Teacher introduces innovations in learning

Prof. Dominique Jacela Maquiran, 40, an Ilonggo teacher hailed as one of Metrobank’s Outstanding Teachers this year, applies innovative ways of engaging learners. 

For him, the theoretical approach no longer works. In his social studies class, for example, students are engaged in culture and history through role-playing, e-comics, and other fun stuff.


“Social studies is considered as a boring subject. So I find ways to make it fun,” he said.
“I want to encourage critical and creative thinking among my students,” he said.

Maquiran is also a teacher for teachers. He designed and conducted a seminar workshop on Equity in Diversity: The Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy which is very relevant now when bullying is most pervasive.

“This is my way of responding to the increasing problems of bullying, discrimination, and abuse in many schools today,” he said.

The workshop trains teachers to be advocates of peace education.

“It is most dangerous when it is the teacher himself/herself who perpetuates bullying through prejudice towards a students’ ethnic background, looks, among others. It’s possible that he/she does this unconsciously,” he explained.

So far, he has given this free training to 3,000 teachers in 116 schools in Iloilo City, Iloilo Province, Guimaras, Davao, Dumaguete, and Quezon.

He has also trained more than 10,000 teachers on higher thinking skills, effective teaching and classroom management, among others since 2001.

This training has resulted in positive impacts based on the students’ evaluations, he said.
As a volunteer for UPV Pahinungod since 2011, he has also mentored volunteer teachers, under-served public school teachers and served as a resource person in the Affirmative Action Program for senior high school students in remote towns in Iloilo, Guimaras, Antique, Aklan and Cebu.

COMMUNITY WORK
Maquiran is also the organizer and facilitator of community outreach activities in depressed areas in Iloilo city and province.

Some of these are the free tutorial for poor children, help for oil spill victims, immersion with Iloilo orphans and the aged, waste segregation project, No Smoking campaign, tree planting, bloodletting and more.

“The beneficiaries were inspired by our little acts of kindness. In our free tutorials, we noted an increase in NAT results; more important, our beneficiaries were inspired and they, too, aspire to study hard as they see role models in the process of interacting with volunteer tutors.”

He is also the proponent of PROJECT LIVE (Literacy Improvement through Volunteer Effort and Volunteer Project Leader on Education Affairs) of Brgy. Quintin Salas, Jaro, Iloilo City.

He is also the proponent of IMPACT-ILOILO (Initiative in Mentoring for Positive, Active and Competent Teachers in Iloilo).

“IMPACT-ILOILO is my personal response to DepEd’s call to private citizens to adopt schools in poor communities,” he said.

It is also with these examples that Maquiran hopes that he can continue to develop high school students to become “Iskolar ng bayan na para sa bayan.”

Maquiran is currently the director of the Office of Continuing Education and Pahinungod of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas.

He has been a teacher for 20 years and has studied under three Metrobank Outstanding Teachers like Drs. Hilda Montano, Alicia Magos, and Nuria Castells.

“I had good teachers. They were the ones who fueled my passion for teaching,” he said.
He also credits his success to his wife Ida Gomez Maquiran and their daughter Ida Dominique./

Prof. Dominique Maquiran

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