VietNamNet Bridge - The training courses provided by the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) to general school teachers on teaching integrated lessons have failed.

Teachers have been told that ‘integration’ is the new trend in education but they do not understand what ‘integration’ means. It is still nearly impossible to design integrated lessons because teachers are uncooperative.

The battle among teachers 

A history teacher from a high school in HCM City said she has finished a training course on the integration teaching method. She said she ‘gained nothing from it’.

“Most of us, the teachers in literature, history and geography, still have vague information about integration and disciplinary lessons,” she said. 

The training course did not bring the desired effects, while no solution has been found, and teachers could not agree on what to teach students.

“When we discussed the lesson plan for the ‘Declaration of Independence’, a literature teacher from Dong Nai province said that literature teachers alone cannot do the lesson, while history knowledge would be unnecessary. But a history teacher said that the meaning of the declaration cannot be conveyed by a literature teacher,” she said.

“Such arguments have been endless,” she said.

Nguyen Viet Dang Du, a teacher from Le Quy Don High School in HCM City, noted that it is not possible to design integrated lessons. 

“How to integrate literature and history knowledge? Literature teachers fear the lessons cannot be given with poetic language, while history teachers fear important historical events may be ignored,” he said.

The teacher said that it was unreasonable to set the same time limit for the lessons with different topics. “MOET wants every topic to be taught within two or three periods, but this is unreasonable,” he said.

Le Tan Linh, a geography teacher at Nguyen Thuong Hien High School, said it would take teachers in different majors to discuss agreements about what to teach students. 

He said 10th graders will study the motion of rotating around the axis of the earth in a geography lesson, and then will learn about the circular motion in a physics lesson. If teachers do not cooperate, they may provide the same knowledge.

A high school teacher in Hanoi commented that MOET was going ‘the wrong way round’ when asking teachers to discuss how to integrate knowledge and how to teach students.

“It needs to show teachers how to teach students and what textbooks teachers need to follow to ensure the quality of lessons instead of telling students to think and do everything themselves,” he said.

“The word ‘integration’ seems to be an obsession to MOET. It might think that ‘integration’ simply means gathering related knowledge together and giving it to students,” he said.

NLD