Blog of Vyacheslav Sapunov
Continuation of the interview with Vyacheslav Sapunov with the Minister of Education of Azerbaijan, Mikail Jabbarov.
- If we compare previous systems and contemporary ones… I am surprised even by tests which are natural today.
- I don’t want my words be perceived in the context of Azerbaijan only, as the problem is universal. Standards of knowledge evaluation, i.e. tests, give us ambiguous results. Last year we selected students for the state program, or at the moment we are selecting students for SABAH (Savadlı – Bacarıqlı – Hazırlıqlı is an initiative by the Ministry of Education, which is aimed at establishing groups in universities which are controlled by the Ministry of Education) who demonstrated high results in standard test exams. They made it into universities in such majors as “diplomacy” and “law.” And what? They think Kissinger was French and Lenin was a Russian president. They believe – this is a quotation – that a lawyer can and has to lie to protect a client’s interests. I can give you a lot of such examples.
There is a problem with general knowledge. Does it mean we should reject tests as a standard instrument for knowledge evaluation? No, it doesn’t. This instrument gives us an opportunity to evaluate knowledge in equal conditions. Should this instrument be the only one? I believe it should not. It should be one of several instruments, probably the most important one.
What does international experience say about this? None of the best universities of the world will accept you, according to GMAT, IELTS, and so on only. They will test your ability to talk, write, be interviewed. You have to explain your desire to study for this or that major. Do I suggest rejection of the central system of preliminary exams? No, I don’t. I think the system played a great role in the struggle against negative phenomena. Should new parameters be added to it? Of course they should! We cannot imagine a shift of our universities at the international level without an opportunity to choose students. Are our universities ready for this? No, they aren’t. However, some of them are more ready than others… What’s my point? Any decisions in the sphere of education policy should be reconsidered sometime later, to be adapted to dependent socio-economic conditions. New principles mean considering the individual skills of every child. It is a turn from transferring knowledge to an ability to learn by himself throughout his life.
- How did the education system deal with the shift from so-called traditional methods to new principles? I mean the curriculum and so on.
- Results are not as high as we would like them to be. There are many reasons for this: teachers were not well-trained; no changes were made in the training system of new teachers, in textbooks, and so on. Does it mean that the principles are wrong? It doesn’t. The principles are absolutely right. Contemporary education is far from the old formula “learn information – tell it – be evaluated.” There are Google and Wikipedia to learn information from. Does it mean we shouldn’t train children’s skills to remember information? No, it doesn’t.
- Do you plan to change the program?
- Yes, we do. We are working in a direction.
- For how long will the evolution shift to the new program last?
- The upcoming educational year will be a year in which we will be able to explain certain things. We will start implementing the innovations in a year.
- And the question of textbooks is obvious. For how long will the process of textbook renewal take place?
- Let me tell you about the technology of creating a textbook. When I was appointed to the position of minister in April 2013, I found out that there were no textbooks for sixth grade pupils who will begin studying on September 15th. They were not printed. They were not even written!
- But how did previous sixth grade pupils study?
- If you remember, 7 years ago we turned to the curriculum. And we implemented it from the first form. And only from the first form. It means all pupils who studied in the second form and so on continued being taught according to the old system. The curriculum is a new approach to education, a new format, a new way to set a task, a new content of education. It is impossible to teach children new content using an old textbook.
- So there was gradual renewal of textbooks every year.
- Yes, every year the Ministry of Education prepared textbooks for one form. The first year – for the first form, the second year – for the second form, and so on. And the new textbooks contained the curriculum. What is a textbook? It is content plus methods. To create a textbook with new content and new methods, one should know them. When you implement new methods for the first time, apparently you don't have many experts who know what and in what way it should be written. The mistake which was made 7 years ago was the implementation of the curriculum at once. Usually a curriculum is tested for a year in certain schools with specially trained teachers. And during the year feedback is collected from the teachers. The feedback is analyzed; the program is corrected, and only after that is it implemented all over a country – in three classes: first form, fifth form, eighth form. And the shift takes four years. In our case the process took much more time. And the absence of a test period was a big mistake. The second mistake was that the new textbooks were written by the previous authors: “These are new standards, please write new textbooks!” And they wrote, did their best. And the situation lasted for a long time. Every year tendering was held, according to the law. Everybody could participate in the tendering. We have 27 subjects. And a textbook is needed for each. Sometimes several textbooks were presented for a subject, sometimes – one or two, and for certain subjects there were no textbooks at all. So there was a subject in the program, and nobody wanted to write a textbook for it. The question was: what we should do, when none of textbooks was good enough?
- It seems one should choose the best from the worst…
- The other question was: what we should do if no textbooks were presented? We should choose someone who won a tender with other textbooks and say: “Please write a French Language Textbook, as we have none.” Imagine: tendering takes place in summer, experts select the best from what they have; textbooks are printed by September. And both teachers and pupils see the textbooks for the first time in September.
At the moment we prepare one textbook a year. So obviously there are big technological problems in the process. What is our breakthrough this year? We have written textbooks for the second and the eighth forms. We published textbooks for the eighth form with a minimum number of copies. We will give them to teachers and expect feedback from them. We will present these textbooks to parents: “You have a year for comments.” After that we will correct the textbooks and officially sent them to TQDK for monitoring.
