Competencies of Grade 1 Teachers in Santa Ignacia North District: Basis for a Teacher Development Program

This study made use of a descriptive survey research design. It was conducted to describe the profile and instructional competence of Grade 1 teachers in Santa Ignacia North District Division of Tarlac Province. Data were gathered through the use of questionnaires and checklists supplemented with an interview to fourteen (14) Grade 1 teachers, eight (8) school heads and one hundred (100) stakeholders. Results showed Grade 1 teachers are competent in their instruction as to lesson planning, art of questioning, use of appropriate motivation, selection and utilization of instructional materials/teaching aids, classroom management, teaching strategies and methods, and assessment of learning. The problems encountered by the teacher are: (1) difficulty in lesson planning due to the lack of teaching guide and/or the lesson objective itself on the given manual, (2) language difficulty and inadequate vocabulary for Mother tongue of both teacher and student, (3) insufficient training on K to 12, (4) inability to implement the scope and coverage to be taken in a single lesson most especially in Mother Tongue because of numerous activities which cannot be accomplished in the allocated time for the lesson, (5) inadequate background and poor foundation of Mother Tongue concepts, (6) difficulty in the use of different criteria in the assessment of pupils’ performance, (7) difficulty in producing instructional materials aligned to the teaching guide provided such as making one’s own small/big book of a story, and (8) insufficient mastery of using new techniques.