Early childhood teachers are the soul of early childhood education, and the quality and level of early childhood teachers determine the development and growth of young children. However, the reality in China is that the shortage of preschool teachers is as high as one million. The preschool education industry is not only facing a shortage of teachers, but also facing the test of quality.
Wen | Wang Shan
Undergraduate signboard
After working in a private kindergarten in Changping for three months, Li Mi felt that she was "about to become depressed." Along with Li Mi, there is also a dog she has raised, whenever the work is not going well, Li Mi will pat the dog's head with her hand, so that every time he sees her, the puppy's first reaction is to withdraw and hide. "Dogs have psychological shadows, which reflects my irritability." Li Mi analyzed to this journal.
Li Mi graduated from a normal university majoring in preschool education. The kindergarten she works for has 11 classes, which is in the upper middle class in Beijing. The reason why the school chose Li Mi is very simple, because she graduated from college and her major is preschool education. This is the scarcity of this private kindergarten: most of the teachers in the school are college graduates, and some teachers who have worked for many years do not have preschool teacher qualification certificates.
Li Mi is a living signboard. Every time there is a parent-teacher meeting in the class, the introduction sent to the parents in the park will be marked with "Li Mi, the teacher of the class, graduated from a normal university with a bachelor's degree in preschool education"; the same is hung up by the head of the kindergarten, and there is a graduate who graduated from a certain two normal universities. "Parents often don't recognize the new teacher, but when they see that I have a good education, they have no opinion."
The bachelor's degree did not bring any substantial benefits to Li Mi, and her salary was only 3500 yuan. In this kindergarten that advocates experience, the head of the kindergarten said bluntly in his first conversation with Li Mi, "You have no experience, you are in the learning stage, you cannot be the main class teacher, and you cannot give you a high salary." Despite this, Li Mi entered the kindergarten happily and became a matching teacher with a class of 35 children.
However, with so many children, the theories in school are useless. Li Mi asked the children to wash their hands, and after saying it many times, there were still children immersed in their own world playing with toys; the class was chaotic, she shouted "small mouth does not speak" over and over again, her voice was dumb, and no child took care of her. Li Mi was confused and did not know how to attract the child's attention. She wanted to seek help from the main class teacher, but she couldn't find anyone each time. "Every time she goes to class, she does her own thing and doesn't watch her children help maintain order."
Stills from "Goodbye Our Kindergarten"
Later, she thought about observing the lectures of the main class teacher to gain some experience. She found that the main class teacher did not care about these situations, and only talked about themselves in class, and did not interact with the children below. Only when the classroom is really chaotic, the main class teacher will yell a few words to quiet the child.
The main class teacher also threw all the work to Li Mi. "She made me think about environment-created content and let me do it by hand. Then I kept urging me, saying, 'If you don't do well, the teachers in the whole class will be deducted,' and I was under a lot of pressure. "In this kindergarten, in order to strengthen management, all the performance of teachers is linked to salary. As with exams, each teacher has a basic score of 100 points a month: points are deducted if the attendance rate is not reached; points are deducted if the teacher's attitude is not good. In the first month, everyone's scores were posted in the poster bar on the wall, and Li Mi found that none of them scored perfectly.
Every teacher is a blank slate
Li Mi often thinks of the experience of practicing in a provincial kindergarten when she was in school, and the newly graduated teachers have an internship period, and the old teachers answer questions and discuss how to write lesson plans. Now, she racks her brains to write nine lesson plans a week, five lesson plans, and four training lesson plans. During the day, I don't have time to take the children, so I go home at night after work to write. Her boyfriend looked unbearable, "Such a little money, what do you want?" Li Mi knows why she is working hard, she comes from a small county, and after the original failed examination, her parents wanted her to go home and become a junior high school teacher. She didn't want to go back, "I want to go for a while.
I don't want my children to try to get out of the county town like I do."
