Physicists Christopher and Ma. Victoria Bernido introduced an innovative teaching framework to optimize student academic performance despite the socio-economic limitations faced by the Philippine basic education system in 2002. A decade later, the Central Visayan Institute Foundation- Dynamic Learning Program has been embraced by over 200 public and private schools nationwide, all of which believe in the “CVIF-DLP effect.” Students who u ndertook the program have shown exemplary performance in the Department of Education's standardized tests such as the National Career Assessment Examination and National Secondary Achievement Test as well as in the University of the Philippines College Admission Test. “Let the numbers tell the story,” says Christopher. “And don't just look at figures from our school in Bohol.”

An internal assessment made by the University of the East, which recently adopted CVIF-DLP, showed third-year high school students receiving mostly “poor” and “low average” scores in science in 2012 changing to a majority getting average and above-average marks just a year after the CVIF-DLP's implementation. Almost every student previously ranked “very poor”, “poor”, and “below average” moved up. “That's what makes CVIF-DLP effective,” says the Bernido couple. Since 2010, the PLDT-Smart Foundation and Smart Communications have supported the implementation of the CVIF-DLP in schools in the DepEd division of Cagayan de Oro City, where they observed the resilience of the program against the deleterious effects of typhoon Sendong. PSF and Smart also expanded the implementation of the Learning Physics as One Nation project, conceived by the Bernido couple and initially supported by the Fund for Assistance to Private Education to address the severe shortage of qualified Physics teachers in the country.

“The Bernidos and the CVIF-DLP have shown how mastery and passion can come together for love of country and produce real results! We always think of innovation in terms of technology and apps, but the CVIF-DLP has also shown us that innovation can happen by going to the root of the problem and the basic make-up of the human person, and in the case of education, how the brain works,” says PLDT-Smart Foundation president Ma. Esther Santos. (reprinted from Manila Standard Today)