Happy Teachers — Chilean Context
True Story/Scenario
Maria Paz is a 1st-grade teacher in a public school of Chile. She has 40 students, both male and female, and 25 of them require special attention. Every day she commutes 1.5 hours to the school, which is very exhausting for her. She starts her day at 5:50 am and comes back from work around 6:30pm, where she keeps working on her grading and class preparation for the next day. Planning her classes is one of the most time-consuming tasks for her since she doesn’t know where to find quality learning material aligned to the school’s curriculum. Some of the famous apps that share and sell learning material, such as “Teachers Pay Teachers”, only have material in English, which doesn’t work for her. The same thing happens with game platforms such as BrainPop that have little or no material in Spanish. Thus, she prefers to search on the Web, which is frustrating because it takes very long. As a result, it’s only Monday and she is already exhausted.
The Need
I’m convinced that in order to decrease the socioeconomic gap in which we unfairly live, it is necessary to improve our education. To achieve this, teachers play a key role as they directly influence the way students learn. Therefore, to improve the quality of our education it is imperative to engage, train, and retain good teachers in our educational system. However, how are we supposed to retain teachers like María Paz with our current system?
According to the TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey) 2013 report, from all the OECD countries, Chile presents one of the lowest index of out-of-the-class hours, with 91% of the time spent in classes. In other words, from a 36 working hours contract (weekly average according to Voces Docentes), teachers only have 3.2 hours for out-of-the-class activities such as grading, lesson planning, student counseling, parent meetings, etc. As a result, Chilean teachers have to dedicate part of their free-time to school activities, which not only discourages them from dedicating enough time to class preparation but also increases mental overload as well as their level of stress. This overload of work explains why currently Chile faces an overwhelmingly high percentage of teachers deserting early from their career, with 20% of new teachers dropping out after their first year, and nearly 40% deserting before 5 years of work in a public school (Valenzuela y Sevilla, 2013). Thus, we could say that teachers’ satisfaction is directly related to the shocking dropout rate.
Moreover, this lack of out-of the-class hours has led teachers to self-regulate school resources, giving less priority to those tasks that require higher effort, like preparing the class, and prioritizing more administrative tasks that not necessarily promote effective teaching practices.
That’s why I want to focus my work in UNLEASH, to find novel solutions that will help teachers like María Paz to decrease their work overload by designing tools and resources to facilitate some of their school tasks. I believe that happy teachers, with access to quality learning material and effective teaching resources, are the answer to improve our education. In order to solve complex social issues like our education, I am convinced that the human-centered design approach to problem solving is the right approach, and that’s the main reason I find the UNLEASH opportunity so compelling. I look forward to participating in this experience and combine expertise with people from different backgrounds in order to design solutions that will engage teachers and boost a better and more equitable education.