However, after an incident, Li Mi decided to resign. One day, she was running in a small playground with her child, and one of the children suddenly fell to the ground and broke his knees. She panicked and carried the child to the infirmary. The principal and parents rushed over one after another. The parents blamed her, believing that she did not look after the child and demanded compensation. After the head of the kindergarten helped to appease her parents, he criticized her for being "careless" and later deducted her salary. After that day, Li Mi did not dare to leave the child's sight at any time, she stared at each child timidly, even if they sat on the chair, they were worried about whether they were going to fall down, and hurriedly rushed to help. "I wish I were the one who fell." She told the journal that later, one day, she had a dream in which she stood in the middle of the classroom, clapping her hands and shouting at the students, but she couldn't make a sound. "I felt particularly helpless. The pressure was too great to keep going. ”
Stills from the documentary "Kindergarten"
Feng Xiaoxia, a professor of preschool education at Beijing Normal University, conducted a questionnaire survey and interviews on the living conditions of 447 teachers in 50 kindergartens with different systems in Beijing. Surveys show that more than half of teachers show a clear burnout tendency. Many are tired, worried, and restless; nearly half of the teachers feel that their temper has deteriorated, and they often get angry with their children and their families for a small matter.
"The pressure on kindergarten teachers is much greater than ordinary people think, and they must get effective strategic learning and support from the kindergarten." The director of a public kindergarten in Beijing told this magazine, "Even if you have studied psychology, pedagogy, and have certain abilities, a new teacher is not capable of managing twenty or thirty children." Even if she was a mother, she did not have the experience of managing twenty or thirty children. For the teacher, the kindergarten should support and help the teacher in practice, and the most important thing is to teach her to understand the child and see the problem from the child's point of view. ”
Kindergarten, French painter Jean Geoffroy, 1898
Sun Yuhong, who is also in a private kindergarten, does not have such pressure. She is 26 years old and is the main class teacher of the kindergarten, responsible for the daily life and teaching of more than 20 children. At the beginning of the class, the children will also put forward various requests, Sun Yuhong does not know how to deal with it, will communicate with the old teachers at noon every day to seek help. Later, every time she encountered a similar situation, she would say to the students: "You have made so many requests, but I only have one person, who do I have to solve first, do you want to discuss once or not?" "After the children listened, they would really get together to discuss, and eventually they would arrange a sequence.
Sun Yuhong's support comes from kindergartens. After she joined the company, she was not directly involved in the teaching and management of her children, and what awaited her was a period of about a year. In kindergartens that advocate hand-to-hand teaching, this is a necessary procedure. Through this kind of learning, new teachers complete the basic understanding of kindergarten and learn a certain amount of experience. "The old teachers have a lot of experience and will tell the new people what to do when they encounter things."
Sun Yuhong's garden, An Xiu, prefers to compare new employees to a blank sheet of paper. "When I first entered kindergarten, everyone loved their children, and why they were later worn out or led to some incidents was because the energy had not been filled and had been consumed. She will be disgusted and her patience will be gone. An Xiu has been the director of the park for more than ten years, and she has also come from the rotation of newcomers step by step to today. In her opinion, the philosophy and educational style of a park determine the appearance of the teachers who are trained. "If you can establish the right ideas in the early stages, there will be a positive way to face the problem." What is your unit philosophy and how to look at your child's behavior, these will be reflected in the teacher. ”
An Xiu has a wealth of training experience. She told the journal that new employees generally go through two time barriers: the first week and the first three months. "Teachers need to be given a basic sense of security in the early stages, telling her about the difficulties she may face and the emotions she may face, and making her realize that kindergarten is not just repetitive work." Otherwise, the teacher may soon stop working, and the understanding of the kindergarten is not clear. ”
The replenishment of energy is specific and meticulous. For example, for the encouragement of children, some people will say "you are very good", and children will not feel when they listen more. An Xiu and the old staff union in the park tell the newcomers how to observe the child's behavior, and adopt new praise methods, such as: "You actually moved things here, you are really powerful!" The child who heard it immediately made a Hercules gesture and said, "I am Ultraman!" ”
Creating conditions to help teachers solve problems is also what a mature kindergarten is good at. In the first two years of the founding of the kindergarten, every time she encountered a communication problem with the parents, An Xiu would visit the parents with the teacher, such as seeing the state of the family, why the children had emotions; or how to solve the problem when the children were stumbling. It wasn't until the teacher suggested that she could handle such a thing that she slowly withdrew. All the parents have An Xiu's mobile phone number, and she often says: "The teacher is busy at work, you are looking for me." Sometimes I encounter parents calling and asking: "Why doesn't the class teacher reply to my WeChat?" An Xiu would patiently tell parents: "The teacher may be in the supermarket or studying." ”
A mental health teacher at a local preschool education in Denver, USA, hugs the child and comforts and encourages the child who is in a bad mood (Courtesy of Visual China)
Once, the teacher was already off work, and the parents sent WeChat to the teacher, saying that they had something to change to someone else to pick up the child. After the teacher saw that WeChat was already half an hour later, she immediately called the head of the kindergarten, but it was still late. The person who came in place of the parents had been blocked out. An Xiu called the parents to communicate, and the first words of the parents were: "What's the matter with you, didn't I say it?" "The safety of children is great, and we cannot blindly hand them over to others." This is the anger of the parents.
