On October 24, the Ministry of Education and Training issued a document guiding the removal of difficulties in teaching Natural Sciences, History and Geography.

Natural Science has four main content strands, including: Matter and its transformation, Energy and transformation, Living things, Earth and the sky, corresponding to the content of the previous Physics, Chemistry, and Biology subjects.

The Ministry recommends that schools assign teachers with expertise appropriate to the content and curriculum. Subject teachers in each class will coordinate with other teachers to test, evaluate and unify student scores.

The Ministry believes that allowing teachers to teach two or more content streams or an entire subject must be done step by step.

Compared to the guidelines on implementing the secondary education program issued in 2021 (which was only applied to grade 6), this time the Ministry emphasized more on having teachers with appropriate expertise to teach according to the content flow.

The arrangement of the timetable must be in the correct order, ensuring that the content taught first is the basis for the content taught later, and not teach topics in each semester at the same time as suggested in the old document. For example, in the 7th grade program, the content "Lever and torque" must be taught before the lesson "Human locomotor system".

For History and Geography , the integrated book according to the 2018 program, which has been used for several years now, prints the History and Geography sections separately, in order, on one book.

Up to now, the Ministry has instructed schools to be able to arrange to teach History and Geography at the same time, meaning that it is not necessary to teach all of History before teaching Geography, but that they can teach two parts of knowledge in two subjects in parallel in the same period of time.

The assessment and evaluation will be in accordance with the content and teaching duration of each History and Geography subject. Then, a teacher in charge of History and Geography of the class will summarize the scores. This guidance is unchanged from the previous guidance of the Ministry.

In fact, this instruction from the Ministry of Education and Training is the way that many schools have applied - that is, teaching integrated subjects but in the way that teachers of each subject teach that subject separately. For example, Natural Science will be taught by Chemistry, Physics, Biology teachers, instead of just one teacher. The same goes for History and Geography. The creation of test questions and grading for students is also agreed upon and divided among teachers.

Some schools teach according to the curriculum, while others let teachers teach each subject in turn, for example, first teaching Physics, then Chemistry, and then Biology.

This new guideline was issued after the Ministry received many opinions from teachers, stating the difficulties in teaching integrated subjects. When the new program is applied in 2021, teachers of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History and Geography are required to take a 6-month training course to teach integrated subjects. For example, History teachers are given Geography; Biology teachers are required to teach both Physics and Chemistry.

However, according to schools, it is very difficult for a teacher to confidently teach integrated classes after such a short time. The goal of integrated subjects is to help students have a comprehensive view, combine knowledge from many fields to solve problems in life, save time for experience, but in reality, it is like a subject combined from old subjects.

In mid-August, when meeting with teachers nationwide, Minister Nguyen Kim Son admitted that integrated teaching was one of the biggest bottlenecks and difficulties in implementing the new program, and could be adjusted.

At that time, many teachers and administrators proposed to separate these subjects into single subjects as before. In a survey conducted by VnExpress on August 29, more than 3,900 out of nearly 4,400 opinions agreed with this.

However, Associate Professor Dr. Chu Cam Tho, Head of the Education Evaluation Research Department, Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences, said that it would be a pity if integrated subjects were separated into individual subjects, because integrated teaching is the right policy, helping students develop qualities and abilities as the goal of the new program. According to her, schools should be autonomous in this matter. Schools that do well should be encouraged to continue, and those that are struggling should be supported.

Duong Tam