New high school demands training, says MEC director – 03/04/2023 – Education

Teachers need to receive courses on an ongoing basis to put the new secondary education into practice, in the opinion of the director of teacher training at the Ministry of Education.

Cybele Amado, 55, who at MEC took on the role of working on teacher training policies, is recognized for having carried out a project for continuing education for teachers and managers of the public network in Chapada Diamantina, Bahia. The program began in the 1990s, received awards and became a reference.

For Amado, continuing education is essential for teachers to be able to work in the new high school, which has been in effect in the country since last year and has been facing a series of criticisms from educators and students.

Approved in 2017, during the Temer government, the new model reorganizes the curriculum. Now, students have a common basic training and opt for a specific curriculum, the training itineraries. This part occupies 40% of the grid and has five options: natural sciences; languages; humanities and social sciences; mathematics; and technical and professional training.

The policy has aroused criticism, such as that the model ignores the lack of teachers and public education structure in the country. Pressure from students and teachers made the Lula government (PT) decide to suspend the deadline for implementing the measure. The ordinance, which should be published in the next few days, aims to calm tempers and avoid greater impacts on the image of the government and the president.

Amado says he understands that adjustments to the format are necessary, but argues that “the reform is important”.

“We can’t keep the old high school with the results it brought us”, says the pedagogue to Sheet. “But it is essential that there is continued training of teachers for the advances in secondary education and its new proposals.”

Born in Salvador, the pedagogue became a great advocate of the need to offer continuing education for educators. “Continuing education is a teacher’s right and a duty of the State, and its role is to maintain daily reflection on contemporary issues”, she says.

In 2019, he took over, in Bahia, the directorship of the Anísio Teixeira Institute, a body linked to the State Department of Education that is responsible for training courses for teachers. It was when he developed a training program that integrated teachers from the state network and municipal schools.

The experience serves as the basis for two of Amado’s main objectives at the MEC: that of promoting the creation of specific bodies for the continuing education of teachers, linked to the state departments of education, and the development of programs that integrate teachers and managers of state networks and municipal education.

“When we carried out this integration in Bahia, it became clear how it made no sense not to add the knowledge of the state and municipal networks”, she says. “A teacher told us that she worked at a state school and that there was a municipal one across the street. Despite this proximity, the teams from one and the other did not exchange experiences.”

In addition to returning to the new high school, continuing education programs in the country must, in Amado’s assessment, have literacy as one of their priorities, especially considering the damage to this phase of education caused by the prolonged closure of schools in the pandemic. For this, in the opinion of the director of the MEC, it is necessary to map good experiences of recovery of literacy that already exist in the country, in a localized way, and act so that they are disseminated.

Amado also believes that continuing education is important to develop teachers’ ability to work with media education. The term refers to practices that lead students to maintain a healthy relationship with digital media, with a critical reading of this universe, capable, for example, of detecting and combating fake news. For her, the colleges that train teachers in the country still do not prepare them to work in what has become one of the priority fronts of education, including by determination of the BNCC (Base Nacional Comum Curricular).

“It is necessary to provide educators with the tools to help their students develop a healthy and ethical relationship with the internet, to understand the power of algorithms, the strength of social networks, to recognize and combat misinformation.”

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Understand the New High School

What is it
Policy approved in 2017, by provisional measure, during Temer (MDB), defined that part of the workload would be chosen by students so that they could deepen their knowledge in the area of ​​greatest interest.

Structure
It increased the number of hours of mandatory annual classes for the stage, going from 800 to at least 1,000. Thus, the total workload of secondary education was increased by 25%, from 2,400 to 3,000 hours, as follows:

• 60% of the common workload with the regular disciplines
• 40% formed by electives within five major areas of knowledge, the so-called training itineraries

Limitations
Over the three years of the stage, the time devoted to traditional disciplines cannot exceed 1,800 hours. As before, schools had 2,400 hours to distribute classes in common subjects, in practice, the ceiling reduced the time dedicated exclusively to subjects such as mathematics, Portuguese, history and geography

Definition of itineraries and disciplines
The law says that teaching networks are free to define which itineraries and disciplines they want to create as long as they are within one of the five areas of knowledge: natural sciences; languages; humanities and social sciences; mathematics and technical and professional training

For whom OK
All public and private schools in the country. About 7 million students were impacted by the policy, most of them (about 85%) are enrolled in schools in the state education networks

Deadlines
The law established a period of five years for education networks to prepare themselves, following the following schedule: 1st year of secondary education in 2022, 2nd year in 2023 and the three-year stage until 2024. Many networks, however, began to implementation before, such as the São Paulo state network, which started the process in 2021