Teachers as agents of change?

Khalid Barkaoui
The work of teachers today is extremely demanding because of the multiplicity of their tasks which have become increasingly complex and difficult. Old tasks and other new ones that require consistent initial training and regular follow-up of continuing education sessions to be up to date and ready to accompany this cohort of students who are under the responsibility of the teaching staff. However, dissonant voices that rise to the plate to castigate the teachers by advancing that our actors are fierce opponents of change.
It must be emphasized that our business is not set in stone. We constantly need to introduce changes and adopt a new posture in order to help our learners learn, evolve and acquire knowledge, skills and life skills.
We live in a world that has experienced significant upheavals in the didactics of disciplines, the presence of neurosciences, positive pedagogy, project pedagogy, the didactization of storytelling, song, theatre, Comics, audiovisual…to learn a foreign language. We live in a world punctuated by the spread of digital, the emergence of GPT chat, soft skills, 21st century skills, namely communication, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and citizenship.
We are experiencing frantic and rapid transformations at the level of our country after the adoption of the national education and training charter until the promulgation of the 2022/2026 roadmap. These changes require a new mentality capable of understanding them and taking ownership of them.
The problem does not lie in the promulgation of the changes, it lies in the approach adopted by our decision-makers who have difficulty in communicating and conveying the nature of the changes and their implementation.
The teachers are on their own and completely isolated. No one deigns to associate them and involve them in this process of decreed change.
It is time to adopt a new communication approach to explain the ins and outs of the change before its implementation. In other words, a communication machine must be put in place by our managers to clearly tell teachers the philosophy underlying the advocated changes, the objectives that the ministry intends to achieve, the approach to be followed to operationalize the expected change. …and therefore establish a bridge of constructive dialogue with qualified, experienced, efficient and qualified teachers in order to find common ground and cohesion capable of succeeding in this challenge of change.
Lately, we have seen a flurry of change without quality communication. First, the establishment of TARL, then the rituals or ritualized actions, enriching reading, the national reading competition, the pilot school, the digitization of the school, without losing sight of education distance education, hybrid education, educational clubs, the commemoration of national and international days… All of this system needs communication that will inevitably lead to understanding and full and complete support. This well-considered commitment is the prelude to success and the adoption of the long-awaited change.
Our human capital is an agent of change who does not appreciate routine and the comfort zone to increase the academic level, to motivate learners, put them on track for success and prepare them to face the challenges of tomorrow.
So let’s provide quality training for practice-oriented teachers. So let’s offer teachers thematic workshops to answer their questions. Let’s equip our spaces. Let us make these spaces more attractive and create the optimal conditions to help the teacher go about his demanding task and the change will take root more and more.