THE EDITOR: Education should not be based solely on the amount of book knowledge stored in the brain, called banking, or by rote learning, but on critical thinking, the ability to create knowledge within the domain of practice, praxis. By extension, metacognitive and metalinguistic reasoning skills are part of this critical thinking. Within this framework, multiculturally-designed curricula (the Australian model is exemplary) should define the instructional objectives, standards and goals of each unit, with teachers having a significant input, especially at the school level, to bolster grasp and ownership.
Besides direct subject content built into curriculum planning, skill sets and standards that foster intelligence, analysis and synthesis have to be taught and modelled continuously, especially given that they are neither static nor immutable.
The pedagogy of Pablo Freire is a good starting point in this respect. In this context, the Ministry of Education should seek to strengthen instructional leadership and promote equitable learning via culturally responsive and effective instructional output and accountability. They must enable methodologies that inculcate all of the above and cater to various learning styles, pace and intelligence types of all students.
The workshop model, for example, is a methodology that pushes students to be creative and responsible for their own learning. It enables students to take charge of their own learning, become active and engaged in their work and development of understanding. It also is a language-inclusive approach that fosters language learning regardless of the subject content. And it can be supplemented by various other approaches that may include:
* Alternative teaching: a co-teaching model in which one teacher works with a small group of students as the other teacher instructs the large group.
* Peer instruction: students work in pairs or small groups engaged in active learning from, and teaching to, their partners or the rest of the group. According to physicist and educator Eric Mazur of Harvard University, students are able to explain it in terms that other students can easily understand.
* Small group work: gives students the opportunity to engage in process skills that are critical for processing information, solving problems and evaluating management skills and self-responsibility through the use of roles within groups; assessment skills involved in assessing options to make decisions about their groups' final answers and presentation skills, as each group must present to the whole class.
* Flipped classroom: the teacher acts as a facilitator, monitoring students' progress on assigned work and stepping in to help when they get stuck.
* Project-based learning: students engage in projects and are responsible for doing their own research and solving problems for themselves, with minimum guidance. Class time is devoted to group collaboration and class presentation of completed projects and
