Commentary: Teachers love their jobs and feel valued but face immense challenges
SINGAPORE: Teachers in Singapore, every bit elsewhere, play an indispensable role in educating students, non merely in terms of academic content only also in terms of values and attitudes.
They are also responsible for guiding students through various educational activity pathways and preparing them for adulthood.
Teachers passionate about their work derive intrinsic joy from intangible rewards, such as when learners of a sudden understand a concept, or when erstwhile students thank them for their guidance.
These rewards do not detract from the reality that teaching is often tough work and involves its own particular set of stressors.
STRESS, BULLYING AND EXCESSIVE WORKLOADS
A recent CNA commentary reported that eighty per cent of Australian teachers surveyed in a research study had experienced exact or concrete bullying and harassment from students or parents.
Near 83 per cent of respondents revealed a want to leave the profession due to teacher-targeted student and parental bullying.
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Another recent survey, this time conducted in the United Kingdom by the charity Education Support Partnership, examined the mental health and wellbeing of teachers, senior teachers, school leaders and lecturers in the further, adult and vocational education sectors, every bit well as other non-teaching staff like school business managers.
Respondents said they loved their work primarily because they wanted to work with children and make a difference in their lives, and they had a very stiff passion for a job they found rewarding. Many also enjoyed working with agreeing individuals.
Nevertheless, 64 per cent of teachers reported feeling stressed at piece of work, with 29 per cent working an average of more 51 hours per week.
Excessive workload, inadequate work-life residue and dealing with poor student behaviour in class contributed to poor mental wellness.
These two research studies enhance questions about the situation facing Singapore teachers, their working atmospheric condition and the challenges they face.
MOVES TO Boost TEACHING SECTOR IN SINGAPORE
The number of teachers in Singapore has increased over the by two decades, from over 22,200 to just over 33,100 in 1998 and 2022 respectively.
Over the same time period, the percent of teachers with university degrees has well-nigh doubled from 45 per cent to 89 per cent.
As a result of large-calibration recruitment outset in 1996, merely about one-half of teachers today have fewer than 10 years of didactics experience.
The Ministry building of Educational activity has introduced measures to go on salaries competitive.
At the same time, the Ministry has tried to professionalise education. Within the by decade, it introduced an Ethos of the Educational activity Profession and a Code of Professional Behave for Educators that outline fundamental roles and responsibilities.
It has also put in identify comprehensive professional evolution schemes and diversified career tracks.
There is also a Teachers' Work Zipper programme to enable teachers to take part in short-term attachments at external organisations in guild to broaden their perspectives.
HOW DO TEACHERS Experience?
Little is known about Singapore teachers' work conditions except through the findings of two cross-national surveys.
The OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey 2022 published its findings in 2014. Singapore had the youngest educational activity strength across the countries surveyed.
Almost 90 per cent of teachers said they were satisfied with their job, with 82 per cent reporting they would yet cull to be a teacher if they could decide again. Nearly vii in x believed the teaching profession was valued in Singapore.
Teachers claimed to work an average of 56 hours per week, which indicated a lot of piece of work was done afterwards official school hours.
As well spending most of their working time on education, planning and mark, teachers as well said they had to engage in administrative piece of work, teamwork with colleagues, educatee counselling, extracurricular activities and manage parents.
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Another survey, the Varkey Foundation Global Instructor Condition Index 2018, revealed that teachers worked 52 hours per week, more than the 45.33 hours that the general public estimated teachers' working hours to be.
Just 31 per cent of Singapore parents would probably or definitely encourage their children to become teachers.
Neither of these two surveys dealt with the principal stresses and challenges facing Singapore teachers. Although the Ministry of Educational activity conducts regular staff climate surveys in schools, these findings are non made publicly available.
KEEPING UP WITH SLEW OF REFORMS
Ane of the major challenges teachers face is keeping pace with the slew of teaching reforms introduced during the past two decades.
These include applied learning programmes, the Straight Schools Access scheme, changes to the PSLE scoring organization, field of study-based banding in secondary schools, just to proper name a few, not to mention greater mainstreaming of special needs students, the reduction in the number of tests and examinations and the cosmos of multiple pathways to educational success.
