Teachers’ Sentiments on the MATATAG Curriculum: A Social Media-Based Empirical Study of Policy Implementation

This paper examined the sentiments of Filipino teachers regarding the implementation of the MATATAG Curriculum in the Philippine basic education system. It aimed to shed light on the difficulties encountered by the teachers in implementing the curriculum by categorizing their comments as positive, negative, or neutral depending on how they were presented and determined the recurring themes the teachers most often mentioned to get to know the general issues and identified the common themes the teachers frequently cited to understand the main topics and concerns teachers share. In addition, only a few studies focused on analyzing real-time teacher sentiments using social media data sets, highlighting a gap this study seeks to fill. This study employed a qualitative descriptive design utilizing sentiment analysis tools to analyze 100 Facebook posts and comments from teachers. Analysis revealed that 39% of sentiments were negative, 34% were neutral, and 27% were positive. Key findings indicate that there is a wide spectrum of teacher responses where the majority of the teachers express negative sentiments regarding the MATATAG Curriculum, identifying the key challenges such as inadequate teaching materials, increased workload, insufficient training, and ambiguous guidelines, all of which contributed to the adversities faced by the teachers. The findings reveal the intricacy of teacher responses and highlight the imperative necessity for curriculum developers and education administrators to respond on the highlighted issues. With the incorporation of teachers’ real-time feedback, this study contributes to policy discussions regarding the further development of curriculum implementation in Philippine educational institutions.