Nothing beats first-hand experience when it comes to teaching. It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read on teaching if you haven’t actually taught a single class in your life or if you haven’t been in one for ages. You don’t know what it’s like to be a teacher. I have recently decided to go back into teaching (January 2023) and it helped me reconnect with the pleasures and struggles of real-life teaching as opposed to as-seen-in-books-and-webinars teaching. Teaching is a beautiful job with all its intricacies and challenges and today I’d like to address teacher education as perceived by teachers and as perceived by other stakeholders.
Perhaps because I take on the role of teacher educator whenever the opportunity arises, I believe my algorithm has been trained to show me posts regarding the topic (mostly Instagram and LinkedIn) and for the past couple of months, I’ve read some six different articles on the topic from the perspective of non-teachers. What caught my attention in those articles was the fact that all of them addressed the issue from a somewhat top-down perspective. One of them asked, “How can we make sure teachers stay in the profession?” another “What can we do to increase teachers’ participation in CPD?” and what baffles me is that it seems that the underlying message here is that teachers are demotivated, quitters, weak, and uninterested in continuous professional development and growth – which is NOT true.
What all of these articles failed to analyze, perhaps because they were written for school administrators, business owners, or the general public – not teachers – is the fact that teachers are rarely paid what their qualifications and knowledge are worth and tend to transition into different jobs in education to try and make sure their skills and expertise are taken into account; their bank accounts as well.
It is shocking how much an English teacher needs to know nowadays to even be considered for a job. You have to have control of the language, a college degree (do notice how both of these involve a time and money investment) aside from active methodologies, the maker movement, gamification, PBL (both of them), CLIL, inclusion, differentiation, ODS, BNCC, SEL, 21st-century skills, Bloom’s Taxonomy of cognitive levels and the list goes on and on. And, alas, these professionals are expected to perform at the highest of standards while being paid R$26,37 on average in São Paulo (according to Glassdoor.com). How can one be motivated to stay in the profession and pursue CPD when you make just enough for a single meal with an hour’s work?
Oh, and not to mention employers who decide it is best for you that they withhold your worker’s rights because ‘they are too expensive’. Mind you, they are invaluable.
ELT in Brazil 
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