“The teachers in Romania will be evaluated annually from an online platform, with students’ performance analysis and feedback from colleagues and school principals, all digitally managed. And these evaluations will directly influence the salary of the teachers,” said Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu at a press conference organized at the Cotroceni Palace.
The announcement sparked among teachers from rumor and indignation to vehement critics. The reason? “Because it is totally broken by our reality, of the school as a system. The idea, as such, is fixed as the walnut in the wall and is hit by nullity from the beginning ”, He commented for “Adevărul” Marian Stas, an expert in education.
In order to talk about the evaluation of the performance in the classroom a teacher, we must first of all establish what actually means to be performing. For the term is a vast one and leaves room for many interpretations. “There is a very wide range of performance models that can be identified. In the rural area, for example, performance would mean to succeed in preventing school dropout. Students to say that they like so much for the teacher that three, five kilometers come only to be there, in the classroom. considers the expert.
Another performance is to raise the level of knowledge of a student, to manage it from note 2 to note 5, from note 5 to note 8 or from note 10 to the Olympics level. “To be able to help children overcome their own intellectual condition. All these are different performances very much from each other. And each of them involves completely other sets of pedagogical and scientific skills. That is why, in itself, the idea of bureaucratizing the performance and making a list of performance indicators is stupid ”said Marian Stas.
What the performance really implies: “If understanding is not, nothing is”
However, performing with a student far exceeds how a teacher teaches and evaluates children. Marian Stas refers to a much deeper look. There are in the economy and in mathematical modeling, he says, two concepts: “output” and “outs”. “Output means something specific, measurable. For example, it could be a Note obtained by the student to a certain discipline. We are talking about the mechanical, technical result of an action. You have learned, you are evaluated. The concept “outcoma”, on the other hand, represents the value added to this learning process. Basically, it refers to what is hidden beyond these notes. Specifically, a student goes to school and takes grade 7 in mathematics. This is the output of the action. But the authentic performance of the teacher does not represent the result in the catalog, but consists in the way the teacher manages to make the child understand the subject. Not only to shoot a note ”, explains the specialist.
Therefore, true performance should not be weighed, quantified only by evaluating the notes that the children take at school, the averages in the catalog or the first prizes: “If the understanding is not, nothing is. And the primordial role to the teacher is: to make the students understand the subject, not only learn mechanically, and then forget. The difference between this mechanical result of an action and the deep understanding of the action itself is, in fact, the difference between functional illiteracy and critical, free thinking. ” The performance of a teacher presupposes that he can make the student learn knowledge, apply these skills and then build his own set of values. “The school is made to cultivate values”, Complete the expert.
“To understand does not mean to shoot a big note.”
What does understanding mean? It means that the student has a sufficient knowledge with which to then juggle, to apply in life: “SIt can call on a number of knowledge factors in various areas and which are not related to each other. From physics, mathematics, philosophy, history, etc. to gather them all together, to give them meaning, and then they can apply them further to create a new idea, a new way of thinking. The difference between learning to keep in mind and learning to understand is huge. Here is the difference between performance and non-performance ”.
The question is therefore asked how can we quantify the understanding of a student and, implicitly, the teacher’s performance? “Understanding is a transcendent fact that goes beyond the space and time of school. To understand means to apply, to extrapolate, to make left, right, front, back, or beyond the piece of knowledge as such. To understand means to want to deepen below and see what other relevant dimensions or implications are ”, the specialist shows.
This is the purpose of the presence of a teacher in the class: to make those with whom they interact, says Stas: “The teacher must create a process that the child can use by extrapolating, extending and developing what is happening in class in other areas of knowledge and in other areas of applicability “
Because the degree of understanding of the knowledge assimilated by the students cannot be quantified, we could turn our attention to tangible, concrete things, ie non-performance indicators: “The integrity of the teachers would be one of them. That is, not to delay at hours, not to use the phone, to be in direct contact with the students. In other words, not only physically. ”
An integral teacher is professionally competent, creates a relationship with children, stimulates their curiosity and imagination, invites them to dialogue, causes them to ask questions, to think critically, to be open: “Then, the evaluation that the teacher makes must be a correct one.