- Who are the authors of the textbooks?
- According to the current laws, I don’t choose the authors. We cannot make anyone write textbooks. Unlike the Ministry of Education of the USSR, the Ministry of Education of Azerbaijan doesn’t create textbooks. In the Ministry of Education we have no physicists, chemists, we have officials only. It is an absolutely different profession! Yes, we encourage universities and departments; yes, I criticize the presidents of universities: “Why doesn’t your university help in creating textbooks, if you have good a foundation?” But we cannot make anyone write a textbook. At the moment all we can do is to provide a fair selection. When an expert commission makes its choice, we envelope all textbooks and send them to three groups: representatives of TQDK, representatives of universities, and the best school teachers. That’s how we receive independent evaluations from various specialists and see a clear picture. So the process of choosing a textbook becomes thorough and well-thought out. And nobody can say that the Ministry of Education doesn’t work on it. We give our recommendations anyway, we try to improve it.
- Don’t you plan to change the system?
- Yes, we addressed the government to change the system of preparing textbooks. It is always difficult to write new textbooks for a young country. Yes, everybody wants to get results immediately, but it is impossible. We have collected positive experience during years, there are centers and authors. And when an author is writing the fourth textbook, he is obviously doing it better. We don’t want to ruin this. We should maintain the best points and improve them.
- How should you improve it?
- We are establishing a special center. Its aim is to develop “a reserve textbook.” What is this? It is a textbook which is written at the state’s order, by a group of experts. It will be implemented if a textbook which was presented for a tender doesn’t meet our requirements. Several countries use such a mechanism.
- So it will be a certain level: if you can make a better one – do it!
- Yes. And we will provide a minimum standard.
- Why is there a problem with authors? I don’t believe we have no skilful professionals in each sphere.
- We have no systems of encouragement of authors. It is not interesting for an author to write a textbook. There is a lot of work, hard work, but they are not well paid for this. There are risks for their reputation: money is small, but criticism could be huge.
- How many textbooks do you need?
- We need about 200 textbooks. Moreover, we have two sectors – Azerbaijani and Russian. Multiply. Of course, new textbooks can contain mistakes, misprints. But the chance that it will be found out during the text period is higher than the chance that it will be corrected two weeks before September 1st. So we are doing our best. Yes, at the moment there are many inconveniences and difficulties, but as a result people will have effective education. Today we cannot say that next month all the textbooks in the country will be new. There are various approaches. For example, we adapt textbooks which were written in Oxford, Cambridge, and so on. There are pros and cons. The advantages are that the textbooks were written by the best minds and according to effective methods. The drawbacks are that we have socially-oriented subjects which form a child’s personality. We cannot educate an Azerbaijani citizen using Oxford History, Literature, Geography textbooks.
- What are the prospects for inclusive education in Azerbaijan?
- This is a very important topic. Inclusive education is one of the priorities of the Ministry of Education. Implementation of inclusive education is connected with several problems: training teachers, establishing and improvement of material and technical resources. Our strategy requires gradual implementation: at first, test schools will be defined where early implementation will take place. Probably we will start from test classes, which will be equipped for integration of special pupils into our social life. Speaking about test classes, I should mention the "Sağlam Təhsil" project. The goal is to protect children’s health during the education process. We are concerned about modern trends: overwhelming programs, too heavy bags, a lot of time is spent at desks. On September 15th "Sağlam Təhsil" will be started in six schools of Baku.
- Do you mean the methods of Vladimir Bazarny?
- He is one of the consultants. We use not only Vladimir Bazarny’s methods, but also experience and technologies from the USA, Canada, Europe. The main goal of the project is to avoid getting education at the expense of children’s health. Health protection and high-level education should be combined.
- You have mentioned the role of the teacher. Unfortunately, we should admit that in recent years the prestige of the profession is low. What should we do to return respect to the profession?
- Let’s separate two questions: What CAN society do? And what SHOULD the Ministry of Education do? Society can read more, for instance, and accustom children to reading. We should preserve our traditional values, as teachers, the elderly, education have always played a special role. We should think about the essence of the word “muallim”. What should the Ministry of Education do? We try to encourage young people to choose a profession. The head of state is supervising the development of the project of the Teachers College Campus. We will establish an environment which will form the views of future teachers. Moreover, this year we have started implementation of material encouragement of students who showed outstanding results at preliminary exams and decided to choose “teaching” as a major. 300 students will be granted 100 manats monthly. We believe it will encourage young teachers.
… Do you know what I am worried about? The spirit of the times when everything is based on material values. Everybody wants to find a gold mine. I don’t say that money is not important. But it cannot replace absolutely all values. Children should dream about being astronauts, adventurers, architects and so on – jobs which are not directly connected with making big money. Before we reconstruct this, we won’t change the mentality… Capitalism, alright… But society should not make decisions just by considering satisfaction of material demands. There are non-material demands. Yes, the idea is not popular, it is difficult to promote it. But we should try to do it. I have more ideas about this, and I will tell you about them next time.
