cooperative learning

Task Three

 

 

Teachers and leaders quotations on Tatweer policy

 

Important Notes :

• All of the data below is teachers’ and leaders’ quotations.

 

• To avoid plagiarism, paraphrase each quotation you want to use to avoid plagiarism (do not take the quotations below as it written). (very, very important). It is plagiarism if you take it literally.

• The date is divided into three categories (The first one for sense making of Tatweer policy, two; for practices, and three; for what teachers and leaders think about what they do. Each one present one of my three research questions

………………..

 

Date of the first research question (Sense making of Tatweer policy)

This part is about what teachers and leaders think about Tatweer policy in advance (their thoughts pre-Tatweer policy). Please read my interview guide to guide you through the questions I used to gather all of the data below.

Teachers and leaders Data:

• I have heard that the Tatweer Policy as a high cost, and I have also heard about its importance in the growth of education. But, there was a lack of information that was easy to understand regarding the programme, and I was unaware of it until it was implemented at our school.

 

• I was excited when I heard about Tatweer School. My friends and I talked about it. We want our school to be a model for other schools. We thought this school would offer us our requirements and all of our needs, but what we found later is clearly different. No one listens to us. No one cares about us. We don’t have a lot of time to meet all of their needs. .

 

• Our school was chosen by the office because it is the best of the schools between all of the other schools in the area.
• R1: I heard from the Twitter accounts of the education office that this policy will cost the government a lot of money and change the whole education system. I don’t know where this programme comes from, though. I don’t know if this will make our school a private one or a model one. At that time, I wished for our school to be chosen because I know my colleagues are hardworking and they want to help their students.

 

• When my principal told me that our school would be joining the Tatweer system, I was thrilled because he said that we would get new devices, money, and training. I challenge my former colleagues to look back at our school in two years and see how it will change. So I was very enthusiastic about it.

 

• Schools are chosen for the Tatweer programme based on the quality of their buildings, how successful they are, reputation, and other factors. Every year, 30 more schools sign up for the Tatweer programme

 

• I have no idea how they chose Tatweer school, but I think the selection of Tatweer school is based on some certain criteria, such as the number of classrooms, laboratories, and the school environment. All of these are criteria on the basis of which they are evaluated.

 

 

• Teachers have no voice or vote in transferring the school to Tatweer. The decision of Tatweer selection is between the school head and the Ministry of Education.

 

• I have seen that some supervisors from the ministry of education visited our school and discussed the Tatweer school’s transformation with the school head. They have observed the school facilities and have seen if they fit with the Tatweer policy

 

 

• Before Tatweer was enacted in our school, I could call this school an autonomous school, a learning school, school-based decision-making, a development school that can build its capacities from inside, work gradually in development until it becomes a self-evaluating school… that can make its own decisions and conduct the program without taking help from the office of education.

 

• I want to tell you the truth.I have already made my judgement on Tatweer, as it will fail when I hear one statement from one of the educational authorities stating that ” Tatweer will be reached to every school in the kingdom….. Generalizability of Tatweer all over KSA is almost impossible because the programme is based on technology, computers, and the Internet, and it is almost impossible for many areas and schools to have access to the Internet services, especially those schools located in the mountainous areas.

 

• At first, I didn’t know anything about the Ttawwer. I thought this programme would make things harder for teachers, but when the office of education explained it to me, I realised that this is already part of my job and what we used to do…

 

• I know nothing about Tatweer policy, and even though I have heard of it, it means nothing to me because there has been no coverage from the media or the educational office.

 

• Tatweer Policy was implemented in this school because the school had good facilities already, such as libraries and science laboratories. in addition, the faculty at the school was well qualified.

 

• When our school was chosen to be one of the Tatweer schools and members of the Tatweer team came to visit our school, that is when we first learned about Tatweer.

 

• The team from the Tatweer official described the policy as an incredible programme, and they said that it would make our school more like the contemporary schools found in developed countries.

