The idea of testing teachers to see if they are ready to pass the Unified State Exam, for which graduates are “trained,” still causes controversy and indignation among teachers. Geography teacher Rezeda Yasyuchenya also doesn’t understand why she was invited again. After all, last year she already proved her level - she passed with 100 points!
- Maybe you came by mistake? - we doubt.
There is no mistake. They said that only the highest category is exempt and who will be certified this year. That's why we are outraged. Well, if they were watching, they should have invited those who, for example, had 48 points, they would have come to take the test,” says the teacher-student.
- You probably do a good job of preparing students for the Unified State Exam?
I usually have very few people who pass. But last year there was a girl who passed with 86 points and got an A.
There are still many dissatisfied teachers in the corridors of Kazan Lyceum No. 110. Today, in addition to geography, they take English, mathematics, computer science, biology and physics.
Take this test every year, when we can devote this time to working with students, to somehow further develop them. This is a waste of time and nerves. That year I passed the certification, testing, and exam - everything was fine, I confirmed my category. And this is stress again, especially after the Rosobrnadzor inspection,” sighs teacher Svetlana Khakimova.
I also already have three testing certificates. The scores are normal. Well, you can at least once every 3 years, why every year? This could actually land you in the hospital. This kind of stress is intense. This morning my blood pressure is “170”, I took some medicine and came. Age and health are no longer the same,” adds her colleague Olga Mikota.
The teacher himself needs this
This is what the Tatarstan Ministry of Education and Science assures. According to the authors of the initiative, diagnostic testing will help assess the level of knowledge of a teacher in his subject, identify his weaknesses and provide him with assistance.
If the teacher himself in mathematics or the Russian language cannot pass the KIM in his subject with a high score, he will never teach his student with a high score. Do you agree? - Tamara Fedorova, head of the General Education Department of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Tatarstan, answers the question about the purpose of testing with a question about the purpose of testing.
According to her, the ministry will not even consider CIMs; they will immediately be sent to municipal methodological services. It is they who will have to identify, evaluate the test results and take action.
There will be no administrative actions or personnel decisions. This is done for the teacher himself. If there are problems, that is, the teacher does not know certain sections of his subject very well, then he will need to improve his qualifications, the organizers assured.
To the question: why re-examine high-achieving teachers and those who also showed high results, the Ministry of Education and Science reported that this will not happen in the future:
So far, we have released only those teachers who have the highest qualification category and those who are being certified this year. If this year a teacher shows consistent results and scores 100 points in his subject, we will work on them in a targeted manner, and in the future they will not undergo diagnostic testing,” the ministry representative promised.
"Fakes" of primary school teachers
A colleague sent her child to first grade at a Kazan school. And from the first days of school, when the teacher began to assign tasks, I was horrified:
My son’s teacher came only after college. She writes “notepad”, “glue a fake”, etc. How did she even pass the Unified State Exam as a schoolgirl? Or did you lose your knowledge during 5 years of studying at KFU? - Mom laments.
All the parents in the class are shocked. After all, first-graders rely on the teacher in everything: how she writes is correct! What will she teach them?!
To this question, officials from the Ministry of Education and Science answer that this is another reason to conduct diagnostic testing of teachers. This year’s innovation means that primary school teachers will also take it. KIMs were developed for them at the Kazan Pedagogical College.
The most important thing is to know the technique. We set the task to check the psychological and pedagogical component. Because without knowledge of pedagogy and the psychology of children, it is impossible to work in an elementary school, says college director Anfisa Zalyalova.
- What about literacy? - we are interested
And this will be the next task. I absolutely agree with you. We recently tested your math knowledge. Of course, a teacher must be both literate and know mathematics. Of course, it is wrong if a teacher writes with errors,” the head of the institution agreed.
A study by Rosobrnadzor of primary school teachers in the country on their knowledge of mathematics showed that:
46% of teachers know the subject at a level below basic;
44% know at a basic level;
10% know at a level above basic.
Myths about the Unified State Exam for teachers
Over the two years of discussion of this topic, including on the website sntat.ru, teachers have accumulated many complaints. We addressed the main ones to the Ministry of Education and Science. Tamara Fedorova tried to dispel the “misconceptions” of teachers.
