There is unanimity when it comes to rating the results obtained by the students who last year, when they were between 15 and 16 years old, took the PISA tests in Catalonia: they are bad. Not in vain, these students have lost in seven years the equivalent of almost two courses in reading and 18 months in mathematics and science. Spain, as a whole, has fared somewhat better. Students have lost the equivalent of one course in reading and a half in math compared to ten years ago. The question is knowing what has led to these results. These days we have heard an endless string of arguments. But perhaps the most authoritative voice to make a judgment is that of the teachers, although many have some reservations about expressing it in public (not those who are the protagonists of these lines). In the end, they are the ones who live with their students in the classroom every day and know better than anyone how their students perform. A majority understands that the massive entry of technology into the classroom has been harmful. And not only that. They remember that the students are not to blame for anything, in any case they are the victims.
David Palacios (49 years old) is a social sciences teacher at the Pau Vila Institute in Sabadell (Barcelona). He has been a teacher for more than 20 years and the PISA results have not taken him by surprise. He is very critical of the emergence of screens in the classroom. “When students open the computer you don't know what they are looking at. ‘Are they listening to me?’ you ask yourself. They are much more distracted than before.”
He argues that there is “a misunderstood innovation” regarding technology and the use of screens. “The physical book is prescribed, it is no longer fashionable. There is an overexposure of computers and mobile phones within the class.” In this sense, he remembers that "there has always been a computer room in the centers, so the hours of this subject could have been increased if it was considered necessary."
He states that they have made him change his entire methodology so that it is digital because all the students were going to have a computer. However, that universality has not arrived. "The delivery of computers was carried out for only two years and that has caused there to be several courses, such as in the first year of ESO, in which there are no laptops, when our methodology is digital."
The screens are not the only problem it detects. He denounces that students have “little culture of frustration.” Because? Among other things, because before, he maintains, "it was evaluated numerically and everyone was clear about their grade." Not now. This prevents, he asserts, students from facing situations that can be frustrating, a scenario that also contributes their judgment, the absence of sacrifice, and the fact is that “everything has to be made very easy for them.” The result: unmotivated students.
He proposes a solution for this mess: lower the ratios. “They talk about immigration and educational needs when the best tool we could have is to lower the ratio. I can't reach everyone if I have 30 students. With 20 it would be something else.”
Despite this, he assures that he is “very comfortable” in the classroom with his students. Outside of it, less, "with all the bureaucracy that you have to face for anything: what if now more computers, projects, changes in the way of evaluation, new education laws every now and then... Your energy is gone in other things".
Like Palacios, Àlex Torío (49) also detects lack of motivation among his students. He even goes further. This mathematics and physics teacher (with more than 20 years of teaching experience) assures that the system “is causing a delay in the student's maturation.” “What we are doing is extending adolescence,” he argues.
“There is no culture of effort,” he laments. So much so that students, “instead of wanting to do exercises to make mistakes and learn from mistakes, want to confirm what they already know how to do.” For him, “there is no quest for learning.”
He shares the idea that the entry of screens into the classroom has had “a very important negative impact”, creating passive students. He explains that digitalization has led each teacher to create their own material with Google tools that they show on the digital whiteboard while explaining it in class. A process that encourages passivity. “The students know that all this material will be available to them. Nobody takes notes anymore. They do not know how to discern what is important from what is not. They end up thinking that everything is very easy. Especially when the input that the teacher receives from above is that everyone passes and no one repeats.”
He teaches 4th year ESO and high school classes. He explains that sometimes, when he walks through the hallways of the school where he works, he sees on the blackboard of the 2nd graders that they are doing the same as him, "with a little less difficulty." And that worries him. “Before GBS reached up to 14 years of age. Now, the same content that was done at that stage is being done up to 16. That is, two more years to do the same thing,” he laments.
He asserts that Catalonia “is at the forefront of this goodism in evaluation, in the protection of students, which in the long run will be very negative in their future. And they will face a competitive world.”
Mr. Wonderful Montse Jiménez (51), a teacher who teaches 1st to 4th ESO classes at a high school in Palafrugell (Vedruna–Prats de la Career). She understands that, certainly, we should not fall into that scenario “where everything is easy and fun,” but we should rethink the system because she observes in the students “a lot of disinterest in learning.” She affirms that the educational world has not been able to connect with her interests. “I'm not saying that everything we have to do is super cool, because a good master class can capture the interest of an entire classroom, in the same way as a good project,” she emphasizes.
He argues that access to information has been democratized and that this carries a risk, such as “thinking that school is useless because at the touch of a key I can know everything.” That's where he sees one of the problems: "If they see, inside the classroom, that they have everything just one click away, that's when they disengage." That is why he believes that it is the teachers who have to give value to what happens in the class to awaken the interest of the students.
There are more things that worry you. Among these, the complexity of the environment. Remember that there is 28% child poverty in Spain, according to Unicef data. Also, the mental health problems that certain students have. “We know that there are some who carry these backpacks and we have not always been prepared to address all these problems.” In this sense, he highlights the need to train teachers to know how to approach these realities, and he understands that only “from the bond with the student is there learning.”
For Jaume Tamareu (57), director of the Laia School in Barcelona and 5th and 6th grade teacher, there have always been students with a lot of interest in learning, with less... but what has happened in an exceptional way In recent years it has been questioned by teachers. “That's what makes many feel insecure.” He claims that social media has greatly accentuated this. “Nowadays it's like everyone knows everything.”
He does not agree with the idea of having to replicate educational systems from other countries, such as Finland. In this sense, he is critical of the Department of Education. “Sometimes he gives us guidelines that can be confusing. In some way it tells you that you have to change the way you teach, the way you work… and that's when you wonder where what we did until now is,” he argues. “And if you accompany that - he continues - with the opinion that the families have formed (because they have heard it, they have seen it in the media...), in the end you question who really leads the class, who organizes the school: do we or the rest of society.”
Some family members – he says – even tell him “that he no longer likes learning the multiplication tables by heart. What does that mean? Memory must be worked on. "It's like all this has no value."
He argues that this context conditions teachers. So much so that “some wonder, before making any decision, what the families will say about it. How can it be? Where is the autonomy you need to lead a class?” He assures that “it has not changed so much the type of student in the classroom, but rather how the teacher acts so as not to feel argued.”
Laura Prat, 1st and 2nd year Catalan teacher of ESO at the Institut Castellet (Sant Vicenç de Castellet, Barcelona), understands that we must move towards an education that needs to be “more personalized” and leave behind the system of yesteryear, “more memoristic”. “A teacher alone in a classroom teaching a subject is a structure that does not work.” She explains that her class includes “different educational services to serve the students,” which are very diverse and reflect “what exists outside the classroom.”
He argues that teachers encounter groups of 30 students in classrooms with different complexities: learning disorders, behavioral disorders, students with special educational needs, students who come from other countries... and maintains that "the main challenge is not to analyze this scenario , but how to manage it.” That is, “how the school is capable of responding to the needs that young people have right now” and that are different from those she had (she is 33 years old) or from those her parents had.
He says that one of the things that bothers him most about all the reactions that have arisen from the PISA report is that the results are not used to improve the system but to label students. “They are never to blame for a given outcome.”
Regarding the use of screens and the concentration of students, he points out that “the most important thing is that the task responds to knowledge that makes sense and interest to them.” “If these premises are met, it does not matter whether it is a laptop or a sheet of paper that is in front of them, because they will carry out the task with concentration,” he concludes.