 

• We didn’t know enough about the Tatweer; we didn’t have a clear picture of what it would look like.

 

• ‘some teachers were afraid of the Tatweer because they thought they were not equipped with the required skills and knowledge’

 

• The first time I heard that we have to take a training course in the summer to work in Tatweer, I decided I would leave the school because other teachers who will not work under Tatweer will take their summer vacation.

 

 

 

 

• I was just told that all students in this school would be given a laptop’.

 

• ‘I have not met Tatweer people but there might be some people who are in the school who are part of the project’.

 

• I can say that we have not seen any implementation of the Tatweer objectives. There is no single hint of something associated with the Tatweer in our school’.

 

• the media was talking about Ttaweer but no one came to talk to us about it’.

 

• ‘Our school was chosen to be one of the schools to implement Tatweer. All of a sudden, they introduced Tatweer and they told us if you do not want Tatweer, we could transfer you to another school. Some teachers left the school’.

 

• some teachers were afraid of Tatweer policy because they felt that they were not equipped to work within the Tatweer environment’

 

• in the beginning of Tatweer implementation there were many training courses. This made us realise that a big burden has been put on our shoulders’.

 

• The introduction of the Policy was limited to elite groups and not to the community. Even in our own departments… and that is because some officials in some departments place a great value on secrets, discretion, fear, and simply the love of monopoly.

 

• The introduction of the programme, with the monopoly that others enjoy, always seems vague. I personally do not know when the programme was introduced, if it was before its enactment, during, or after. I actually knew by chance from people talking here and there

 

• Tatweer school were selected according to the following criteria (King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Public Education Development Project, 2011):

 

• The availability of appropriate school buildings and educational facilities • The school’s geographical location had to be close to the Department of Education of the province
• The school’s leadership should have the ability and enthusiasm to change and develop
• The school’s leadership should possess appropriate leadership skills • The stability of the school body (e.g. low turnover of teachers).

 

• When these requirements were met, schools were selected by the MoE to enact the policy. According to the latter document, the nomination mechanism was as follows:

 

• Application Phase: the school submitted an application form to the Tatweer offical to join the policy
  • Studying the Reports: the DoE studied the applications submitted and determined the schools or initial selection
  • Conducting Interviews: with school directors to evaluate their leadership skills
  • Visits: a team from the Tatweer official visited the nominated schools to note evidence supporting their appropriateness for the Policy
  • Acceptance: the nominated schools were accepted for the Policy
  • Accreditation: the Tatweer policy accredited the chosen schools to become part of the Policy
  • Signing the Formal Contract: the Director of the Tatweer official prepared a contract that was signed by the school’s director.

 

 

• When they gave us the policy, they “threw” the books at us without any help or support (Director, TS12).

 

• Tatweer starts to infinity; I don’t know the timeline because there is no plan or strategy from the Ministry (Director, TS5)

 

• When we started, it made our lives very difficult. We didn’t know what it was for. Was it to promote and develop students, teachers, or the school?

 

• They chose us … they didn’t consult us before… because we fit the features they want, such as our job performance, the character of our leader, the school’s stability, and also all staff here work together as a group (Deputy, TS2).

 

• The ministry usually nominates the school, but we are very interested in development, we checked the standards they put, and since we met them, we asked them to be one of the Tatweer schools (Deputy, TS4).

 

• We normally do not ask the Ministry of education to be part of any programme, either they forced us to do it, or we enacted our own programmes, of course after their approval (Director, TS10)

 

• A parent once asked me what is Tatweer and I didn’t have an answer

 

 

• To be honest the whole idea was not carefully studied. There is no plan, no clear process, and no appraisal

 

………………………….

Date of the Second research question ( The actual experiences and practises of teachers and leaders on Tatweer policy)

 

This part presents all the data about what teachers and leaders do as a result of the Tatweer policy being introduced. Please read my interview guide to guide you through the questions I used to gather all of the data below.

