Education | Reshaping classrooms for success

Ilídia Cabral

The reshaping of classrooms is crucial to developing a new schooling model which can cater to a more diverse student community, said professor Ilídia Cabral from Porto’s Catholic University, on the sidelines of a public lecture delivered on Wednesday at the University of Saint Joseph (USJ).
The scholar, who holds a PhD in Education, talked of “The Grammar of Schooling,” a concept explored by David Tyack and William Tobin to understand why schools are so reluctant to change conventional forms of education.
She recalled that the student community is now more diverse, and as such, classrooms should be reshaped accordingly.
“In Portugal [for instance] there has been a significant development of successful results in schools as failure rates have dropped. But there’s still a percentage of students unable to reach set minimum goals,” Professor Cabral told the Times.
She added that, “One remaining issue lies on this obsolete schooling model…We are first taught to be teachers while we’re students, so it becomes very hard to think outside of the box or to come up with alternative ways to regroup and reorganize the entire classroom.”
After being invited to give a public lecture at USJ, Ilídia Cabral introduced the findings of a research study project she conducted based on three innovative projects designed to combat student failures and to reshape the traditional school model.
The scholar reflected upon what could be done in Macau to improve educational success and the quality of teaching and learning methods.
The “grammar” of schooling metaphor, she explained, is used here to show that the way we teach is as natural as a language’s grammar. Language users do not think about grammar systematically, and the same happen with teaching: “We have inherited this schooling model and it remains unquestioned.”
Ilídia Cabral stressed that classroom practices and teaching strategies should then be improved upon to meet current student diversity needs.