September 16, 2020 – As part of the ongoing National Educators Academy of the Philippines (NEAP) transformation, the Department of Education and the Philippine Normal University (PNU) have collaborated to better assist teachers and school leaders for their pursuit of professional growth.

“The partnership is to support the Department of Education through the National Educators Academy of the Philippines in assisting teachers and school leaders show evidence of attainment of their current career stages which are based on the applicable set of standards and further support them to move to the next career stages,” said Dr. Bert Tuga, PNU President, during the Handang Isip, Handa Bukas press briefing on Monday.

To support the NEAP Priority Development Programs for teachers, school heads, and supervisors, PNU has reviewed the Program Design (PD) of NEAP to align and equate professional their accomplishments with the university’s existing graduate degrees. PNU also developed a customized program for NEAP personnel.

The customized program of PNU focuses on the outcomes-based approach that addresses the needs of the Department to correctly position and move the teachers, school heads, and supervisors to their next career stages as prescribed by the sets of standards adopted by the Department.

With this partnership, teachers and school leaders can bring to PNU their accomplishments based on the NEAP earned units and go through PNU equivalency to know and to place them in the correct MA or Ph.D. program.

In addition, the Australia-supported and PNU-based Research Center for Teacher Quality (RCTQ)—a partnership between PNU and the University of New England SiMERR National Research Centre in Australia—also provides research and technical assistance to DepEd.

After doing a policy study on how to transform NEAP in 2018, RCTQ now focuses on the implementation phase of the NEAP transformation, including the development of Teachers Induction Program (TIP) for new teachers. The development of the TIP includes the usage of various learning modalities for different school types to make it more responsive to the COVID-19 crisis.

Dr. Gina Gonong, the Director of RCTQ, shared that the induction program will benefit 11,000 new teachers, and their research shows that ‘an induction program can impact on teacher commitment and retention, teacher classroom instructional practices, and student achievement.’

Furthermore, RCTQ helps to align the Human Resource (HR) systems for teachers and school leaders with the Philippine Standards for Teachers (PPST) that comprise career progression, promotion, and performance management.

“As mentioned by Dr. Gina Gonong and doon sa presentation ni President Tuga of PNU na part ito noong NEAP transformation natin and as you can see there is cross recognition of the professional development programs on the part of NEAP,” Undersecretary Nepomuceno Malaluan said.

“While the NEAP right now is not a degree conferring body as part of our transformation, its program is moving toward being recognized and credited by higher education institutions, particularly teacher education institutions. We are very happy with the partnership that we have with PNU and RCTQ and the one that was presented by PNU is a recent development,” he said.

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