 

• Before Tatweer brought it to our school, the supervisors of the education department looked at how well we taught. After Tatweer brought it to our school, the Tatweer supervisors asked us to do some programmes to do it in the school. They monitor our progress and they also give us grades. They also asked us to post about the things we did at school on Twitter and tag the official education department.

 

Teachers and leaders Data:

• However, we were overloaded with a lot of demands concerning Tatweer Policy; they asked us to develop more programmes to evaluate our work performance, not just the class schedule as implemented in ordinary schools. Tatweer officials were looking for evidence and verified activities for each programme we ran at the school. They [Tatweer officials] make regular visits to our schools twice or three times per semester.

 

• I have been tasked with additional work, such as developing programs and activities, and following up workmates.

 

• Of course, the two systems differ; in regular schools, the extra tasks are related to occupational development and are not mandatory; however, in the Tatweer program, these activities are mandatory.

 

• The Tatweer official selects the best teacher (first teacher) in the school, lets him attend some training courses, and then he will transfer this experience to the rest of the teachers in the school.

 

• Tatweer Policy is developing both leaders and teams. It began with developing school principals and deputies, and they will train the rest of the school employees, including teachers and management staff. Teachers are trained to put together 3-year strategic plans and operational annual plans. The manager or the deputy supervisor evaluates and supervises the plans and how they are implemented.

 

• Tatweer aims to organise and set up schools during the time when operational or strategic plans are being put into action. This is because the school follows a clear plan, where votes are analysed, defining obstacles, pros and cons, and stating available opportunities. Many tools are provided to gather information about the problems facing plans implementation for administrative staff, teachers, students, curriculums, buildings, facilities, in addition to the Excellence and Quality Committee.

 

• For example, once information from all of the school’s categories has been gathered, it will be analysed to figure out what problems need to be fixed first and in what order. In one year, for example, we found ten problems. We ranked them in order of importance and decided to start solving three of them with the help of the Quality and Excellence team and a specific plan

 

• When making and putting the plan into action, we pay attention to priorities or problems. For each problem, a special plan is made to deal with it. This plan will go on for three years, which is the length of the strategic plan. At the end of that time, the impact of the programme and the success of the plan will be looked at.

 

 

• Before Tatweer, I didn’t know anything about cooperative learning, professional learning communities, or learning strategies. Although we used those strategies before Tatweer came, we didn’t know what they were good for or how and when to use them. Tatweer Help us figure out how to use those strategies.

 

• For example, when the first term starts, all math teachers have a meeting. and every teacher makes a plan for a subject unit. Then, all of them teach their students this unit based on their plan. They meet again to decide on the uniformity of final exam questions. After the exam results are released, teachers look at which questions students didn’t solve; they discuss why they didn’t solve them, and they give each other feedback. This is an example of how teachers work together in Tatweer school.

 

• What makes us different to ordinary schools is that we collect and analyse students’ data and then use it for developing plans. We do this because we want to reduce randomness and develop and execute plans. We’ll be able to judge how well these plans worked or didn’t work in the future

 

• As a principal before Tatweer, I only had a few responsibilities and did what I was told. But when Tatweer came to our school, and because the Ministry of Education requires our school to participate in the international exams, we had a lot of tasks to do. We had to work with other teams, make annual plans, meet regularly, and analyse student data.

 

 

• In Tatweer school, we have to do a SWOT analysis to figure out where we are weak and where we are strong. We use it for every initiative we make. This is something that was different about my job when I was a teacher in an ordinary school.

 

• In Tatweer school, we have to send reports, results, statistics, etc to Tatweer officials, and this was not the case in the ordinary school. This is a requirement from the Tatweer official. 

 

• We have new concept In Tatweer Policy which is called ” First Teacher.” He or she helps teachers get better at their jobs. He or she makes sure teachers get better at their jobs by holding meetings, talking about and organising classroom visits between teachers, giving feedback to help teachers improve their teaching strategies and classroom management, and evaluating practises.

