The art of Teaching: Teachers aren’t Rich!

by Stivi Cooke (a qualified English teacher and a workplace trainer in hospitality in Hoi An)

“… [to]empower the learner from kindergarten upward with curiosity, self-confidence, independent thinking and creativity.”

Quote from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. VietNam was among the first to ratify and sign the Convention.

In the time of the ancient Egyptians, young boys were carefully selected to become ‘scribes', masters of writing. They were taught how to write, how to express thoughts and describe the world around them, to create the Egyptian records and history, tales of Kings and Queens, conquests and disasters. They were sometimes buried with great honor. Yet even at that early stage, the qualities of scribes were often debated.

The irony of being a Vietnamese teacher is that the problems they face are much the same as teachers worldwide; salary, job satisfaction, sufficient training, enough backup and support, manageable class sizes, suitable materials, continuing employment, and enough teaching tactics to do the job competently.

Of all of the problems, this is perhaps the biggest; how do we continue to train and supply fresh, effective teachers into teaching systems that place too much pressure on teachers to perform to the expectations of people not directly effected by the quality of teaching: administrators, managers, politicians, government inspectors, sensitive and worried parents in a competitive system and the public in general?

Teachers face a number of challenges: large class populations, access to regular training and development, suitable materials for students, inventing new ideas and lesson plans to fit lesson plans often based on curriculums that are out-dated or don't meet the needs of business, higher education or vocational training. Resistance to change is clearly evident across all the sectors of the educational framework of VietNam.

“Burn-out” is an expression we use in English to mean that someone or something is too tired, worn out or has no energy to continue what they do or what it does. Only in the military or front line public service industries such as hospitals, hospitality or teaching does ‘burn out' become such an obvious problem that it's publicly acknowledged yet education professionals suffer more from this than most professions.

We can add one more – confidence with teaching English to Speakers of a second Language (their native, first or ‘mother' language), this form of language teaching usually called ‘ESL'. This ‘confidence problem' is common throughout many countries where English is not the first Language, particularly in Asia because the Asian languages developed very different written and spoken techniques to European Languages.

So to say that Vietnamese teachers don't have a high level of English fluency is quite unfair. With such a large young population, scattered and disorganized resources, difficult budgets and where to focus educational development, it's a wonder that Vietnamese teachers can do as well as they actually do. Reading, writing and grammar skills are high enough to meet the needs of the curriculum – the real question is how to develop Speaking and listening tactics for Teachers.

The government is very aware of the problems and much has been written in public online forums, newspapers and in the media, yet the simple fact that traditional teaching methods are not meeting the needs of students, public expectations and workplace requirements means the system needs overhauling and that's happening – mostly in the cities.

VietNam is big and long with a large population – a lot of those students are in the smaller towns and mountains – how do we reach them with effective and practical education? Though ‘national commitment' – sixty odd years ago Japan and then South Korea lay mostly in ruins from war yet built world class education systems though national programs that had strong public support and funding – China is now reaching that in less than forty years and VietNam is now half way there.

Education pushes growth and innovation. Education forces change but offers people choices about their future. So remember as Teachers Day approaches…Good or bad, teachers need our help and we need your support. Consider this – before you can have hospitals, roads, technology and the rest…a teacher has to teach them how to use it, make it and create it

The Art of teaching 2: The Modern World

It's a little known fact that one of the greatest shifts in educational thinking occurred during the Second War in America. Faced with having to train and teach large numbers of people fast and effectively to support the war effort, major changes began to happen.

Students would work with the materials; materials were condensed and written in a less academic fashion. Courses were designed for people with low education levels and almost no formal technical training. Audio and Visual materials became a mainstream feature in teaching.

Nearly seventy years later as part of a western education, this now includes Student participation in lessons as active learners, creating their own projects, discussing their opinions, challenging and questioning the teacher and challenging the information and knowledge presented, daunting requirements in a traditional ‘teacher as unquestioned authority' educational system.

The modern teacher is also expected to teach ‘soft skills' – the communication skills of the workplace, act as counselor, explain and lead on social issues such as bullying and emotional stability, coping with personal problems and the love life of young adults.

But how can Vietnamese teachers meet these challenges with outdated, poorly designed materials and teacher training?

VietNam has two widely known problems: supplying enough teachers in the system and finding them suitable positions and the quality of teacher training and the standard of teaching in the classrooms.

Part of the answer as most Vietnamese educators have already acknowledged is finding ways to improve training. There is an old saying in education, “it's not the book, but the teacher, that makes the difference”.

The seemingly never ending arguments over the national curriculum, high school testing and ‘rote-learning' and university lecturers teaching quality are missing the point – education is not ‘learning facts' but engaging the mind, inspiring imagination and providing reasons for why subjects must be learnt in certain manner.

