"Professional" "Development"

During the previous school year at the high school and the night school, most of the English teachers were gone either one or two days per week. This was for professional development training they were "required" to attend. I use quotations because although I was told it was required, the more I looked into it, the more I discovered that wasn't exactly the case. The professional development classes were to improve the teacher's English. This is part of the same push by the government to make the country bilingual that brought about the TEFL program within Peace Corps. A group, called Costa Rica Multilingue was formed within the executive branch, it has five goals, which I'll do my best to summarize quickly here: prepare teachers with communicative teaching skills in English, improve the quality/amount of bilingual workers, offer resources and technology to institutions to improve English education, raise and manage funds to offer English learning programs, monitor the labor market for bilingual workers. The official, more prettily worded goals can be found here. These are great goals, they make perfect sense, and I think the effort by the presidential office to improve English education is great. Yet, good intentions only take one so far.


As part of the first goal, Costa Rica Multilingue worked with the ministry of education to provide the aforementioned training. The teachers were usually professors from the closest university, and the teachers were put into groups based on how they had scored on the TOEIC (a proficiency test). This test had been given to all teachers in 2008 or 2009 for the government and Costa Rica Multilingue to get a handle on where the country stood. The results were sobering, with something like 1/3 of teachers not even reaching intermediate level of proficiency. So, in 2010 and 2011, the teacher training occurred. For me the biggest problem was that the training occurred during regular school days. Based on what I gleaned from conversations with various teachers, about 40% of teachers went to training one day a week, and another 50% went to training two days a week. The other ten percent had a high enough level to not warrant training, or no group could be organized for them. There were no substitutes or rescheduled classes for the teachers that were at training. So, if all the teachers were attending training, we're talking about 28% of English classes over those two school years being missed. Granted, the idea is that the teachers will become better teachers, thus using the classes they do have more productively. I might be willing to accept this proposal if it were five or ten percent of classes, but 28% is a pretty sizable chunk of the time that the students should be receiving instruction. A pretty sizable chunk of the education that the parents, as taxpayers, are paying for. The night school teachers, if they had attended the training during the day, did not have to show up for night school-as the training counted as their work day. I never observed the training, so can't comment on it's worthiness in that respect, but many a teacher said they enjoyed it because, after working in the morning, they usually watched movies in the afternoon. I'll bet $5 they used Spanish subtitles. 


While I wholly agree with the concept of the training (it has essentially the same purpose as the TEFL program), I couldn't disagree much more with the way it was carried out. With teachers already receiving ~55 vacation days a year (in addition to all official holidays) I think it would have been a considerably better idea to schedule the professional development during summer break, and have it required to continue work the next year. This could have been an intensive two week course or something like that, and then teachers could have continued throughout the year with half days or maybe one day a week for the teachers most in need. This would have considerably cut down the classes missed and disrupted less the continuity of the learning process for the students. Of course, I'm sure the super strong teacher's union wouldn't have gone for it, and I think that's such a huge problem. The proficiency tests showed that a large number of teachers were simply not apt to teach English, but instead of getting fired, or forced into extra training (outside of work hours), these teachers were taken out of the classroom two days a week. Let's imagine for a second the education these teachers' students are receiving: already subpar, and now, 40% of the time, you don't have any class at all. This sure doesn't seem to me to be the plan that is going to help those students learn or practice much English. More frustrating, if after a year of taking the classes and not improving his score to a satisfactory level, a teacher doesn't get fired or reprimanded, they just have to attend training the following year. Depending on one's training teacher, this might actually be a reward. 

(perhaps their teacher is in training...)

Curiously, the two teachers that had undoubtedly the worst English at the high school last year weren't attending classes. I inquired into this and found out that if there weren't enough people in your area at your level, or the people couldn't agree on a schedule, the class wouldn't happen. So, as there weren't enough teachers that had the horrendously low level of English that these teachers did, there wasn't a group. So, the two teachers that needed the most assistance with their English received none. So, instead, a number of teachers that actually didn't need much help with their English, but rather with lesson planning, classroom management, developing learning objectives, and well, just general professionalism, instead spent one day a week arriving even later than normal, leaving even earlier than normal, taking a long lunch, and spending the afternoon watching a movie. In case you're wondering, no, no one from Costa Rica Multilingue ever came to observe the teachers, and whether they were implementing their "improved" English in the classroom. Needless to say, despite all this training, over the course of a year, I discerned no difference in the English abilities of my teachers. Well, not completely, there were two teachers that showed improvement, but that's because I told them to come to me with problems, then we'd go over them and practice them--something they said didn't occur in the training-as they had to stick to the program wide plan. 


Good intentions indeed, but, in my opinion, carried out quite poorly. The reluctance to work extra comes from a sense of entitlement I've noted among teachers here, which I think comes from the fact that, even despite its development, in Costa Rica, especially rural Costa Rica, being educated is still quite rare. Labor is super, super protected here, so that probably also contributes to the unwillingness to think about requiring training outside of work hours. Additionally, the nationally run ministry of education creates a lot of distance between students and parents and the ministry's management in the capital; thus weakening one of the great sources of accountability on public education. I write about it, because probably half of the teachers I worked with used Spanish instead of English because they didn't know the English words and phrases, or didn't feel confident using them. A more accountable training might have addressed this, and differently scheduled might not have robbed 28% of the classroom time from students nationwide. The Peace Corps application describes the job as challenging more than a fews times, and this is just one of the many challenges I have encountered during my time here.