– Assessments are not education, they are not her priority, and testing is not education, but only a form of verification of what is happening at the moment – the Polish teacher mentions.

What is the priority then? This must be explained through a coherent concept of education, which answers the question about the meaning of education and training in today’s world.

– It is necessary to make a change in Polish schools, but first you need to explain to everyone why education is the most important in the world, because everything else has its beginning – Lęcki asserts.

Prepare for changes

The school must change, according to experts from the professor’s team. Hausner is, first and foremost, to eradicate the “widening development gap” that separates us from highly developed societies. Only then may the situation of the Polish economy change on a global scale in the future. This “mission is central to contemplating changes in the education system.” This change must occur, among other things, within a broader context – European and global – that goes beyond the national approach, with the support of the Minister Responsible for Education and Education, Przemislav Kazarnik.

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The public debate in this regard may not have been vital at all. There is a growing awareness that we have reached a dead end, so ideas of change, small and revolutionary, multiply. Distance learning has exposed various shortcomings in our education, but it has also imposed some (but) mental technological advances. It is true that due to the epidemic and such-and-such and not another team governing national education and science, we are stopping work for the time being, but the potential energy for change is slowly building up – confirms Yaroslav Petlak, director of the STO School Complex in Bemowo in Warsaw and author of the blog “About School”.

In the aforementioned report, experts claim that curricula should include topics related to important social and cultural issues, such as climate change or social exclusion. The school must also show the student that changes are a natural path of life. Career reorientation, the emergence of new, often unplanned careers and instability will only be opportunities for people who are able to quickly adapt and open to lifelong learning.

– The ability to adapt is not negative, it includes the ability to independently search for knowledge, develop special competencies, create motivation, solve problems, ask the right questions and accept the risks that it brings – we read in the report.

Teach teachers first

However, there will be changes in schools in universities. Preparation for work in the school consists primarily of expanding knowledge of a specific discipline or field. There is a lack of innovation and practice.

At present, the teaching practice is treated as a formality to be completed, as a complement to the main study program, and not as a basis for it. So if we notice problems with education, it starts with the university; About how higher education thinks about knowledge and science, how it is taught, and how the habits of future teachers are shaped, experts note.

This approach leads to a lack of multidisciplinary. Academics themselves use old teaching methods because they do not know others. “They inherit these habits.”

Universities, with the exception of experimental sciences, rarely organize workshops on methodology for teaching a particular subject. Nor is there a program to develop teaching competencies, and to train in new methods and techniques, known in this environment only from theoretical work. Universities are still focusing on what students need to know, not how to get them to understand it, the report’s authors conclude. And they propose to select new leaders who will redefine higher education, for example on the basis of new technologies. Because the overarching goal of universities should be to “educate specialists for change in all areas of life”.

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