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There are teachers for whom online school means entering, giving students a lot of homework and leaving. “Unfortunately, those who teach bad face-to-face will teach even worse online,” says Professor Mircea Miclea, from Babeș-Bolyai University. The key to solving the problems of this special school year, held in pandemic conditions, is in the hands of teachers, said the former Minister of Education in an intervention on Digi24.
“The simple fact that you give him such an assignment and don’t get involved does more harm to the student. The quality of the interaction you have with your student is critical at this time. You have to understand his point of view, how he sees things and then you have to lean to his point of view, to teach what you teach him depending on how he sees things, what interest he has in the subject you teach, because then he will understand better . The quality of the interaction between the adult and the child, regardless of whether the adult is a teacher or a parent, is essential ”, declared Professor Mircea Miclea in Digi24.
Lessons with the best teachers in the country
When asked what the ideal online school would look like, Mircea Miclea, a professor at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, spoke about an “e-learning” platform and detailed what it would entail:
“You have to bring all the good teachers in the country, you have to put them in a studio, you have to record the lessons they teach in that studio.
After you have recorded the lessons made by the best teachers in the country, add examples, counterexamples, animation, text, diagrams to those filmed recordings and create a model lesson.
You put this model lesson on a platform.
Eventually, you can create two variants of the same lesson: a remedial variant, that is, for students who have learning difficulties, and a excellence variant, that is, for students who are very good and who are given more exercises.
And then, from the mobile phone, while going to school, from the cart, the students can access the lesson given by the best teacher in this country and then he will learn.
Even for the classroom teacher it will be a help, because he will be able to send the student directly to that content, not to those great topics, and at the same time it will be a motivation for the class teacher to rise to the level of the lesson in which the teacher gives it teacher that the child can access online ”, explains Mircea Miclea.
“So you, in a poor town, with a teacher who only comes from time to time, because the bus does not arrive, you would have direct access from your cell phone, you don’t even need a tablet, to the lesson of the majority. Good teacher in the country, ”added Professor Miclea.
An opportunity lost for ten years
He recalled that ten years ago he put an article in a law that was going to make an online learning platform, but it was ignored. “This has been said for years, but it was not taken into account, now it would have been real, not a fantasy, and what I say is not my opinion, there are studies for this, you just had to take these studies into account” That’s all “said Professor Miclea.
“This solution was possible ten years ago, ten years were lost,” stressed the former minister.
“I hope that at least from now on this will be done, because otherwise, what the results of the periodic analyzes show is that the difference between rural and urban increases from one class to another. Instead of school Being an equalizer: this is one of the social functions of the school, that is, no matter where you are, if you learn well, you have the same professional opportunities. works as an equalizer of opportunities, as a differentiator of opportunities: those in front are increasingly ahead, those who are behind are increasingly behind“Mircea Miclea commented.
The current decentralization, rather a detachment of responsibilities
„Scandalous and immoralThis is how Mircea Miclea characterizes the fact that the Secretary of State for Pre-University Education said goodbye in this same period of beginning school, the peak, for electoral campaign reasons. “It shows how important school and education are for those in government positions. The electoral campaign is more important than the education of the young generation,” said Mircea Miclea.
On the other hand, he points out that “We must not turn the educational process into an annex to a health process ”. That would be a big mistake, in his opinion.
“I appreciate the fact that however the school has opened, rather than being postponed, I appreciate the fact that a kind of decentralization has started – extremely limited, rather a discharge of responsibilities from central authorities, but it is still a beginning of decentralization, in the sense that it no longer comes with a global solution for the whole country, nuanced decisions can be made depending on the situation in a locality or in a school, which is a good thing ”, thanks Mircea Miclea.
The school could hire the teachers it wants. And she too would cast out the homeless
The former minister explained what a decentralization process in education would really mean:
“I think we should always pressure the Ministry and the Government to offer some global solutions. E.g, National online learning platform and virtual school library and curriculum change can only be done at the national level.. But, on the other hand, undeniably, decentralization is essential, only it must cover all aspects.
The version of the law that said how decentralization should be done lasted several months., After which they have been canceled all those articles of law. Decentralization there didn’t mean throwing everything into the schoolyard. Meant that the budget is managed by you as a school and board of directors, you decide how to manage it.
Doi: hiring teachers You do it as a school and you throw them out as a school, if they don’t perform. Not like now when the teacher can laugh in your nose, because he is not an employee of the school. All parents can go to the principal and tell him that the teacher is not performing, that the principal cannot do anything to him.
Decentralization also means decentralization of human resources: who you hire, who you promote, inclusive how directors are hired. It was written in the law that the school board organized the contest to hire the principal. And that was canceled.
So, of course, you have to decentralize, but not in this way, now that we find it difficult. To blame others, we left them decentralized, but we took any other lever related to the budget, related to the use of human resources, ”commented Mircea Miclea.
What would Mircea Miclea do if he were a school principal?
The key to solving the problems of this special school year, held in pandemic conditions, is in the hands of the teachers. If they can really do their homework, that is, teach very well, better twice than they taught last year or in previous years, then school success will be achieved. “Success in school does not only consist in respecting the rules that must be observed now, but it means that the competences included in the school curriculum are acquired,” Mircea Miclea stressed.
“Much more could be done if the solutions that had already been offered for several months were taken into account: in May and June to start school, in various settings, then we would have experimented, we would have learned from those experiences and now we would have known much better what we should do; a second solution was to do make-up education over summer vacation: pay certain teachers to help some students make up material lost in the months they were not in school. The UK has allocated £ 1.5 million for remedial education. It was also possible to start school two weeks earlier, on September 1, with the idea of having a time reserve in case a new crisis arises during the winter. Solutions were offered, they were not considered. It would have been a better start at school, people would have felt safer, ”says Mircea Miclea.
“If I were a school principal, I would have a small meeting every day with the teachers I have at school, because each of my teachers will find specific solutions to the problems they face with different students and could share, so that tomorrow the school it works better than today, because we have already found some local and contextual solutions. This is how we learn, we have to create machines through which schools learn from the experiences they had the day before, “said Professor Miclea.
The public message focused on fear. What is the remedy to control anxiety?
Unfortunately, he says, the public message has always focused on fear and making people fear, believing that this way they will better follow the rules. “It is not good, it is not fair, there is scientific data that shows that if you increase your anxiety level, to a certain extent people listen to you, but then they begin to deny the message that anxiety produces. Is called defensive denial this whole story, ”explained Mircea Miclea, who is a psychologist by profession.
What should be done from now on? Parents and teachers alike need to be more careful in dividing their children’s time into their daily schedule. Children need to focus on homework. In school, if the teacher teaches them very well, she absorbs them in the lesson she teaches.
“It’s like reading a good novel, you no longer pay attention to your surroundings, because you live in the world of that novel. A good lesson makes you less bothered by the fact that you have a mask or the fact that someone is coughing behind you, you focus on that lesson and then you forget about the anxiety you have, the anxiety you have, because you you concentrated on the task, ”said Mircea Miclea.
Also, at home, parents need to talk less about their condition or the condition of others – that they are afraid, that they are worried – and more about the tasks their children have to do.
So, focusing on tasks, on what we have to do, helps us better manage the fears we have, concluded Professor Mircea Miclea, former Minister of Education and former head of the presidential commission on education during the term of President Traian Basescu.
Editor: Luana Pavaluca