Afterwards, An Xiu sent the parents' instructions again and noted his office phone again. "It's especially important for teachers to enter what kind of kindergarten they are in. If you enter an institution, regard the purpose of profit, do not pay attention to the welfare of teachers and cultural atmosphere, as long as parents complain about the teacher bonus, as long as the parents refund or handle the departure from the kindergarten, the teacher will be punished, such a unit, the trained teacher thinks that it is necessary to please the parents, so that the child will not have an accident. ”
However, most people are not as lucky as Sun Yuhong. More people, like Li Mi, are in the powerlessness and helplessness of work. A kindergarten director told the magazine that she once knew a teacher who went to work in a very good kindergarten after graduation, but soon quit her job, asked why, and the teacher said that she could not control her impulse to hit the child. Because a senior teacher in her class often physically punished a child with stunting, even if she told the principal, it would not help, because the teacher's husband was the superior of the principal. Feeling deeply powerless, she resigned.
High flow rate
More private kindergartens do not have the ability to complete post-induction training for teachers. The director of a private kindergarten told me, "There is such a shortage of teachers, who has time for training." You say no one in case, do we use it or don't we use it? "Some kindergartens even require teachers to just satisfy their parents. A kindergarten teacher told me that a teacher in her kindergarten never pays attention to the learning effect of students, but after each class, she will name the parents of the children in WeChat one by one, tell them what the children have learned, and pay attention to reviewing them after returning home. Sometimes, parents are reminded to add clothes to their children when the weather is cold. "In the eyes of her parents, she is a conscientious and responsible teacher."
Liu Zhanlan, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences, affirmed the status of private kindergartens in the article "Preschool Education Must Maintain Education and Public Welfare", and at the same time described its living conditions: private kindergartens have become the main body of kindergartens in the number of kindergartens, they do not receive any financial subsidies from the state, and because about 79% of private kindergarten organizers are individual citizens, the number of kindergartens held by non-governmental organizations is very small, especially the kindergartens held by non-profit organizations. Therefore, most of them operate in a market manner, generally for profit as the main purpose, and even some places have set a one-time upfront registration fee of more than one million yuan for kindergartens, and proposed a policy of paying a high proportion of corporate income tax or business tax every year.
In other words, from the perspective of market laws, private kindergartens can only reduce costs if they want to survive, and they do not have the ability to ensure the excellence of teachers. Moreover, the gap in the kindergarten teacher itself is already an irreconcilable contradiction.
In the absence of teachers, there are even many who will choose interns to top the class teachers. The director of a private kindergarten told me that they would introduce six or seven interns to the unit every June, and they would be dismissed after a year of work, leaving only a few excellent ones. The advantage of this is that on the one hand, interns can increase the vitality of the park and reduce the pressure of teacher shortage; on the other hand, "the intern's salary is only about 1500 yuan, which is half of that of ordinary teachers." In this way, tens of thousands of yuan of wage expenses can be saved. Kindergarten teachers are so scarce, there are often kindergarten directors who say, 'Just come to the individual'."