Myth 1. Title. Officially, the procedure is called “diagnostic testing according to the CIMs of the Unified State Exam.” For the sake of brevity, journalists and teachers themselves nicknamed it “Unified State Exam for Teachers.”
Myth 2. For money. In the comments to our articles on this topic, users reported charging money from teachers for participating in the Unified State Exam. They say they collected 400 rubles from them.
No money is collected from teachers. At the request of our minister to Rosobrnadzor, FIPI provided us with CIMs free of charge. We did not incur any expenses.
Myth 3. Boycott teachers. A recent petition written on behalf of teachers in Tatarstan caused a lot of noise. The authors opposed the holding of the Unified State Exam among teachers and called for a boycott of testing, as was done in the 175th gymnasium.
It is not true that the 175th gymnasium boycotted the Unified State Exam. There were only 2 teachers who returned the KIMs blank. So what is written in the petition is all a hoax.
Myth 4. There is no methodological help. Teachers complained that they did not receive any promised assistance based on the results of last year's testing.
I can say with responsibility that methodological work was carried out. That road maps have been drawn up. Starting on May 16, we had a report from municipal methodological services at the Institute for Educational Development, where they reported on the work to implement these road maps. And I think that the results of students this year have leapt forward in the average Unified State Examination scores, including because the corresponding work was organized.
Myth 5. Illegal. The petition against holding the Unified State Exam among teachers claims that this procedure is illegal and violates the rights of teachers.
We test teachers on their subject knowledge in order to help them. There are no violations of the law here.
Do teachers cheat on the Unified State Exam?
The teachers themselves say this. While preparing for testing today, one of the teachers in the hallway remarked with offense to her colleague:
I honestly prepared, I spent so much time on preparation, but many calmly wrote it off and that’s it.
Even the Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Tatarstan doubted the objectivity of the testing results of individual teachers last year. They showed too good scores, and their graduates, on the contrary, failed.
At the same time, the picture regarding the objectivity of testing subject teachers in a number of districts is alarming. Subject teachers of the Kukmor, Mamadysh, Arsky, Baltasinsky, and Leninogorsk districts demonstrated the highest results. At the same time, the cross-sections we conduct do not confirm the comparable level of knowledge of their students,” Engel Fattakhov doubts.
Apparently for this reason, this year they decided to film everything that happened in the classroom during the exam. Video recordings will also be sent to the Republican Monitoring Center. If its specialists suspect someone of cheating, they will be able to check it. Teachers are not afraid of cameras, but they considered the procedure itself humiliating:
I don’t know how it is in other subjects, but it’s impossible to copy in English. Because we don’t know what materials we will receive, what assignments and essays we will write. “Our cheat sheets are in our heads,” the English teacher is confident.
Previously, it was always allowed to use notes. On the contrary, it was encouraged. It is impossible to keep such a large amount of material in your head at the same time. Why are they putting us in jail like this, and as if we are taking a diploma for the first time, but we have already received it,” her neighbor is indignant.
According to the Ministry of Education and Science, last year the republic’s teachers passed tests well in the Russian language, mathematics and biology. Many scored above 70 points. At the same time, there are subjects in which teachers need to improve.
Our greatest concern is chemistry and our greatest concern is computer science and CT, but we will work,” summed up Tamara Fedorova.
In total, 16 thousand teachers passed the Unified State Exam in Tatarstan today. 61 points were opened for them, just like last year, in 13 subjects plus primary classes. The results will be known in three weeks, but only the test participants themselves will know them. The ministry assured that teachers' grades would not be disclosed to the public under any circumstances.
Natalya Vladimirovna Belova, history and social studies teacher at Lyceum School No. 1420, Honorary Worker of the General Education System of the Russian Federation:
Since 2008, the Unified State Exam has firmly entered our lives, becoming today one of the main tools for testing the knowledge of graduates. And from this moment on, discussions around the Unified State Exam have not subsided! Almost like football or hockey in the old days united fans of our country, regardless of their field of activity, age and gender, so the Unified State Exam today continues to excite not only public opinion, but also the minds of scientists, officials, cultural figures, scientists, and teachers themselves . Every innovation evokes a response and is often not without criticism.
