I still remember the afternoon in October when our school head gathered us in the faculty room and placed a single-page memorandum on the table. It was the official rollout of the MATATAG Curriculum's trimester grading framework for Grades 1 through 10. I looked at my colleague beside me, a veteran teacher of 22 years, and she whispered, "Hindi pa tayo handa." She was right — and also wrong, in a way I could not yet explain.

That was eight months ago. Today, I can tell you with full confidence that the trimester shift is one of the most teacher-friendly changes DepEd has made in over a decade. But only if you understand what actually changed — and what surprisingly did not.

Why DepEd Moved to Trimesters Under MATATAG

The quarterly grading system that served Philippine public schools for years was designed around a different curriculum — one that was dense, fragmented, and often difficult to complete in the time allotted. Teachers would rush through competencies in the final weeks of each quarter, sacrificing depth for coverage.

MATATAG's fundamental promise is a decongested curriculum. Fewer learning competencies, but each one taught with more depth, application, and mastery. A quarterly calendar did not complement this. Three terms do.

Each trimester now runs approximately 14 to 15 instructional weeks, giving teachers a longer uninterrupted runway to develop concepts before a summative assessment cycle. For subjects like Mathematics and Filipino, this means students have real time to internalize before they are tested.

The Three Grading Periods: What Changes in Practice

Here is the part nobody talks about openly: the component weights shifted. Under the old system, Written Work, Performance Tasks, and Quarterly Assessment carried fixed percentages that varied by track. Under the MATATAG trimester system, the weight of Performance Tasks increased across all grade levels because the curriculum places a premium on demonstrated learning, not just correct answers on paper.

Written Work: 25% — shorter, more frequent formative checks instead of long unit tests
Performance Tasks: 50% — projects, demonstrations, outputs aligned to real-world application
Trimester Assessment: 25% — a focused, competency-based exam per term

What this means for your class record: you need more column entries for performance tasks, and those entries need to be deliberate, not just "participation" scores. This is where digital tools like DepEd Me's E-Class Record system become genuinely useful — it auto-handles the weight computation so you can focus on teaching instead of arithmetic.

SF9 Under the Trimester System: The Form Nobody Warned You About

This is the detail that caught most of our district off guard. The School Form 9 — the report card — had to be restructured. Instead of four quarterly grades per subject, it now carries three trimester grades and a final grade computed from the weighted average of all three terms.

More importantly, the remarks column changed. "Passed" and "Failed" are still there, but the descriptors now align with MATATAG's proficiency levels: Beginning, Developing, Approaching Proficiency, Proficient, and Advanced. If you are still using the old SF9 template, your report cards are technically non-compliant this school year.

Practical Advice from the Classroom

After one full school year under the trimester system, here is what I would tell a teacher starting fresh in June 2026:

Plan your performance tasks at the start of the term, not the end. The biggest mistake I made in Trimester 1 was treating performance tasks as end-of-term wrap-ups. They are not. They are continuous evidence of learning.
Use a digital class record from day one. Manually computing weighted trimester averages across 45 students is an invitation for clerical errors. The DepEd Me Classroom Hub handles this automatically, including the SF9 export.
Communicate the changes to parents early. When our first trimester cards went home in December, half the parents called the school confused about the new grading descriptors. A simple parent orientation in November would have saved everyone the stress.

The trimester shift is not a burden. It is an invitation to teach differently — with more patience, more depth, and more trust in the process. It just takes one full cycle to feel natural. And then, like my veteran colleague eventually admitted: "Mas maganda pala."