Teachers whose students had low marks in the Baccalaureate simulation will take skills development courses. Experts explain how students should be prepared in the coming period.
How do Baccalaureate teachers prepare – Photo Archive
School inspectors will organize methodical activities with the teachers who teach subjects for the Baccalaureate. Priority is given to teachers who have students with averages below 6 when simulating the 2024 Baccalaureate exam. Thus, the county school inspectorates will organize webinars and methodical activities with teachers, with an emphasis on the development of skills that require improvement and counseling for particular situations.
At the same time, the Ministry of Education recommends that students take Teleșcoala lessons and practice practice tests from previous years to prepare for the Baccalaureate. “You should know that the subjects are not difficult at the Baccalaureate. The subjects are created for the average level, for the certification of an average competence, and for this very reason they must be respected for all graduates”explained the Minister of Education, Ligia Deca.
Don't fatten the pig on the eve
First of all, the system should be purged of teachers who do not perform, is the opinion of Cătălin Viorel Nan, the vice-president of the National Federation of Parents' Associations. “The pig always gets fat on the eve of December 24th, then you give it wheat and expect the bacon to be very good… it's a fantastic help. Now, seriously, isn't that funny? Why doesn't the education system own up to its own mistakes? Why doesn't the education system start cleaning itself of underachievers? A teacher's performance is also in his students' ability to take exams. The results are clear for everyone. There is no doubt that the education system is not working. And now they want to fix this thing through classes? It seems to me that the assumption of real responsibility is still being avoided“, says the representative of the parents.
But education expert Ștefan Vlaston explained what teachers should do to help students get at least a passing grade. “This is only done through paid remedial activities. If the state has money, let the teachers be paid by the hour, and let them call the students after class or on Saturdays, in smaller groups of 5-6 students. To bring them to the table, to discuss. At least in mathematics, from my lifetime experience, if you don't have face-to-face contact with the student, to see what he didn't understand, you don't solve it. So, watching a movie with solving some problems is a bit hard to figure out what the student didn't understand. Grade 5-6 is very easy, if you do the essential problems, point I, there are six very simple subjects, and if you solve them you are close to 5, you also score a few points from the other subjects, and then you reach grade 6. You can work with students only on what they understand and what would get them a minimum grade“, says Mathematics teacher Ștefan Vlaston.
For his part, Marian Staș, expert in education and teacher and coordinator of education programs, is of the opinion that “we pretend that we do, statistically speaking, not to say that nothing happens. There will probably be areas where they will work more applied. There's a Romanian saying that says you don't fatten the pig on the eve, and even less with children of this nature, who have achieved very poor results and who clearly have a very fragile baggage of knowledge and training. The yield will be quite low, because they can't do something like that, they can't, they don't want, they don't know, they need more consistent support, not from this, like that, on automatic fire, on the eve of the exam, the holidays . Whoever has the determination to make use of this opportunity can work, both the teachers and the children. I expect the proportion of those who capitalize on this situation to be somewhere below 10%“.
Teleșcola, the solution proposed by the Ministry of Education
The Ministry of Education recommends students to follow the Teleșcoala lessons, after analyzing the items after simulating the Baccalaureate exam, and to practice the topics from previous years.
“Teleschool is a very big form without a foundation because it is made artificially and not naturally, this is not how school is done, this is not how people learn like the rest of the world. The educational yield of the Teleschool process is below 10%. Not all teachers are very competent, our behavior on the glass is enormously different from the natural behavior in the classroom. Very few teachers are able to manage a video lesson professionally, I know this from my own experience. Our human nature locks us in relation to the glass. These solutions proposed by the Ministry of Education have no substance, content in them“, says Marian Staș.
The parent representative points out that recorded lessons would be effective if “the education system would be functional“.
“But, at the moment, the functionality of the system is on the ground, you come with some good utensils for nothing, no one says that Teleșcoala cannot be good, but it cannot replace the system itself. To be able to rebuild something, you have to see the reality on the ground. You can't build walls on a shaky, cracked foundation, and the foundation is the teacher, the teacher should be performing”explains Cătălin Nan.
Topics that everyone can go through
In early April, after “detailed analysis of the results recorded at national level by correlation with the specifics of each item“, the National Center for Policies and Evaluation in Education (CNPEE) proposed the optimization of exam subjects and remedial activities for students. More specifically, CNPEE found the solution to optimize the exam subjects, so that the students have grades above 5, namely, increasing the weight of items with satisfactory, good and very good performance (successful items) in the economy of the test, i.e. of subjects which most of them managed to solve, so the simplest ones.
“Any test of this type should contain one-third easy subjects, one-third intermediate subjects, and one-third advanced subjects, for those who want to get 9s and 10s. It is very good for the exam to be like this, with a third of very simple subjects, because not everyone has to study mathematics, become a mathematics teacher. The fact that students do not pass either the National Assessment or the Baccalaureate has only one explanation: the teacher is obliged to go through all the subjects, including the most difficult ones. Don't just do the easy ones, repeat them ad infinitum. Remedial classes would be successful if they focused on solving simple subjects, from the third of subjects at the minimum level. The main reason for the fact that Romanian education is on the ground is that those who make school programs and framework plans have no idea what the students are capable of. This is the tragedy, our school does not adapt to the needs, interests, talents and expectations of the students and behaves like a Procustean bed, like a mixer in which all students enter and escape who can. Not all students are the same. Another tragedy is that no one evaluates anything, the teachers are not evaluated. No one controls the teachers either“, believes Ștefan Vlaston.
The Math teacher also recommends “assessment of students' school progress”, through a “summative assessment, with grid-type, personalized tests“, but also o “formative assessment“, so that teachers know where to start.
“At least in math, learning is like a multi-story building, if a lower floor is missing, the whole building collapses, there's nothing you can do. That's why meditations with few students are successful, because the teacher sees what he doesn't understand and fills in the remaining gaps, encourages him, congratulates him, and that's what matters“, adds Ștefan Vlaston.
If the subjects will be easier than they should be, it would be “professional and political misconduct“, is the opinion of Marian Staș.
“On the other hand, to say that the topics are appropriate does not necessarily mean that the topics are trivial, indulgent, and that they are easy, but that they are appropriate in terms of content difficulty. All healthy educational systems in the world create subject banks and also introduce certain “tummy” subjects that are either easier or harder to see where the average of children who solve them is. The opposite proof is represented by the official subjects, if we are going to see trivial subjects in the summer because there are elections, it will be a disgrace to the whole earth, because it is clear that they had another stake and not the pedagogical, honest one, as is correct, as is normal“, adds Staș.
