20% of teachers think the internship model is ideal – 10/17/2023 – Education

It’s not a case. It’s not even two or three. Several students in the 6th to 9th grade classes where Luís teaches English have already had anxiety attacks in class. He helps as much as he can, he acts intuitively, because, when he studied Literature, he didn’t learn anything about how to deal with students. During the internship, which was supposed to be an opportunity to try out teaching, he had to sit passively and watch classes, without being asked to take part in the activities. Discouraged, he only completed 10% of the mandatory course load and obtained a signature from the school to prove the remaining part.

Luís is the fictitious name of a 34-year-old teacher from the São Paulo state school. He requested anonymity Sheet to talk about the difficulties he faced and still faces for having finished college without having the slightest idea of ​​the reality of schools and how to deal with the challenges that arise in the daily life of a classroom.

This is, unfortunately, the story of the majority of teachers in Brazil and of a training that, among many other problems, neglects the importance of internships.

An unprecedented research obtained exclusively by Sheet shows that only 20% of teachers in Brazil consider the current internship model to be ideal. Interns often do not participate in practical activities and also do not receive guidance. Carried out by Instituto Península, which develops education projects focusing on teachers, the Pulso 2023 Survey: Educational Policies From the Perspective of Teachers carried out online interviews, between July 3 and August 8 this year, with 3,029 teachers with an average age of 42 ,8 years, from different regions of the country.

The study comes to light following another alarming data on teacher training in Brazil, released at the end of September: only 13.7% of undergraduate students completed more than the minimum mandatory 400 hours of internship. Just under 20% completed between 301 and 400 hours of internship and more than half (55%) only completed up to 300 hours. Almost 12% did not do any internship.

The numbers are from an analysis carried out by the NGO Todos pela Educação based on the questionnaires from the last Enade (National Student Performance Exam), applied in 2021. And, it is worth highlighting, these are the workloads declared by the graduates — there is no way measure cases, like Luís’s, in which the student obtains the school’s signature without having actually completed the course load. And, according to the NGO, there is a perception that this practice is not rare.

Luís calculates that, of his entire class – he studied at a private college in the interior of São Paulo –, only 10% completed the 400 hours of internship required by law. According to him, the directors who sign the internship reports sometimes don’t know that the student didn’t complete all that workload or else, says Luís, they pretend they don’t know.

Teacher at the São Paulo municipal network, Flávia (name is fictitious), 35, says that practically everyone in her class, in order to graduate, asked teachers they knew to sign the mandatory internship without having completed it. She and many colleagues did an internship which, because it was paid, was not accepted as mandatory, says Flávia. The teacher studied pedagogy on a blended basis (she went to college once a week) at a private university.

Flávia states that, although they completed an internship, she and her colleagues graduated without knowing how to prepare a class and, more than that, without tools to deal with unforeseen events and situations in which what was prepared simply does not work.

Flávia is a teacher of a class of 25 children aged 4 and 5 years old, five of whom are inclusion cases (they have some type of disability or other condition that requires special educational support) and there is no assistant in the classroom. During training, the lesson plans they learned to create were, in Flávia’s words, a complete fantasy, far from what they would find in a classroom.

Another piece of data must be considered in this sad equation of education in Brazil: more than 60% of teachers graduated in distance learning (distance learning) — this considering the data until the pandemic, in 2020; Since then, the modality has only grown, and currently pedagogy is the record-breaking career in distance learning.

This increase in teacher training without in-person classes increases the need to think about an efficient internship policy in the country, according to Heloisa Morel, executive director of Instituto Península.

She says that education interns “are not welcomed or treated as protagonists in schools”. “They receive a large amount of information, with an emphasis on accumulating theoretical repertoire”, she says. In general, the internship does not provide future teachers with information on how to apply, in practice, what they learn in theory.

Often, according to Morel, the intern has to remain completely passive, attending classes without being asked to collaborate in any way — or, even worse, staying outside the classroom, in bureaucratic school activities. “And it is in the classroom that the intern understands and truly experiences what it means to be a teacher.”

The Península survey shows that 87.7% of teachers totally or partially agree with the idea that internships can only be effective if carried out in the classroom. Furthermore, 80.8% said they were willing to welcome an intern into their classroom.

This reveals, in Morel’s assessment, that there is room for the implementation of a new internship policy in the country, with criteria to measure the quality of this practice in the training of future teachers. To achieve this, he states, it would be necessary to establish coordination between higher education institutions and education networks.

In São Carlos, in the interior of São Paulo, Península supported a project to coordinate schools in the municipality and colleges in the region that train teachers. The idea was to better plan the distribution of interns between schools. Furthermore, both colleges and schools had responsibilities in developing and overseeing the internship program to ensure quality. The project also encouraged interns to actively participate in different activities within the classroom, instead of just being observers.

For Luís, teacher training needs to be connected to the reality of education in the country and should, for example, provide tools to mediate conflicts and deal with different levels of learning in the same class.