New Implementation Frontiers

For the past two years, Dr. William Spady, the Network’s fifty-year OBE veteran, has been intensely engaged in a pioneering implementation effort with the St. Paul’s Catholic Education Mission in the Philippines.  St. Paul’s is a centuries-old ministry of teaching and nursing and has over forty K-12 schools and six university campuses in the country. As a unified system, SPC has committed to fully implementing OBE in all program areas, grade levels, and professional preparation specialties.  According to Spady, that commitment is well under way and has attained the following first-ever milestones for the country’s schools and universities:

1. Developing a visionary framework of life-performance outcomes for all of its students to be integrated into all subject areas at all levels;
2. Deriving operational performance essentials for all of those outcomes in language suitable for each age cohort;
3. Developing a set of parallel affirmation statements for each major outcome that are recited by students during each school day, with their progress on the outcomes self-assessed and documented regularly in personal journals;
4. Designation of six schools and one university as implementation Pilot Sites for the system in which all program areas have established culminating academic outcomes now being used to redesign and align curricula, instructional practices, and assessments;
5. Interactive workshop presentations on OBE by Spady to well over 2,000 high school students so far at the six Pilot Schools;
6. Creation of an OBE Facilitation Team of curriculum coordinators and faculty currently being trained by Spady to assist the ministry’s other schools and campuses in implementing all of the above components and
7. Redesigning and restructuring courses and class schedules in the teacher education program at the Pilot university campus.

“It’s been a major challenge for teachers to shift paradigms and begin thinking and working from an OBE perspective, but the momentum has clearly shifted and the morale is sky high,” said Spady, “and the tangible evidence is everywhere – and on video!”