 

• The Tatweer programme aims at creating professional learning communities in which teachers work with a team according to their specialisations and academic backgrounds. These groups or communities aim at enhancing and promoting the students’ academic attainment. This programme was implemented after conducting the appropriate questionnaires to identify the needs and requirements of students and teachers. We have indicators from one to five. Any result equal or under 3 means we have to create a programme to solve the problem we have. For example, teacher professional development is a programme we created after the findings indicated that the level of teachers was nearly 2 out of 5. This indicated that they were required to attend Tatweer occupational training courses.

 

• The Tatweer programme includes five work areas; which are the areas of the school environment, school-family-community partnerships, school management and leadership, and learning outcomes. This programme is established on a plan that is developed at the beginning of the year according to these work areas; then, all team members are required to comply with the rules and guidelines of the programme. This programme can be applicable for a period which ranges from one to five years according to the prospected educational outcomes.

 

• Before Tatweer, teachers would only teach their lessons and then leave the class. But after Tatweer, a teacher’s job is to put students in groups based on their academic attainments and skills needs. This helps teachers meet these students’ educational needs…. I like Tatweer because it organises all school work well and encourages teachers, supervisors, officials, students, and parents to work together.

 

• I have something to say, and you can put it in your own words. To accept the Tatweer policy, you have to slough off of the regular school system. It’s like you just came into the new world.

 

• Some teachers in Tatweer also work as trainers on top of what they do as teachers. They take training courses offered by Tatweer officials, which they then teach to our teachers. … something we never did before.

 

• According to all participants, there are two important concepts that play a vital role in the organisation and decision-making in the Tatweer schools system: the Excellence Team and the senior teacher.

 

• Firstly, the Excellence Team is the core of the school and its main role is to lead change and maintain sustainable development. This team has to do the self-evaluation of school performance and the subsequent planning. Excellence Team efficiency can also be measured through the student’s performance, teacher’s performance, and evaluation of the project to see if the goals and objectives have been met.

 

• Secondly, the senior teacher, who is in charge of professional learning of the teachers, has to ensure that they are in a position to receive professional development and enhance students’ achievement. The senior teacher is usually responsible for teachers who teach the same discipline. The number of the senior teachers in each school varies depending on how many teachers they have in the school. The head teacher is free to formulate senior teacher positions based on the school’s needs. For instance, the head teacher of school C chose the teacher of the History to be a senior teacher for social sciences, while other Tatweer schools in this study did not have a senior teacher in this discipline. Therefore, it is up to the head teacher and the school’s individual requirements.

 

• In terms of curricula teachers cannot exchange the curriculum with another curriculum but they have the ability to add and enrich it

 

• the school can’t change the curricula… we did not reach this level until now, that was mentioned in the Tatweer model policies. It depends mainly on developing the teacher first to design the curricula, then there would be freedom to devise the curriculum… the teacher now is able to criticize the curriculum in an objective way and then send it to the stakeholders

 

• teaching methods and strategies have changed. In the past, the teachers used to deliver and explain the lesson to the students and the students were only receivers of the information. Now, everything has changed, we are now talking about active learning’

 

• ‘you can see clearly the difference at our school. I noticed that the way teachers think has completely changed. But there are a few teachers who still hold on to the traditional way of thinking’.

 

• some teachers are delivering their lessons electronically by downloading materials on the computers and then using PowerPoints and Smart boards’

 

• ‘all classrooms are provided with computers and this is huge change to our school.

 

• the school website includes facilities for accessing recorded lessons which enables students to repeat lessons whenever they want’

 

• the plan was for the schools to self-evaluate our work’

 

• ‘the good thing is the Tatweer minimises the centralisation in the school. In the past, the school administration was doing the planning alone. Teachers were not participants in the designing of the school plan. Now we are doing our school plan as teamwork through the Excellence Team

 

• Excellence teams, provide the school with guidance for school development’

 

• the ability to self-evaluate all aspects of their schools meant they could identify their schools’ weakness and strength.

