The stories of two teachers, one who has just retired and the other who has just got a job, reflect how little has changed in 40 years with the arrival of new teachers in classrooms, a trance that experts and international educational organizations consider transcendental to ensure the quality of the educational system. Javier Moreno, who passed the exam for teaching in 1981, remembers: “They gave you your destiny, they told you where you had to teach and you got in there like crazy, like a sack. In some centers that was not very problematic, in others it was”. Teresa Terrer, who took the exam in 2021 and became a trainee civil servant at a secondary school in September, adds: “You enter as just another worker. When you arrive at the center they give you the schedule that corresponds to you, the groups that you are going to cover and you start. And once the course has started, they explain to you how the process works and they assign you your tutor”.
The incorporation of new civil servant teachers into the public education system today is a disaster similar to that of four decades ago, a regional education official admits privately. Something that is also recognised, in other words, by the Ministry of Education in the plan it presented in January to reform the teaching profession. The document considers it necessary that the internship period for beginning teachers cease to be “a mere formal requirement as is currently the case”, and be replaced by a true “tutoring” process that allows “learning in practice”, although at the moment it is not specify more.
Teresa Terrer is an intern in Spanish Language and Literature at the Joanot Martorell Institute, in Valencia, and teaches 16 classes a week. In the six months that her stay will last, her tutor will have to see how she teaches 12 classes. And Ella Terrer must enter to observe three sessions of her tutor. The beginner will be evaluated at the end, although passing is usually taken for granted. The suspense, indicate educational sources, which would force the affected person to do the practices again, is reserved for extreme cases of lack of suitability.
Although he greatly appreciates the help and advice of his tutor, Terrer considers the support system insufficient. And she warns that the initial solitude is even more dramatic for interim professors, those who cover the casualties of civil servant teachers and who have normally overcome the opposition without obtaining a position, as happened to her in 2010. That year, Terrer enrolled in the bag to make substitutions, but due to the cuts that followed the financial crisis (increase in hours that a teacher had to teach, increase in students per classroom, plummeting demand for interns), they did not call her until 2017. In those seven years he was working in the communication sector, because he had studied Image and Sound.
Before starting to cover that sick leave, his only experience in a class had been in 2006, during the internship quarter of the old Pedagogical Aptitude Course, the (CAP). “It was a save yourself, because they don’t prepare anything for you. They give you an appointment one day to tell you your classes and show you the center and you join the next, with the course started. You see yourself there with 25 students and you say: ‘I don’t know how to control a classroom’. It’s distressing. I spent the year asking my classmates everything, studying and preparing a lot for my classes, because I had to be very safe”.
Compared to that, the trainee period is proving to be much easier for her, now that she has many hours of classes behind her. The same thing happens to the majority of new civil servants: about 80% of the places in competitive examinations are won by interims for the points that experience gives them. The current reform of the ministry, in addition to improving the practices of officials, aims to reduce the volume of interns (from the current 25% to a maximum of 8%) and promote practical learning in teaching careers and in the master’s degree to be a teacher high school
Forty years earlier, after having passed the competitive exams and having briefly passed through a quiet village school, Javier Moreno was assigned to a huge center in Alaquàs, in the Valencia metropolitan area. “They put me in seventh year of EGB, in group D, which was where the students would repeat over and over again until they were 14 years old and could leave even if they hadn’t graduated. And that just came out. Not only did they not give you some guidance, but they used to give you the most complicated places, the ones that nobody wanted and were empty. That hasn’t changed much.”
Due to his conception of education, Moreno specialized in the so-called compensation centers, in complicated neighborhoods of the Valencian geography. He was director, advisor to teacher training centers and adult teacher. After having studied Geography and History, he took another opposition and worked as a high school teacher in that specialty until he retired. Through his experience, Moreno became convinced of the importance of mentoring. “There should be a tutoring of new people by teachers with 10 or 15 years of experience, who accompany them in their beginnings for one or two years and see this function recognized in their teaching career, remuneratively or with hours. That is where the improvement that is needed could come a lot”.
Know what happens in the next class
Working together in class would be beneficial for the veteran teacher, the beginner, their students, the center and the educational system, Javier Moreno believes. The novice would learn the trade in a less traumatic way. For the expert, having the young man by his side would help him to have the class better controlled and “could help him retrain and catch up on some issues.”
Also, Moreno continues, it would reduce the traditional “isolated” work dynamics of teachers: “They would have to socialize a methodology. Just as an engineer cannot invent the color codes for plans, because other people have to interpret them, in shared teaching you cannot enter the classroom with a piece of paper and three notes. It must be done in a more professional and communicable way to others. It would be good for the person in the classroom and for other teachers to be able to know what is happening in the next class, because maybe there are things that might interest them”.
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