Education Forum

Francois-Marie Gerard

Francois-Marie Gerard and Mohamed Miled from BIEF, an organization for consultation and intervention studies, presented Lebanon's new education system to a group of teachers and students from AUB and other institutions on April 25. Dr. Karma El-Hassan, Education Department associate professor, introduced the Project for Improving Evaluation and School Assessment in Lebanon. She explained that the project aims to eliminate the system's current disadvantages such as vagueness, lack of resources, performance, and self-assessment.

Gerard, in simultaneous translation from French to English, gave an overview of the goals and objectives of BIEF before moving on to a detailed account of Lebanon's existing, though flawed, competence-based approach in education. Gerard stated that competence now means "carrying out tasks with efficiency" and that "what we have now continues what we had before and pushes it forward. It doesn't deny it." Gerard then explained that the school, like the market, has to change and evolve because of high demand. He referred to Xavier Roegiers, director of BIEF, who defines competence as the "possibility for an individual to mobilize in an internalized manner, an integrated set of resources in view of solving a problem-situation belonging to a family of situations." Gerard presented a plan based on the movement from an objective-based pedagogy to a concept-based approach focusing more on constructivism than behaviorism. He stated that the BIEF approach disqualifies strictly systematic learning processes and follows the pedagogy of integration and linear approaches. Studies on this method at first received low success rates globally because, Gerard explained, students were not able to solve the task they were given because they were not taught how to.

The two-hour forum ended in questions posed mostly by AUB professors and Makassed teachers concerning the applicability, reliability, and validity of the competence-based approach in schools in Lebanon.