Source: Haaretz
The Israel Education Ministry is devising another reform in the wake of the “sardine protest” against crowded conditions in the classrooms. According to the new plan, students in their third year of teacher training would join veteran teachers in the classroom and run them jointly, thereby lowering the number of students per teacher without a need for opening new classrooms, a complex, expensive proposition.
The plan is being headed up by the ministry’s new deputy director general, Eyal Ram, a former head of the Institute for Democratic Education at the Kibbutzim College of Education. Education Ministry and teachers’ college officials are discussing the plan, and the ministry’s goal is to have a blueprint for the “one classroom, two teachers” program at the end of November, 2014. The plan would also change how teachers are trained by consolidating most of their academic work in their first two years, allowing them to teach in the schools in their third year, with their fourth year continuing to be set aside for interning.
For now, though, the program has no budget. The Education Ministry does not plan to pay the third-year education students who will be co-teaching in classrooms. Nor will the ministry pay the veteran teachers for mentoring them on how to teach a class of some 40 students. There isn’t even a budget for the overtime hours this mentoring would require.
Read more at Haaretz.