2023-08-09 09:46:17
The results show that most managers, 75.2%, consider the mental health of students and teachers to be a challenge.
Teacher training, students’ and teachers’ mental health and lack of family involvement are the main challenges faced in public schools in the final years of elementary school, a stage that goes from the 6th to the 9th grade. The information comes from an unprecedented survey, released this Wednesday (9), which involved the participation of more than 3,300 education leaders from municipalities across the country.
The Perceptions and Challenges of the Final Years of Elementary School survey in municipal education networks was carried out in partnership between Itaú Social and the Union of Municipal Education Directors (Undime) to identify the main bottlenecks in supply and management at this school stage.
The results show that most managers, 75.2%, consider the mental health of students and teachers to be a challenge. Approximately the same percentage, 74.1%, point out as challenges the lack of involvement of families and 69.9%, the training of teachers regarding specific aspects of the stage. In addition, 64.6% consider the transition from the 5th to the 6th year challenging and 57.2% point to the issue of the schools’ infrastructure to meet the demand.
For the president of Undime, Luiz Miguel Garcia, the study data show the need for more attention to this stage of education. “It draws attention to education in its entirety. We need to attend to socio-emotional issues, we need to understand and help children, young people and adolescents to find their place. Definitely, it is not possible to do a compartmentalized education, with a content vision.”
According to Itaú Social’s Development and Solutions manager, Sônia Dias, the final years of elementary school are a stage of many changes in a student’s life. Students no longer take classes with just one teacher and start taking classes with teachers from specific areas. Furthermore, it is the transition from childhood to youth, a stage usually taken between 11 and 14 years of age. According to Sônia, all these changes and transitions have an impact on the teaching and learning process.
“It is very common for us to see children in this age group who are not paying attention, or who are very sleepy, but because the brain is developing and it often needs that energy for itself. Adolescents in this age group often have moments of great questioning, often loneliness, fear of physical changes – the voice changes, the body changes, it is a phase of great insecurities”, says Sônia Dias.
Given this scenario, specific actions are required. The research shows that 54.1% of the teaching networks that participated in the survey state that they do not have a team dedicated to the adaptation of students, in the transition from the 5th to the 6th year, and that 27.8% do not offer welcoming spaces and groups to students. Regarding the involvement of families, the survey reveals that 21% of educational networks do not implement, or implement with great difficulty, strategies for engaging family members; 57% implement it with some difficulty and 22% implement it without difficulty.
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Professional qualification
The research showed the need for continuing education more in line with the challenges of this school period. Continuing training is what professionals do throughout their careers to develop certain knowledge and keep up-to-date.
According to the survey, almost half of the networks, 49.2%, offer training to teachers once every two months for teachers; 26.1%, once every six months; and 6.8%, once a year. The proportions are similar in the provision of training for other professionals, such as school directors and pedagogical coordinators and secretariat staff.
The themes most offered are playful, critical and participatory forms of learning (30.4%), use of methodologies that promote autonomous and participatory learning (26.9%) and specific contents of areas and curricular components (28.4%) . Those least offered are content about the changes and development of adolescence in students (19.4%); the implementation of teaching content on African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture (19.8%) and specific approaches to correct age-grade distortion and school trajectory (14.4%).
“Initial training leaves many gaps and, therefore, it is even more important that continuing training exists. Of course, every professional needs to keep up-to-date, but more and more we are seeing this inducing and fundamental role of continuing education for teachers”, says the manager of Itaú Social. For her, the formation that exists in most networks can be considered fragile, given the low frequency with which it occurs.
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According to the data collected, the networks point out the lack of teaching materials to apply the training contents in the classroom as a difficulty (47.7%); the frequency of professionals in continuing training (51.7%) and even the adherence of professionals to continuing training (55.1%).
For Luiz Miguel Garcia, from Undime, the initial training of teachers, in undergraduate courses, also needs to be reviewed, to get closer to the reality of schools and make new professionals arrive more prepared. “We are experiencing a major crisis because the initial training of teachers does not include pedagogical instruments for adequate training, which bring future teachers closer to the reality they will encounter on a daily basis”, says Garcia,
He states that the initial training of teachers in Brazil needs to be rethought in order to get out of the content model and reach more reflective processes. Garcia also points out that most undergraduate students opt for the distance mode, which, if there is no experience in schools provided for in the curriculum, distances them even more from the reality of the classrooms.
comprehensive education
Offering comprehensive education is also one of the challenges facing municipal networks. In general, in Brazil, 57.5% of the respondent networks declare that they have actions to expand or implement integral education in the final years.
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Among the strategies for expanding integral education, the most advanced is the offer of elective subjects or extra activities. According to the study, 42.8% of the networks have already been implemented, but another 18.5% still have no plans for implementation. Another initiative pointed out is the increase in the number of teachers, implemented by 39.9%.
The study shows, however, that six out of ten networks that implement some comprehensive education strategy have a lot of difficulty with financial and infrastructure issues.
Full-time education has recently become a national public policy with the enactment of Law 14,640/2023, which establishes the Escola em Tempo Integral Program. The federal government is going to invest BRL 4 billion to increase the number of full-time enrollments in basic education schools by 1 million in 2023. The goal is to reach, by 2026, around 3.2 million enrollments.
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Solutions
Identifying weaknesses in the networks, according to Dias, is important for finding solutions. “Although we have these gaps and weaknesses, we understand that there is a lot of opportunity. Students pass through these schools only once. So, we have the opportunity to make this educational experience for them the best possible, an experience that supports their development”, he says.
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According to Garcia, public policies are needed specifically aimed at the final years of elementary school and that are joint. “The final years of elementary school were forgotten. What we are doing, we are guiding actions that discuss this problem, and discuss what we can do together, this construction needs to be jointly by the Union, states and municipalities.”
The survey was conducted between May 18 and June 26 of this year. In all, 3,329 municipal education leaders across the country responded to a virtual questionnaire. Together, the respondent education networks concentrate 3.4 million students in the final years of elementary school, which is equivalent to 64% of the total of 5.3 million students in this stage in the public network across the country.
With information from Agência Brasil
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