 

• we started to work as a team in order to make our plans, and to discuss our weaknesses and there is less centralisation in school administration’.

 

• All classrooms have computers and smart boards. I can save any work on the smart board and it is easy to get back at any time. The students can also write and draw on the smart board’

 

• ‘there is no creative teaching, the teacher is still the main source of information’

 

• there is no difference among teachers who work under Tatweer and teachers who do not’.

 

• we now get a lot of questions from students; this is the proper teaching where students have their own point of views discussed’

 

• Tatweer has allowed participation of different parties with the teacher, not like before when the teacher used to be responsible about the curriculum and everything in the classes.

 

• the new curriculum allowed students to share and participate more actively in the learning process which was one of the Tatweer objectives’

 

• ‘in Tatweer, the curriculum from my experience is something that has been prepared and your job as a teacher is to deliver it to the students. You cannot delete or add anything to the curriculum’

 

• In the past, learning was predominantly aligned to the content in the textbooks, but for now, I love the teaching approach where the students start using their own knowledge and stop relying on the book only.”

 

• I think students want to have their personalities developed and have their voice, they don’t want to memorise this or that’

……………………………….

 

Date of the third research questions: Challenges and Opportunities of Tatweer policy (What teachers and leaders think about what they do?

This part present all data about challenges and opportunities when Tatweer policy is enacted; what teachers and leaders think about what they do? (post-Tatweer policy enacted). for example, what was the difficulty? easy? Why? Why not? What work well? why? Why not? What does nor work well? why? Why not? Please read my interview guide to guide you through the questions I used to gather all of the data below.

 

Teachers and leaders Data :

• Every time the Tatweer official supervisors come to our school, they create a mess for our work and they do not trust us. I have no idea why they think they know more about my students than I do. Every day, I work hard to make sure my students are proud of me when they graduate I love teaching, and I don’t care what Tatweer supervisors think about me.

 

• They do this because supervision at Tatweer Policy is compulsory and requires authentication, which represents an indicator of the programme implementation reliability.

 

• The biggest problem is that some team members don’t work as hard as others, which means that not all programmes can be finished or only some of them can, but if the team members work together, they are more likely to be successful. It won’t be hard, and sometimes we’ll go to school at night to get our work done.

 

• There are many reasons why Tatweer school team members don’t do much, but the most important one is that the teacher has a lot of classes, which puts him under a lot of pressure. A teacher, for example, has to teach 24 classes. This makes them less likely to want to work and take initiative, which is especially bad for teachers who don’t do well when they’re under pressure. Also, you know that teachers are all different in terms of their personalities and how well they can adapt to new things.

 

• When the Tatweer policy is put into place at our school, it comes with procedural guidelines on how to do things. In this document[ Tatweer guidelines], it says that teachers who work as extras on the Quality and Excellence team can’t teach more than sixteen classes a week. The same applies for “First Teacher.” He shouldn’t teach more than eight classes a week because he has other responsibilities, like training teachers and supervising. The educational department later requested teachers to teach more classes and undertake extra work, which has created conflict between teachers and the educational department….This policy has been written by them, but they do not follow it….You want your interest, and we want ours.

 

• Budgets were one of the things that made it hard to put Tatweer into action. Once, after making a plan and starting to put it into action, we lost funding suddenly, which stopped the plan. The team was disappointed because they had been excited about the plan.

 

• To make sure that the Tatweer programme or any other programme is successful, it is important to have the right environment, infrastructure, management, and cooperation between all the people involved. But when Tatweer officials only care about their own interests and teachers also want their own interests… They[Tatweer officials] don’t care about the Tatweer at all. They only care about themselves.

