The expert teacher: the strange invention of Minister Bianchi
Expert teacher. Introducing a new figure whose usefulness has to be demonstrated creates further inconvenience, arouses confrontations and injustices, solicits disputes. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali
When he assumed the leadership of the Ministry of Education, Prof. Patrizio Bianchi said he wanted a "loving school". Now that he is leaving due to the resignation of the government, he leaves her "quarrelsome and dissatisfied".
At the start of the new school year there is less than a month but it is feared that – net of the Covid variants with the relative organization of specific and updated prophylaxis measures for pupils, teachers and staff (including fragile workers left without protection) – inevitably we will have to deal with the usual problems: shortages of staff, delays in appointments, chicken coop classes, disabled people without support, growing double bureaucracy that will add, as always, that of the ministerial circulars to that of the designers of the autonomy school. The design of a 4.0 school within the PNRR has sinned by excess of announcement: for now, we take note of the birth of a new organism in the already suffocating plethora of existing ones, the " School of higher education and continuing education ", which will support the Directorates General and the existing Departments, will have to coordinate with the local schools and will make use of the advice of INDIRE and INVALSI.
The name is bombastic but a prelude to a pharaonic schedule to provide online training, through bodies and associations that will make use of self-proclaimed experts, with the issue of pedagogical suitability licenses and didactic updating. Exactly the opposite of what the militant school would need: a robust parachute to be used in situations with a high rate of educational problems, usually in the classroom.
It is on the efforts of teaching in the classroom that we must invest to help teachers: the method is not to add but to remove bureaucracy and redundant obligations, to ensure that teachers and pupils go to school willingly, pruning off unnecessary trappings and improving the relationship between teaching and learning.
On the recommendation of Prof. Bianchi, the Government now introduces, extemporaneously, beyond any contractual logic and any method of listening to the school base and the OO.SS. , a figure that exudes demagogy and approximation, a sort of sop to the EU that has long been soliciting generic differentiations within the professional figures of the school: he is called an "expert teacher" but it is all to be invented. We must not mimic foreign school systems by filling the daily phrasebook with anglicisms, neologisms, acronyms, formulas, algorithms: if anything, instead, strengthen and improve our teaching tradition. Almost half a century after the Delegated Decrees, which had launched a new model of the school system, after consultation and concertation implemented with all the professional and social components – on which weighted evaluations of merit can be expressed only after some time – that organization chart that was based on the specific connotation of monochromatic and collegial roles and functions is now affected by the introduction of a new figure, ope legis , fallen from above, which arouses perplexity with respect to the optimization of the public school service, its usefulness in the economy of a configured and tested legal context, to improve the quality of the efficiency-effectiveness of the final product. For some time the bureaucracy has been a ball and chain of the school that would need a vigorous care of regulatory simplification, if only to restore to teachers that freedom of teaching, understood as freedom of method, of which they are constitutionally owners. To imagine what reason led Minister Bianchi to this original thought, one would say that it could be the opening words to a differentiation of the teaching function, but its practical utility is not understood.
In what thematic and professional field would this teacher be defined as an expert? With what results and advantages for the school? Expert is an adjective derived from the noun experience: should we therefore believe that he would become such after attending three three-year online training courses?
And who would the trainers ever be? It is assumed subjects more experienced than him, from which he should learn the abc of this new qualification that would make him a consultative and guiding reference for colleagues. But our school system foresees that the same functions of school manager and inspector are a functional differentiation, after competitive selection, of the teaching function.
It is true that once upon a time the didactic directors and principals were the custodians of a pedagogical knowledge that made them guide and reference for their teachers. Should we therefore suspect that the expert teacher would substitute these skills still in the hands of school managers, to leave them only purely bureaucratic and organizational tasks and functions? But how would it be possible to acquire the qualification of expert teacher, one for each school? Only after three three-year training courses, therefore, will be fully operational in nine years. Nothing is said about the training model that would substantiate the professional know-how of this figure. On the other hand, it is known that it will be highly sought after due to the fact that it will be encouraged with an annual ad personam allowance of 5650 euros per year. There will be many postulants, only one elected: with what criteria for identifying and assigning this office? An extra grain for school managers who carry on their shoulders the boulder of a ministry among the most top-down and bureaucratized, where bizarre and often impromptu ideas are born, inspired by newism, perhaps in order to justify their own existence, and then poured into schools of autonomy to become the decentralized institutional miniaturization of the central-national apparatus.
The same OO.SS of the school have expressed reservations and doubts about this 'facade' operation.
" The government finds new resources to finance the figure of the expert teacher, a selective mechanism of the professors that will concern only 8 thousand workers per year and that the category has already rejected with the general strike of last May 30 – is the criticism that comes from the secretaries generals of Flc Cgil, Cisl Scuola, Uil Scuola, Gilda Unams and Snals Confsal – Money is found for everything except for the renewal of the national contract. We want the excerpt of the provision of the measures concerning the school, which must be brought back to contractual matters, identifying the resources to close the negotiation for the contract of one million people ”.
The fact that Minister Bianchi delivers this legacy to the 4.0 school of the Pnrr through the "bis aid decree" leads us to think more of a new teacher figure to be invented, introduced with an urgent suspicion, than something that the school really does, in this moment it needs.
The expert teacher suggests a sort of icing on the cake of a system of recruitment and training of teaching staff which instead needs to be rebuilt at the root, starting from the secondary and university education of future teachers and professors.
The path taken a few years ago and with increasing intensity by the tenants of Viale Trastevere is not convincing: that of centering the in-service training of teachers through improvised and ephemeral courses, often managed by seconded staff or absent from school classrooms for years. Nor does the creation of courses based on tests and questionnaires to be completed online meet the requirements of good, complete, integral training. The best teachers are those who know how to decline and combine an ancient wisdom, started from their own school education with the ability to express solid skills, creativity, divergent thinking. Freedom of teaching is a constitutionally guaranteed principle and can never be subjected to the evaluation of some certified expert colleague just for having completed a virtual training cycle.
Nor can school administrators 'surrender' the didactic component of their function.
Therefore, this hierarchy is perplexed, which would be introduced on the basis of an expertise gained in solitary navigation, after nine years of theoretical training.
In the meantime, the militant school goes on and has to face daily a complexity of ever new and evolved problems, which cannot be solved by an "High" who dispenses advice left and right.
The strength of the teaching function lies in its unity of role, its centrality in the fulfillment of training tasks does not admit organizational hierarchies since there is no corresponding hierarchy within the concept of culture, inherited, reworked and transmitted.
There are already too many training and evaluation institutes, and they sometimes create more obstacles than they can help. In school magazines we read letters from teachers who leave school at the end of their career, exhausted and stunned by the rampant newism, by circulating clichés, by the bureaucratic harassment of handcuffed circulars, redundant meetings, useless obligations, indecipherable diagrams.
Generally they regret the school where they could express their value but they came out – in the end disappointed and embittered – despite the great satisfaction that teaching gives.
Introducing a new figure whose usefulness has to be demonstrated creates further inconvenience, arouses confrontations and injustices, solicits disputes.
Please, let us restore serenity to those who carry out this delicate profession, with pragmatism and common sense.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/ministro-bianchi-scuola/ on Tue, 09 Aug 2022 05:07:55 +0000.