And it would be an appearance, Marian Stas points out: the way the teacher relates to the children and belonging to a inferiority complex from many teachers. “There are teachers who “break in figures” on the idea let them show them why they are capable. And I teach them in a tangled way, incomprehensible not to be accused of being poorly prepared or superficial. The culmination is that sometimes they do not understand what they want to say ”, he said.
But it should be done precisely the opposite: the teacher to explain in the sense of all, in a simple, not simplistic way: “The simplistic way does not add any value, say nothing. Instead, to teach in a simple way, to know how to explain complicated things in the meaning of all, it is an art.”
Marian Stas, Education Expert. Archive
“Hitting, a cousin of pickles with flower”
The neuralgic point of this process of evaluation of teachers is the degree, explains Marian Stas. For when all the teachers are fastened to the post for the entire duration of the professional career, “Any conversation about the pay for merit is a beating. It is ridiculous, it is hit by nullity. Because you can not do this in the absence of mechanisms that directly correlate and performance, but also the lack of performance with motivational elements that can be positive or negative. For example, termination of employment contract, sanctions versus promotions. The stimuli beach has no way to exist in relation to the degree. The degree is, in fact, the ingredient that poisons the discussion about performance in education ”.
In other words, a titular teacher, who remains on that position until retirement, is no longer interested in performing in any way. His job is not threatened by anyone. He does not have to fight to keep him. Does not compete with someone or more. So, why should they be tormenting to perform in the classroom? Why struggle, make effort, consume energy, complicate unnecessarily? For what? He cannot be expelled anyway, his place cannot be taken by someone else anyway. “It is exactly like a tummy of righteous pickles and on which flower is gathered ”, explains the expert.
But, says Marian Stas, it is normal to happen like this: “Because our human nature is to go on the minimum resistance. It is a human thing as possible. “ No matter how good we are, it touches us, at one point, the sufficiency. And slowly, slowly, sometimes even without realizing it, we begin to work on the principle let it go and like this: “Now I am of note 9, then 8.50, 8.25, then I go down to 7.50. But, let it go sometimes, nobody dies. It is in the nature of things when you do not have a motivational stimulus that correlates the performance with a correct pay, respect and recognition.”
We speak, here, just about a bottomless form, considers Marian Stas: “Because when you are asked to be the first, to offer as much, as beautiful as possible, as you are asked to come up with results, to perform but nothing is offered in exchange, on the contrary, why would you make this effort? Orcum you do not get any advantage from him. That’s why I say that the idea sounds beautiful, but it has no relevance.”
Solutions
How could teachers be determined to perform in the idea of really helping students understand? Marian Staș believes that the solution is to rebuild the bolt of the vault in education, namely the framework plans, of the curricular model: “One is to have a communist, centralized framework plan, and the other is to have an open, non -communist curricular model. The change must be done at the system level, and then it will reach people, each.”
Marian Stas mentions that the only element that could really change the Romanian school paradigm are the framework plans for the high school, the modified, airy schedule of the students: “We change on the following psycho -human structure: so that I can reach a change of vision, paradigm, first of all I change my behavior. Secondly, I repeat that behavior endlessly, until my blood enters, as it would be, and it becomes my new mentality, the new value. ”
If the performance of the teachers will be evaluated directly in proportion to the grades obtained by students in the classroom, then we will witness an aberrant phenomenon. We will reach the situation in which the teachers, in order to prove their performance, could inflate, artificially increase the performance of the students in the classroom. We could assist in the note notes from the belly, to better results, to several prizes first with crowned, for competent tests without mistake, to the environments concluded with brio although the student did not give to school at all, etc.Than to light straw in my head, to come to school with scandal, I better pass them. ”
