what we are doing in school is having the desired results in the directions we have set out. As I write this, state after state has, among other things, attempted to do something about CCE which was on the backburner for all these years. Workshops and trainings have been held galore and many states have developed manuals for teachers. The CCE lexicon sounds like this – formative and summative evaluation, scholastic and co-scholastic areas…rubrics and tools for this…phew! All of these are supposed to take care of CCE. It is now becoming a nice business and many organizations are beginning to become ‘experts’ who will deliver ‘CCE Products’ for our thankful consumption, both online and through workshops.

Assessment as a tool for reform…?

A question that has consistently bothered me is – how fundamentally different are these developments from what we have been up to so far? It is one thing to define or lay out the aspects that we would want to assess in a child. This wish list can be really long, and we can include all our fantasies of ‘good education’ in it. The issue, however, is whether the teacher is prepared to do it. From all accounts, the answer to this is in the negative. I do not wish to take stock of the results of efforts over the last twenty years to improve what happens inside the classrooms, but I do believe that the outlook is still gloomy. For one, if we map what children learn on even the most basic aspects – such as 3R’s – reading, writing and arithmetic, we find worrisome gaps. We know that children at the end of five years barely end up learning stuff that is equal to grade 1 or 2. Further, there are many studies that show just how un-child friendly, monotonous and inequitable our classrooms are, barring some exceptions. In such a scenario, one wonders if reform which uses assessment as a basis is going to make any difference. In fact, it may only end up causing more confusion.   

So far, CCE looks like old wine in a new bottle, which is what happens when we do tinkering. The earlier tests and term exams seem to have now morphed into this formative and summative evaluation business, which is now called the ‘CCE method’ of teaching! The spirit, therefore, has not changed. To add to this, teachers seem to be making effective use of the ‘no detention’ policy – that a child should never be detained in a classroom, at least till he reaches the eighth grade. The spirit behind this no detention policy was that the child should not be penalized for under achievement or no achievement. The argument was – why wouldn’t any child want to learn, provided we made learning interesting, engaging, meaningful, and provided all obstacles in the family, school and community, were removed? The problem was thus located outside the child. Fair enough. But teachers seem to have interpreted it quite differently, and this has resulted in ‘automatic’ promotion from one grade to the other – never mind if the child has learnt anything or not! In many ways, this is an excuse for not teaching which teachers can exploit.

So, CCE has become continuous promotion with little or no learning.

Teachers have so far been adept at giving paper-pencil tests and scoring answer sheets using red ink. It gives them a sense of pleasure, of power, to be able to point out mistakes and slot the child. Even here, we can ask if understanding is assessed on these paper-pencil tests and exams. Currently, it is assessed in limited ways, since that is not the emphasis in teaching. Now we are saying that the teacher should move away and not be limited by this. We are saying that the nature of paper-pencil exercises and tests should change and assess whether the child has understood something or not. Secondly, we are saying that there is something beyond the so-called scholastic/subject matter areas – any child comes to school with a range of abilities – children can express and imagine in a variety of ways, and they may be good in certain kinds of physical activities and so on. These must be recognized (we use the term ‘co-scholastic’ to underline this) and must contribute to the overall assessment of the child. So, if a child draws a three headed elephant using his imagination, or if a child draws a parrot with red feathers and a green beak (which I have actually seen in a school in Chhattisgarh), what do we expect the teacher to do…? How does one evaluate this in CCE? What is the reference point? First of all, how does one evaluate expression, say, a drawing? I have a problem with this. We might at best say that the child can do such and such a thing, and make a record of his abilities, and celebrate these. It would be such a pity if a teacher sees these drawings and says, “But this is wrong! Such animals don’t exist! What have you done?”

Teachers, who have a very clear conception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ (and most teachers belong to this group), and who are schooled to believe that there is only one right answer, will take such children to task. They have not been prepared for this. Similarly, if children start asking questions which the teacher may not be able to answer, what is the teacher supposed to do under CCE? So far, we have shut them up. But are we prepared to let them ask?   

The more I think about CCE, the more I am inclined to believe that it is much more than evaluation. It is first of all about understanding the child  – where she comes from – her background, her family, her identity, her various abilities and the challenges that she faces as she negotiates school and its requirements. So let me add CCU – Continuous and Comprehensive Understanding, as a pre-requisite to CCE. Without this, can we say that our evaluations are going to be sound and helpful to the child? Secondly, is everything about evaluation? I suppose, no. Like I mentioned above, not everything that the child does needs to be judged on some grading scale. We may describe and narrate what the child does. This becomes a cumulative record of that child’s experiences and abilities as she passes through school. A well-kept record will read like a story of that child. It tells us a lot, actually.

What is currently happening in the name of CCE is sad. We have centrally developed manuals and formats which the teachers have to fill out routinely. There is very little of remedial teaching or support to address problems. Ideally, if we use this approach, we should be able to map out each child’s abilities, challenges and prepare plans to help the child overcome these challenges. We must also be in a position to truly appreciate each child as a person. But ‘filling the format’ has become the end rather than the means.

In order to look at the child differently, and in a more wholesome manner, the teacher’s conception of education, its purposes, its processes and its possible outcomes, has to undergo radical changes. This, I believe, has not taken place. All these years, we have focused more on techniques of teaching. There has been very little discussion on the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of education and how the teacher sees these things. Further, we have also not looked at the teacher as we would want the teacher to look at the child. Teachers, like children, need to be nurtured. Instead, we treat them with distrust at best.

To sum up, it seems pertinent to ask – how will you measure or evaluate something when in the first place you are not doing most of what is required to make that thing happen? We are trying to evaluate the outcomes of a teaching-learning process which is meant to be child centred but which is actually anything but that, which still requires children to learn by rote. Then we add a few things we need to measure under the so-called ‘co-scholastic’ domain without seriously asking whether we are doing them (sports, music, art and craft and the like) in the first place in our schools. These aspects, which should actually be central to the educational experience of every child, are relegated to mere formalities.   

You cannot just do something all of a sudden because some law or Act requires you to it. Presently, everyone is running around preparing CCE manuals and the like, hoping that these missing elements in a child’s education will somehow appear in the classroom once training on CCE is done. We need to dig deeper and ask why, in the first place we were not doing these things earlier. 

I believe that the route to reforming, changing, improving or transforming (call it what you want) classrooms cannot come alone from assessment. Something else needs to happen first in the way children are taught. This contains the seed for measuring what they have learnt. Assessment cannot be seen isolation, as we are seeing it now.

Which is why, I say that CCE as it exists now will remain at best another scratching on the surface. We have put the cart before the horse. Then we have missed the wood for the trees. They exist together and cannot be seen in separation.

Raipur
June 2012

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