Xu Ming, the chairman of An Xiu's kindergarten, cannot accept such a practice, on the one hand, the interns have not undergone relevant training and their professional ability is not enough, on the other hand, this will also have a great impact on the cohesion of the entire teaching team and the overall teaching and research. Her director only selects people from two channels, one is to contact the school, interview students to practice in the park, and slowly cultivate. Another is the recommendation of an acquaintance, "He must be able to guarantee that this person is credible, and you can also know why he resigned." She doesn't like recruiting teachers from society. "Many teachers exchange job hopping for pay, and her education and children's hearts gradually disappear in the process." And after a period of training, she will still choose to leave. ”
In the case of limited financial resources, Xu Ming's method is to find ways to retain people. She set up a rule that if the teacher stayed in the kindergarten for five years, the child did not have to pay any fees from entering the kindergarten to leaving the kindergarten; if it was less than five years, half of the normal tuition fee needed to be paid, and the staff would refund it after five years, which ensured the stability of the staff to a certain extent. For Xu Ming, this is not an easy decision, which means that a lot of operating costs will be added every year. However, this did not stop the flow.
Geng Xiaoge, a master's degree graduate from Beijing Jiaotong University, selected 10 private schools as a sample when designing his graduation project, and counted his teacher turnover rate from 2013 to 2015. He found that the average three-year churn rate of 10 private kindergartens was 22.6%, 25.8% and 22.8%, respectively, which significantly exceeded the normal turnover rate of 15%. Among them, the turnover rate of a kindergarten in 2014 reached 46.7%.
Geng Xiaoge found that in terms of age, teachers aged 20 to 25 were the most mobile, accounting for 42.1%. Through several years of work, they have mastered a certain amount of teaching experience, and they want to jump ship to work in a more well-paid kindergarten. 25 to 30 years old also accounted for about 21%, at the age of marriage, had to give up the job of kindergarten teacher.
In Xu Ming's park, leaving is more because of love and marriage. More than 90% of the teachers are from normal colleges and universities in the surrounding provinces of Beijing, such as Shanxi and Hebei, at the beginning everyone wanted to find a job and break through in Beijing, but at a certain age, hindered by the pressure of life, many people will choose to go home. "Unless they become a family in Beijing, have a home, or the couple's salary can support their rent, they will basically go back." Feng Jia, chief director of Xu Ming, told this magazine.
Xu Ming also understands that in the eyes of these teachers' families, private kindergarten teachers "are to show others children", which is not a job that can be taken, and children will have better choices when they return to their hometowns, enter a primary school, junior high school, and get married and have children early. There was originally a girl from Xinjiang in her garden, who was liked by her children, and then returned to her hometown for examinations, and did not come back, "After the completion of the training, when she reached the age of marriage, she had a girl in her family, and her parents would not let her come out."
There was a flow that Xu Ming hadn't thought of at all. At that time, her kindergarten had just been rated as a municipal demonstration kindergarten. Xu Ming originally thought that the kindergarten could continue to work this basis. Unexpectedly, in the summer vacation that year, almost every class had a teacher who chose to leave, and it was an important teaching position. The reason is very simple, there is a private kindergarten to build a new kindergarten, want to dig people from her, sent a text message to all her teachers, promised a high salary. "I can't do anything, there are so many positions, and I really can't solve so many positions of the main class and director." Xu Ming felt helpless, every qualified teacher from the beginning to the gradual maturity of the need for 3 to 5 years, the loss of one means to start from scratch.
There is a big gap in preschool education
In November 2017, after the "red, yellow and blue incident", Xu Ming quickly organized a dinner party. She invited the principals of more than a dozen of her kindergartens to get together and chat, in order to calm the emotions of the kindergarten directors and give them "pressure and shock". It was all women's dinner tables, there was no cup to change, and all that was poured was emotion and bitter water.
Some principals said that many teachers would come to reflect that they did not know how to get along with their children, "Can I still hold my children?" "Can I still kiss my children?" In the face of children who originally spent time and night, many teachers do not know how to be good. Parents are also full of emotions about the kindergarten, and there are always people in the parent group who will come out and question the attitude and behavior of the teachers in the kindergarten. More difficulties could be a potential wave of departures. "Many teachers received phone calls from their families saying that Beijing was too chaotic, and asked them to stop doing it and change jobs." Xu Ming told this journal.
Xu Ming appeased the director while discussing countermeasures with them. She asked all the principals to go back and count the number of people who had left their jobs as a response. "Kindergarten is getting harder and harder." She told the magazine that several kindergarten operators she knew had chosen to close their kindergartens.
