Teachers want more time with their students, and less time spent on paperwork and meetings.
The National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) said teachers were consumed by administrative activities and were therefore unable to spend as much time as they would like in the classroom.
NUTP secretary-general Lok Yim Pheng said ever since the implementation of digital school-based assessments, teachers were spending crucial school hours on entering student data into computers.
“Along with heavier workload, our teachers need a lot of time to familarise themselves with the system and the computer programmes they use for these purposes,” she said. Lok also said regular school meetings between teachers and principals were at times unproductive, and called for more “professional engagement”.
“Sometimes these meetings extend for hours, which is unnecessary.
“These meetings should stick solely to the agenda, which unfortunately is not the case in many of our schools, as we have heard from teachers themselves,” she said.
Besides shortening meeting times, Lok called for at least one teaching assistant in each government school to help with administrative tasks and paperwork.
“The Education Ministry has approved the plan for including teaching assistants since last year. But until now, it hasn’t been implemented,” she said.
Lok said with a teaching assistant in place, teachers would be able to devote more attention to the classroom and the needs of their students.
She was speaking in response to the results of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Teaching and Learning International Survey 2013, which found Malaysian teachers spent 17 hours each week teaching students, compared to the survey’s average of 19 hours.
The survey involved over 100,000 teachers from 34 countries including Singapore, Finland, Iceland, Italy and Spain, and collected data on the learning environment and working conditions of teachers in schools across the world.
– themalaymailonline
