Talk About The Teacher’s Responsibility in The Current Situation of Educational Quality
There is much talk these days the quality of education and the media engages in disputes over the responsibility of teachers in low performance exhibited by Chilean students. On the other hand, teachers complain that they always prove them guilty and nowhere meeting rigorous analysis on teacher quality. By the way, I am convinced that teacher quality has a significant impact on teaching and learning processes.
Certainly, as I have stated several times before, that some of the problems of our public education pass through the administrative and financial mismanagement and, indeed, this is explained by the autonomy of managers no teachers in local authority educational establishments . Without autonomy to decide, not to be blamed for the failure to a greater extent than their fair share of their lack of academic leadership.
What about teachers? I think that if managers can not have autonomy in the management of resources, can not therefore provide performance incentives for teachers and this, of course, could make a difference. Regarding the incentives offered by the Ministry of Education to teachers who perform well on assessments (whether mandatory or voluntary as the AEP), knowingly say that teaching hospitals have suffered muc humiliation even try to collect these payments on schedule the Ministry of Education never respected. If the Ministry itself does that with the best teachers, what is left to municipal corporations always short of resources? Continue reading
Leadership and Moods in Education
We all know (because we have studied or investigated, by experience or by simple intuition) how mood affects interpersonal relationships at work and in the performance of the work itself. We also know that today as never before in history, it is essential to team up and do it properly we must have self-awareness of the operational status of equipment and, of course, personal emotional levels can generate shared moods need to know , assess and manage. That is, members of a self-conscious team know they are directly related to the underlying emotional currents of each of the members of the team and will be reflected in their work. In education, the treatment will affect them, their students, parents and guardians or other institutional staff.
Negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, discomfort, among other things, divert our attention and make the work. Furthermore, as we know, moods generate a kind of contagious polarity in the case of negative emotions is very dangerous for organizational functioning. Several studies indicate that one of the professional groups most affected by stress at work in Chile are the teachers. The levels of tension, discomfort, insecurity and frustration are unusually high in our education sector. One might wonder why. Continue reading
On Quality, Leadership and Education
Not only in Chile, but in many parts of the world on five continents, we are talking about the need to move to higher levels of quality. In Latin America, of course, the issue has gained urgency ranges. It seems that the economic and social investment in education we are doing does not satisfy the aspirations of the citizens, since the levels of inequality of educational quality that are the most depressed socioeconomically and receiving the most high is too large, which added to the differences between the cultural heritages of both groups, the quality of parental education and aspirations of families, makes the problem of educational quality in an inescapable urgency in making progress towards the full development.
In the case of Chile, has not only been a weakening of the State responsible action to ensure quality education for all, but also failure (despite efforts) to broaden the coverage of preschool education, dropout rates that, although low in overall bulge in precisely those sectors that require more education, poor results in national and international standardized measures, lack of autonomy in educational management of the local school administration, ignorance (and apathy) of parents and guardians about the educational and school activities, teacher training if not bad, at least mediocre quality, very low social status of teachers (linked to low wages, despite efforts to raise them), relaxation of the school disciplinary rules; bureaucratization of the administrative procedures of teachers, lack of implementation of methodologies for an education suitable for the XXI century and a long list of problems with varying degrees of national or local impact. We are very far from having a quality education and how serious is that, although the diagnosis is clear and accepted by the majority, not as a country we have been able to agree on the basic actions for improvement. Who ruled yesterday and called to such agreements, known today and entered the implementation of them. Continue reading