Trainer teachers, not only in VietNam but many other countries with a developing education system study mostly theory and not enough practice. The study of semantics for Vietnamese English teachers for example, is largely pointless and should be replaced with layered phonics and pronunciation techniques, particularly stress and emphasis in sentences.

Lesson plan development is too detailed and doesn't encourage teachers to experiment and create their own ‘style'. However a lot of teachers do try very hard to discover better ways to educate in the classroom.

Another valuable skill that is taught in a ‘hit and miss' fashion is forms of communication. What I mean is showing the students how to speak and write in English to discuss, compare, contrast, persuade, explain, instruct, report past events, talk about experiences and give opinions. These skills are simple to teach but require a wide knowledge of language choices and options.

This is not only about English teaching but many other subjects where the student and teacher have to talk about complicated topics particularly in technical and scientific areas.

One very important area is the ability to find and research information by teachers for their particular subject areas and upgrade their knowledge on a regular basis by studying further or simply reading, watching information via the internet, professional associations, libraries and other methods. Interestingly, I meet a lot of Vietnamese teachers yet many are simply not aware of the possible ways they can get better at their job, broaden their knowledge and learn to enjoy learning for its own sake.

Vietnamese educators have long understood these desired and required improvements but have struggled to raise standards with budgets, salaries and sub-standard facilities being constant background issues. Worldwide, governments are beginning to understand that better educated workforces raise living standards and increase economies.

In the sixties, Singapore faced the same problems but created a national policy of improving education on a large scale with the result, fifty years later, its rated in the top 10 education nations in the world. In VietNam, the real need is to ‘bridge' the gaps in high education and build strong relationships for Universities and business, particularly for technical vocational skills.

It's not easy as Minister of Education and Training Pham Vu Luan tried to explain during the recent question and answer session in the National Assembly on November 24.

A large part of the problem lies with establishing firm standards across all areas of Vietnamese education and enforcing them. This is a legal and government problem which cannot be resolved quickly. It also requires a widely understood educational framework that links education further to real world needs.

The great problem is poor management and recognition of experience and competence in the classroom rather then the rigid career structure now in place for teachers, particularly those poor but highly dedicated teachers working in difficult areas of VietNam.

VietNam is doing its best to modernize. Vocational colleges are trying to install state-of-the-art equipment along with modern teaching methods. Primary Schools are recognizing the need for more visual and mentally appealing material for children and Universities are trying to recruit more lecturers. The nation is on the way to better things.

The future rests on the national commitment to a large scale drive to raise educational standards with a nation wide program. This in turn will produce not only better educational outcomes but also lift incomes and eventually the national opinion of the value of education.

The Art of teaching 3: Experience and Inexperience

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” William Arthur Ward.

Modern teachers are expected to adapt and learn and improve their craft almost by themselves. Easy for someone to say and another to do…

Across VietNam, from the village teachers in the mountains coping with a hard life and difficult teaching conditions to the well-paid Lecturers of the major cities; the pressure is on to increase the quality of their personal teaching as well as lift the nation as a whole into a new world…

The problems are well known – salary, recognition, status, class numbers, poor training and so the list goes on. So what is it really going to take to raise VietNam's educational future?

First, overhaul the Curriculum, MOET (Ministry of Education) has long known about the problem and has already begun this process. It is not yet clear to many Vietnamese professionals if this will be adequately addressed. However the curriculum must cover a broader awareness of the world outside VietNam, particularly modern ways of studying, research and training techniques.

Another sore point of the curriculum is the lack of soft skills education – communication, working together, planning and negotiating and inspiring creativity. There is also a strong need to include ‘emotional education' – making friends, preventing bullying and health education. At the secondary/high school, also include some form of sex education and coping with relationships. This can be very effectively and quickly introduced using Peer group and Case study projects.

Secondly, create a truly national professional association of teachers that monitors, regulates and sets standards for all teachers nationwide. This would be more effective than relying on state encouragement. This is a controversial subject due to the many outside influences and pressures on teachers however such an association would also be able to design and distribute quality mentoring and professional skills material specifically for regions and demographic groups.

Thirdly, legalize private teaching but ban teachers from linking extra classes to exams. Private lessons should be designed to offer remedial tuition and assistance with theory such as math's and physics and particularly for English teaching, time to speak – not copy. Both Singapore and Japan struggled for a long time to deal excessive exams and tests that didn't really enhance student's ability to think about the world around them. In a lot of Asian countries educators have noticed the high degree of ignorance about local regional issues such as climate change, regional politics, pollution, water and industrial resources. Critical issues for the future leaders of the region.