In 2003, Xu Ming opened his first kindergarten. At that time, her most concerned about the choice of parking places, the price of commercial housing is too high to afford, and the supporting kindergarten in the community is the best choice. After choosing the venue, she posted an advertisement in the Beijing Evening News to recruit 20 teachers. She received hundreds of cover letters, many of them handwritten. "At that time, it was really one out of a hundred, so we picked a beautiful interview, because children like gentle and beautiful teachers." Forty or fifty girls performed their talents or took small observation classes one by one, leaving 20 people behind.
Today, it seems that 2003 is the first year of the development of private kindergartens. This stems from the gradual withdrawal of enterprise-run kindergartens and street kindergartens. The Guiding Opinions on the Reform and Development of Early Childhood Education issued that year described the overall goal of the five-year education reform from 2003 to 2007: to form a development pattern with public kindergartens as the backbone and demonstration, social forces as the main body, and public and private, formal and non-formal education. Since then, private kindergartens have developed rapidly.
In 1958, a kindergarten teacher in China took children to make games (courtesy of Visual China)
Data show that from 2003 to 2011, the number of kindergartens in the country increased from 116,400 to 166,800, an increase of 43.3%. Among them, the total number of private parks was 55,500 in 2003, and increased to 115,400 in 2011, an increase of 107.9%.
After 2005, Xu Ming's job advertisements received fewer and fewer responses. By 2010, kindergartens were expanding faster and faster, and one kindergarten she knew was rapidly spreading across the country with a number of ten or twenty. Recruiting teachers is becoming increasingly difficult. "It's all about other people looking at the treatment and looking at the environment to choose you, and you are not qualified to choose at all."
Every year during graduation season, Xu Ming would let employees go to the school's job fair. Their information desk is next to other kindergartens and schools, surrounded by public kindergartens or government institutions, enterprises and institutions, and then the military garden. Many people will go to the booth of Xu Ming's unit after a turn and ask for some basic information, and few people leave personal information.
Sometimes, they would say hello to the school, find a classroom to preach, and stuff job postings into people's hands. The brochure is beautiful and creative, but still no one wants to come. "The whole recruitment season is busy like a war, but it's hard to recruit people, and one or two are rare. Private parks determine that you are in a disadvantageous position in terms of treatment and stability. ”
This is even more pronounced in Shanghai. A recruiter at a preschool institution told me that since 2015, every time I went to school to enroll, the teacher would tell them that by the time of february or March, the students had been "robbed". "Five years ago, we were still talking to the school about the cooperative practice base, but now it is impossible, we have to bring in teachers from remote areas such as Guizhou."
In 2008, when drafting the Outline of the National Medium- and Long-term Education Reform and Development Plan (2010-2020), Chu Zhaohui participated in the preschool education group as an expert. At the time, he had done a budget. He mentioned that it is estimated that 200,000 professional teachers are needed to enter the early childhood education positions every year to meet the needs of preschool education. At that time, only about 10,000 early childhood education graduates were trained by colleges and universities every year.
Many people think it is unlikely, saying that this number is too big for teachers' colleges to reach at once. Chu Zhaohui said that it cannot be achieved, but the demand is here. Later, although the government took some measures, the main energy was used to run kindergartens and expand kindergartens, not to expand the training of teachers. This is equivalent to building a house for children to enter, but without considering what the children will do after they enter. ”
Chu Zhaohui said: "The coverage of preschool teacher training is not so large, which means that some of the personnel who enter the position of preschool teacher are unqualified. According to the "Special Evaluation Report on Preschool Education" released by the Ministry of Education in November 2015, 66% of teachers with college degree or above in 2014; 61% of teachers with preschool education qualification certificates, 17% of non-preschool education teachers with qualification certificates, and 22% of unlicensed teachers. Chu Zhaohui provided another reference data, "Of the more than 2 million kindergarten teachers in the country, nearly 70% of the teachers have not rated the title of preschool teacher. Under the current circumstances, this situation will continue for 10 to 20 years. New teachers are unqualified, but because there is not a sufficient number of supplements, there is no way to get them out of their posts in the short term."
(In the text, Li Mi, An Xiu, Xu Ming, Sun Yuhong, and Feng Jia are pseudonyms)