 

 

• The Tatweer programme is being victimised by both Tatweer Official and the Ministry of Education parties. Since I’ve been head of the school, they’ve never agreed on anything. I’ll give you an example: Tatweer officials, as you may know, are in charge of sending the school policy guidelines. These guidelines cover things like training and leadership, among other things. On the other hand, it is the job of the Ministry of Education to pay for the school and hire the teachers. right? … In the Tatweer guidelines, it says that teachers shouldn’t be allowed to teach more than 16 hours a week because they also have to do management work. But this hasn’t happened because the supervisors from the Ministry of Education come to my school and ask me to make a teacher work 24 hours a week because i told them I needed more staff to carry on Tatweer programmes effectively…. if I want to hire a new teacher, I can’t because the ministry of education is in charge of that….. So, as a principal, I have to listen to the Ministry of Education and not Tatweer Official, because, honesty, the educational department has more power than Tatweer Official.

 

• There is no agreement between all parties involved. For example, the principal has his own plan for school counselling, and this is different from the Tatweer officials’ plan and the students supervisor plan. So, as I told you, no coordination at all.

 

 

• Every problem we had with our school system came from the Ministry of Education. Every time a new minister is put in charge of the education department, he brings new plans for changing education and throws out the old ones…. We [teachers] are the ones who have to deal with this madness.

 

• Before the Tatweer system, I gave my students their own class and I moved away. There is a lot of knowledge and skills that teachers should be familiar with, but I am afraid we do not know about it. But when Tatweer is enacted, things change. We learn about things like assessment, self-reflection, how to set goals, evaluate them, and find out what they mean. We’ve heard about it before, but we don’t know how to use it.

 

• Working under Tatweer policy for me is impossible because teachers who work in ordinary schools take the same salaries we take here in Tatweer school. This is not fair, and you know you can’t say anything else……

 

 

 

• Tatwwer is rubbish….The Tatweer official informed us that “First Teacher” has to train teachers in our schools for some courses to run the Tatweer programme efficiently, and guess what happened? We pay effort and time to train them, and unfortunately, we have heard that some of these teachers transfer to another city because, as you know, employee transfer and hiring are the responsibility of the education ministry, not the head of the school…. If this is not rubbish, then what is it? 

 

• I was so embarrassed to work as the “first teacher”….. Because my colleagues think that I am reporting their performance to the school head… Later, no one from the staff wanted to take this position.

 

• The only good thing about being a first teacher is that your weekly class time is cut from 24 to 16 hours. but a lot of staff will dislike you.

 

 

• …. The teacher here needs years and years to learn everything that comes with policy, but the ministry of education wants them to learn it all in one day.

 

• The ministry of education used us as an experiment… I can give you one example… There is a Jourdan company in which the of education department does communicate with them to make a programme called “Sima”. This programme was to transfer normal curriculum to virtual classrooms and it failed later , so they stopped funding it…

 

• Every year we have to expect something is new from the office of education. They suddenly move from “Muggrata system” to “Sima system” and later to Tatweer…. And the end of year they blame us for not working so hard.

 

 

• Every week we get a visitor from the education office to evaluate our performance, and they ask the same questions… Once a day, I went to an educational office meeting where I gave them all my notice and feedback about Smart Bored…. I was expecting that they would not say yes are right.. Your comment is right. Because the ones who are responsible for this will not care and will do what they think is right, not ours….

 

• I am the one who is in the school…. I am the one who is suffering….. I am who can share feedback to you[educational office supervisor]….. you have to take it from me, not your ideas.

 

 

• We have a contract with the education office, but they don’t live up to what they said they would do. There were five parts to the contract. First, teachers shouldn’t work more than 16 hours a week. Second, schools need a set amount of money to run their programmes. Third, schools need all the help they can get, both in terms of technology and education. Staff at a school must feel like they won’t be moved or sent to other schools. For example, when the education office asks a teacher or leader to move to a second school, there is no benefit. This should be up to the school, not the office of education!

 

 

• For the First Teacher, we try to reduce his/her load, but the Education Administration is refusing that’.

 

• our Excellence Team provides helpful plans. They provide useful guidance and advice to all teachers in the school’.

 

 

• There are no direct connections between the Tatweer policy supervision office and the education administration office. There is no direct link between them ’.

