MOET has unveiled a new general educational curriculum

The Ministry of Education and Training in late December 2018 unveiled a new general educational curriculum which is designed to develop students’ competence. With fewer subjects and the number of learning hours , students will have more time for outdoor and entertainment activities.

MOET has said that ‘integration’ is the new trend in education, in which relevant knowledge of one discipline will be integrated with information from other fields in one lesson.

Topics will be raised by teachers for students to discuss. The topics will be analyzed with the knowledge drawn from different fields.

General school teachers have been taking training courses to prepare for ‘integration teaching’. However, most teachers still say they have vague information about integrated lessons. 

Pham Thi Yen, headmaster of Jean Piaget Hanoi Primary School, thinks it would be easy for primary school teachers to switch to a new teaching method, because the teachers were trained to teach different subjects. However, it will be a big problem for secondary and high school teachers, who only know the knowledge in their fields.

“Many of my colleagues want to know how to create integrated teaching subjects,” Yen said.

According to Nguyen Xuan Thanh, deputy director of the MOET’s Secondary Education Department, the curriculum for natural science covers four topics - substances and transformation of substances; living beings; energy; and transformation, earth and sky.

Some topics require a high integration level such as climate change, health education, STEM education, environmental protection and sustainable development.

Geography and history will be two sub-disciplines which are both independent and supportive of each other. 

There will be two separate lines for the two subjects to follow, but information from both subjects will be used in 6-10 teaching periods designed for seventh, eighth and ninth grades.

Unfamiliar to teachers

A secondary school teacher in Hanoi admitted that she still cannot understand integration and inter-disciplinary lessons, and doesn’t know how to design her lessons.

Vu Dinh Chuan from MOET said the teaching method and the way of designing lessons and organizing classes remain unfamiliar to teachers.

Under the new education program, instead of asking students to do home exercises to review the lessons, teachers will ask students to solve questions to be raised in subsequent lessons. This will be a difficult task for teachers who have been following the ‘read-take notes’ teaching method for many years.

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