On the one hand, it was an interest to feel the atmosphere of the exam and, if you like, to feel like a schoolgirl. I can’t call myself a arrogant person, but I didn’t have to specifically set aside time for preparation, since systematic studies and work as an expert of GIA-11 in social studies and history gives me a lot of confidence, forces me to always be “on topic”, to look for different approaches , techniques that allow my students to successfully pass the Unified State Exam by correctly distributing the exam time.
Social studies is not only a set of facts and theses, it is also a language, the knowledge of which helps a young person learn to talk about society and the state, about the world of people of which he is a part. The difficulty, in my opinion, is that it needs to be put in writing.
Undoubtedly, one of the most dangerous risks in the learning process for a child is the incompetence of the teacher. Of course, there is no need to say that knowledge of the taught discipline and the ability to solve the Unified State Examination with a high score are the same thing. But if a teacher is incompetent in the field of state certification, then the risk of graduates receiving low scores increases.
In this regard, my personal experience of passing the Unified State Exam has shown that a teacher placed within the strict time frame of the Unified State Exam will be much better able to teach not only how to solve certain tasks, but also how to manage time during the exam. Therefore, my position is that teachers should not give in to taking the Unified State Exam and should not be afraid to do so. But this issue must be approached with the utmost correctness; one cannot cut from the shoulder, since the opinion of the teaching community cannot be called unambiguous. There should be no “campaignism”. And yet, passing the Unified State Exam by a teacher is a right that should not be turned into an obligation.
Of course, passing the Unified State Exam by a teacher is important not only for the school principal, who forms the teaching staff and is interested in high scores. Passing the Unified State Exam by a teacher, in my opinion, is important for parents of students. They are given confidence that the teacher knows his subject and, having passed this test, will be able to teach the child. And I would like to answer my students with the words of the head of the Moscow Department of Education, Isaac Iosifovich Kalina: “The personal example of a teacher and the opportunity to demonstrate professional skills can be a good beginning for graduates and for all students.”
In conclusion, I would like to thank the staff and management of the Moscow Center for Quality Education for providing all teachers with the opportunity to pass this test and pass it with honor. I want to believe that for many of my colleagues this was the case. My score = 92 on a 100-point scale and 58 on the primary score.
The staff also understood the discrepancy between the amount of work and the allotted time, so they gave me an extra 10 minutes. After 55 minutes of work, I solved 24 tasks without checking. I handed in the work and came out in a terrible state, and told my dad about everything. Dad turned to the administration, and without any dispute I was allowed to write the work for as long as needed. I worked for another 60 minutes. It was uncomfortable: I felt like I was holding people back.
The answer form deserves special mention. It was standard, contained 26 points and did not correspond to the format of the work: in the number of tasks, in the absence of a form for a detailed answer. All this had to be written on the back in free form. At subsequent diagnostics, I was also given this form, and it also did not match the format of other work.
About a week later, we received an email with the diagnostic results (file attached). For each assignment, the table shows the topic of the assignment, the maximum score and the grade received. It turned out that I received a much lower grade than I expected. During the screening we were given assignments and my work; There were again no specifications and evaluation criteria. In many ways, my mistakes turned out to be stupid - I myself was surprised how I could write such a thing. We felt that some tasks were graded incorrectly, and one task did not correspond to the standard program. They were not allowed to photograph anything, and they were not provided with a copy of the work.
At home, we prepared and submitted an appeal by email, which remained unanswered. A little later we received a certificate (file attached), which indicated the initial result. They refused to give us a certified sheet with a transcript of the results.
It should be added to the above that the inability to analyze errors at home significantly reduces the educational benefit of such diagnostics. I was well prepared for the diagnosis, there is no doubt about it, and I was counting on a “5”. The first time the impression was so bad that I didn’t want to come there anymore.
Let us note that during this diagnostic, the administration and staff were interested in us, as CO-workers. We were given a personal registration sheet, we were open to dialogue, and we met halfway in everything that was not prohibited. Then the situation changed, but more on that next time.