 

• ‘The Tatweer was well organised and provided an opportunity for some groups to discuss the curriculum’

 

 

• ‘we did not have enough training to implement such a project. We don’t have a clear plan for such a project’.

 

• ‘nobody explained anything to us about the smart boards. We learned about the smart boards by ourselves and the problem with the smart boards is that they have lots of faults and problems’.

 

• The teachers need to improve themselves in order to carry out their duties effectively. This is why we blame the Tatweer offical, in the beginning there was a lot of support but in the end, this ceased to exist’

 

• ‘I think the teachers were not prepared for Tatweer. In addition, the administrators were not ready for Tatweer because they lacked training’. When the Tatweer started there was very little training. We still use the traditional teaching which includes memorisation’.

 

• I think experienced and skilful teachers should provide training courses, not tatweer trainers. especially those who know how to deal with students regardless of their attitude and educational level’. We understand our students more than they do.

 

• Tatweer was not useful for schools. It is far away from the school’s needs and it focused on technology more than any other issue’

 

• ‘imagine teachers teaching 24 lessons per week and Tatweer official asks them to do more extra work. It is not easy at all’.

 

 

• ‘some teachers were afraid of the Tatweer because they thought that they were not equipped to use the relevant facilities and lacked experience or training to deal with the new technology’.

 

• Tatweer faced some obstacles. Some problems were possible to overcome during the planning stage such as teacher training and building a good relationship with the Tatweer staff to reduce the resistance factor’.

 

• Some of the teachers did not cooperate fully with Tatweer official’s vision’. Right from the onset of the project, it was important for the Tatweer officials to ensure that teachers were fully involved with the policy through the sharing of information and through providing training. I think if this had been done, the teachers could have been better placed to engage with the project and implement it to the best of their ability.

 

• ‘collaborative learning and teaching is great, but it cannot be used with 35 students in a single small room’

 

• there are sometimes more than thirty students in the same classroom and, yet the teaching materials are designed to be used with only half this number’

 

• ‘Tatweer tried to develop the learning environment but had no follow-up procedure. It did a lot of things but without repairing and fixing broken technologies’

 

 

• Ministry officials left everything and focused on the school construction. What did they do? They took off the tiles and replaced them with granite…. They placed marble on the outside of the building… do you understand? So they were interested in appearances and moved away from the true meaning of the policy … They did work on teacher training…I don’t deny that… this is true. But at the same time… their interest in appearances was more than it was on training (R1, MoE).

 

 

• What cause problems is centralisation. The MoE is the largest bureaucratic government system in the Kingdom, and with the large number of employees of over 5,000 and 500,000 teachers they should delegate the authority to the directors of education in each province (R2, MoE). We thought Tatweer school would give us more freedom, but we have to get approval from the Minstery Departement for everything we do, and they don’t understand anything.

 

• The management is much centralised with no accountability or transparency, in addition to the bureaucratic procedures we are facing (R6, MoE).

 

• The policy may not complete ‘its journey’ under the shadows of bureaucracies and complex procedures (R6, MoE).

 

• We enact Tatweer along with other programmes… it is difficult because we are learning and enacting everything at the same time, which in most of the times confuse us (Teacher B, TS6).

 

• Honestly, it was a very tiring year to the extent that teachers felt they will “explode” from all the pressure and heavy work load…It would have been better if they trained us first before enacting the policy, however, the MoE were very understanding and told us not to pressure ourselves even if we applied a small part of the policy, but because teachers held high expectations and were very competitive, they pressured themselves to achieve faster… and we did succeed (Director, TS6).

 

• Before starting Tatweer, there should be a satisfactory environment to accept it… a convenient environment. To achieve this, there should be promotions, training seminars, answers to all questions to make sure no one is hesitant or in doubt (R8, MoE)

 

• The ministry’s communication with the school about Tatweer is very poor (Teacher E, TS2).

 

• They should listen to what we need and not just order us to do what they want (Deputy TS2).