Fourth, a National Educational Qualification Framework that must by Vietnamese law be complied with by all educational institutions regardless of whether they are private, public, government or business oriented. This should also apply to all businesses hiring employees. The framework would set the standard for work related training and education nationwide.

Finally, establish a fast method of issuing work permits and visas for foreign teachers to assist local teachers. VietNam has a sensitive problem with foreign institutions operating in VietNam and the quality of education they are claiming to provide. To provide the same level of education as the home country institutions means those institutions have to provide better teachers and materials than local institutions and that's very difficult to prove.

VietNam should require all foreign educational providers to offer some proportion of assistance to local teachers and institutions as a compulsory means boosting the needs of the local system, not creating two separate educational streams.

As I said at the beginning, the issue is how to boost experience for local teachers – raising the quality of the local system should be the overriding priority. Getting overseas teachers to help the locals would very quickly reveal the quality of the foreigner's skills and the institutions that they represent.

There are thousands of dedicated, skilled, knowledgeable and conscientious teachers in the Vietnamese educational system. We owe it to them and their students to support them forward for the benefit of VietNam – not foreign institutions, not government agencies or bureaucratic administrators who hold on to ‘territory' and status at the expense of the nation.

The Art of teaching 4: The Great Change

Everything starts with thinking before you act…

I often arrange to meet a Vietnamese at, say, for example, 8pm. I'm ready at 8pm and waiting but people often ring me to say they're on their way so I wait… often for half an hour or more…This is time I could be using for other things.

VietNam has big plans, a big population and is trying hard. This story is not about criticizing the Vietnamese.

In the traffic, people don't look before they go on the road. In the shops they don't offer alternatives to make the sale. Things happen on a daily basis because people seem unwilling to consider consequences or cause and effect. I often ask the Vietnamese, ‘Why did you do that?', when I'm mystified as to why problems occur. I often get the reply, ‘Because everyone does it that way'.

The excuses for why are many. The real issue is to get people to change their attitudes. And this always starts with education. Yet in VietNam, a large proportion of education is stuck in a time warp – meaning that it has not changed in a long time.

So this is the beginning of the great change… getting people to realize that there other ways to do and think about things and avoid or prevent obvious problems.

The first way is to design education so everyone is more or less learning the same thing. Traffic education for children is a good example. Some children learn to look left, and then right and then left again before they cross the street or ride away on their bikes. Yet everyday I see dozens of kids' ignoring red lights. So the rules of road safety must be taught to all kids (and adults) regardless of the law or whether the learners are from low social-economic groups.

The next way is to get people thinking about cause and effect and consequences. The teaching is simple… ‘what if”… the exploration of possibilities… In Western education, students are taught about cause and effect to learn that actions have consequences far beyond the immediate results. This is a key component of technical and scientific training – what happens to the road after you built – how to wire a house safely. The concept is to get them plan effectively as part of school activities – this leads to a habit of thinking before doing later in life.

Of particular importance is the need to allow students to contribute to their own learning; doing team projects, presenting knowledge to the class, discussing topics and issues, thinking about solutions. This is vastly different to responding to exams, tests and drills. It requires both teacher and student to become more responsible for the education generated and actively examine the quality of what is learned. Not easy to change in a culture that teaches acceptance and compliance rather than innovation and challenging the thinking of the culture.

A striking feature of Asian Education is the low level of self-learning encouraged by the educational systems. More advanced educational systems foster the love of reading and the idea of ‘life-long' learning; the notion that modern life changes so fast those workers must upgrade their knowledge and skills regularly. It's sometimes being excused as too expensive but both books and knowledge are being digitalized at a extraordinary speed and internet cafes are not expensive in VietNam.

The final and hardest part is to link education to the real world needs of people, companies and the national goals of VietNam. This requires a lot of international help to transform however the Vietnamese must retain control of the direction and pace of such assistance. At the moment, the nation is the first stages of an ambitious plan to upgrade and modernize tertiary and online education. That's a brilliant start but will take some years to produce noticeable results.

The yet un-resolved question of how to do this in vocational and technical education should become part of a national invitation with benefits for international contributors and trainers. In the western systems, this is about ‘training the trainer'. Those trainers then train others, who then train others. However the challenge is to teach the trainers to deal with the needs of different clients and the economic needs of particular areas.

VietNam is developing fast but the spread of better educational methods is not yet able to match this progress. A young workforce eager to learn new ways is a bonus as is the expanding internet access. However the greatest challenge lies in accepting the price change will bring. Managers and systems will have to be more open to innovation and examination. Workers will have to accept that life will not be so relaxed and casual and the nation will have to become more open to outside influences.

This nation's youth and energy are ready for the challenge in my opinion. I have met so many bright and cheerful young adults keen to learn more… the hope rests with them.

This article first appeared in Tuoi Tre News