These reforms exercise not but involve teachers redesigning pedagogies and subject content, only more critically, teachers unlearning some of their own preconceptions of teaching based on their own experiences every bit students in order to embrace different means of thinking about education.
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Teachers need professional development in lodge to amend acquaint themselves with how to respond to the reforms.
Only then can they exist effective frontline ambassadors for these reforms past enacting them and explaining their rationale and their workings to students and parents.
Many parents are feeling bewildered about these reforms and are understandably influenced past their own experiences and conceptions of what learning involve.
Students and parents will judge the efficacy and meaningfulness of these reforms partly through how they perceive teachers, who are key intermediaries of the Education Ministry, to be implementing them.
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A QUESTIONING PUBLIC
Instruction is unlike other professions such every bit medicine and the law. The general public feels at ease questioning teachers' professional expertise compared to doctors or lawyers.
Maintaining healthy partnerships with students and parents can be a challenging task.
There are no official statistics on teachers being bullied or harassed by students and parents, though there are occasional press reports of students verbally or physically abusing teachers, or surreptitiously filming them and uploading the videos onto social media.
There are besides some parents and students who dispute schools' disciplinary procedures and even file lawsuits confronting educators and schools.
One of these cases involved a parent suing his son'due south secondary school in 2022 after his son's smartphone was confiscated for a iii-month period as punishment for using it during school hours.
Another case saw a teenager suing her sometime secondary schoolhouse for declining to protect her from declared bullying past her peers.
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Such cases show a worrying tendency by parents and students to view their relationships with schools in an unnecessarily adversarial manner.
The task of maintaining teacher and student respect for teachers has been complicated by the growth of the private tutoring manufacture.
The concept of teacher has now expanded across the school to include private tutors and school omnipresence is no longer necessarily the sole ways to attain academic success.
With the ubiquity of social media and smartphones, it is now much easier for parents, students and also school leaders to communicate with teachers. The boundaries between work and personal time take been increasingly blurred.
Teachers are oftentimes expected to be selflessly committed to developing and nurturing students. However, they also need to guard against work demands intruding into their enjoyment of a salubrious personal and family life.
CHALLENGES TEACHERS Face ARE WELL RECOGNISED
There are some indicators that the challenge teachers face in working with stakeholders received attention from officials. In 2022 then Minister for Education Heng Swee Keat said that teachers could not be surrogate parents, while urging parents to be supportive of their children'due south teachers.
More recently, the Ministry of Education has published guidelines for fostering healthy school-dwelling partnerships.
At the aforementioned time, the Singapore Teachers' Union offers talks for teachers on topics similar teachers' rights and limitations in disciplining their students, teachers' liabilities to their students vis-à-vis the Tort of Negligence, managing challenging parents, managing students with disruptive behaviours and navigating the social media mural for student/parent engagement.
The third primary challenge teachers face is dealing with the intense human emotions involved in their work. Because of the high-stakes competitive nature of education in Singapore, all major stakeholders – teachers, students and parents – invest not simply fourth dimension and try but also a great bargain of emotional energy into schooling.
Working together while grappling with one'due south own, as well as others', beliefs, attitudes and actions is not ever like shooting fish in a barrel.
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Information technology's articulate Singapore teachers face a few major challenges in their work. These challenges, if not advisedly dealt with, may atomic number 82 to unhealthy levels of stress.
The rapidity of educational reform and the increasing demands of other stakeholders mean that teachers have to work extra hard to live up to the onerous expectations being placed upon them.
Another contempo CNA commentary highlighted the danger of piece of work burn-out due to work stress, with approximately 2 in three employees reporting above boilerplate to high levels of stress.
Teachers and other stakeholders therefore need to pay attending to the consequence of piece of work stress in order not to impair teachers' power to continue being stellar educators.
Jason Tan is associate professor at the National Constitute of Didactics.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/commentary-teachers-love-their-jobs-and-feel-valued-face-immense-challenges-285786
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