What is the Turkish school system like? 2014

For trainers coming to Turkey for the first time, let me give you a short explanation of the Turkish educational system. It's forever changing and quite hard to keep up with. 

Recent changes 

Until 1997 children were required to attend school for 5 years. From 1997 to 2012 this increased to 8 years. Now it is 12 years. Pre-primary education is optional.  Children get a Primary diploma after 8 years. The first 4 years of primary is definitely held in school. After that there is the option of continuing at another school or at home, which has been widely criticised. 

I'm not sure exactly how the 'at home' option works because homeschooling is not a popular issue (and has been illegal) unlike in some other countries. Homeschooling is quite popular in the US, for instance.  Other options after 4 years of compulsory schooling are attending a religious school or vocational school. 

The new ruling has been widely criticized because parents have to make choices about their children's educational futures a younger age now, actually at age 9 or 10, before their real abilities are clear. Also many people think it is a not-very-secret way to take girls out of mixed education and put them in religious schools with single sex education.  

There is an interesting article about the Turkish reforms in the New York Times and another in the Financial Times. 

One of the criticisms of the new 4+4+4 system is that the government is trying to increase the number of religious schools, called Imam Hatip schools. For more information about this issues look here. These schools are being opened in other countries and international students come to Turkey to attend them, too. An interesting book review also provides some more information. 

One result of the new system is that children start primary school one year younger, at 5 instead of 6 or even 7, however teachers did not receive training in how to teach to younger pupils. Many parents (myself included) chose to keep their children out for that extra year in spite of the threat of fines. 

What do they learn at Primary? 

General information can be found on the Internet. What concerns us is language education so I'll restrict myself to information relevant to literacy in the mother tongue and foreign languages. 

Turkish children now learn to write Turkish script first, not printed letters. The first books they read are written in a handwriting font. You can download the fonts from this website. 

Turkish is very phonetic. Children learn letters, syllables and then put the syllables together to form words. If they can read syllables correctly, they can read (at least this is the attitude I see in many Turkish primary school teachers.) Children are timed regularly in Grade 1 to see how many words they can read out loud in 60 seconds. Did they understand what they read? That's not entirely clear to me! I suspect it depends on the teacher whether comprehension is checked. There is little or no awareness of pre-reading or post-reading activities in Turkish language classes, which affects some of our teachers who teach a foreign language. They often replicate the methodology and ask children to read English texts out loud without relevant pre-reading and often with no post-reading activity. 

Parents are explicitly told not to teach their children to read in Turkish before they start school because 'they will be bored'. There is no differentiated learning and I have never seen stations being used by a class teacher. Children sit in rows from Grade 1 and are expected to adjust to 'normal' didactic instruction. I cannot see evidence of teachers being aware of multimodal literacy or even telling stories in class. In Turkish or in English. (Of course there must be exceptions.) 

Children have the same teacher for all 4 years of primary school. Most grown-ups remember their primary school teacher and may continue to pay regular visits to him/her even as adults.  

The children may have another teacher come in for music or English in a state school if parents have paid extra for this.  

Children are graded from 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest mark. Lessons are 40 minutes long. 

English teachers

Roles:

They should try to get on well with the class teacher, who in effect controls the classroom space and the relationship with parents.  Some English teachers complain that when they visit the classes to teach, there is no empty space on the desk for their stuff. There may not be room on the walls for hanging up the children's English work. Other teachers have told me that if the class teacher complains that the children are hard to manage after the English classes, they can get into trouble. These issues put stress on English teachers.  

There is rarely a dedicated English room except in wealthier, roomier schools. 


Literacy: 

English teachers are usually asked not to introduce any reading or writing in Grade 1 (or to wait until the second half of the school year) because the children are learning to read and write in Turkish. Because pre-school is not compulsory, most Turkish children do not learn to read until they are 6. It was 6 or 7 under the previous system.  

Then the English teachers are not sure what their role is in teaching writing/penmanship because the handwriting conventions are different (and Turkish English teachers are not trained to teach penmanship in English, either.) Turkish doesn't have the letter Q, for instance. Should the English teachers 'teach' it?  Should the teacher use script or printed letters in second grade? These issues have not been resolved yet and each school does it differently. 

When I visit primary and also pre-school programs I try to encourage the teachers to start telling stories from pre-school onwards so the children get into the habit of listening to a story. This would make the process of learning to read easier. English teachers often complain that they can't tell a story in English easily because the children won't pay attention, won't sit still, etc. because they don't have this habit in L1. Many parents do not read to their children at home in their mother tongue so children are not used to listening to stories or looking at picture books. Many English teachers are unsure how to read to children - should they read the words on the page? Should they tell the story in their own words? Should they encourage children to interact while listening? How should the teacher respond to what children say/And afterwards should they use the story for the next activity (game, arts and crafts etc.) and if so, how? 

Most YL teachers enjoy having sessions where they can discuss and practice these skills.

The 'discipline' issue 

The word 'discipline' in Turkish basically means punishment. The Ministry of Education apparently (?) stipulates that teachers/schools cannot discipline children. Whenever I talk to principals about classroom management and the need for school-wide policies that all the teachers follow consistently, I am told that they are not allowed to discipline the children. Then I try to explain that I am not talking about punishment, but rather having expectations that children will not run in the corridors or in the canteen because it's dangerous, that no one hits or kicks anyone else, that everyone is responsible for creating a positive environment where all the pupils can learn. This doesn't seem to make much sense to some school administrators ..... Let's try to talk about these issues on courses if it comes up, OK?   

For example, I once saw high school children hitting each other hard in middle of the back during an English lesson I was observing with a native speaker teacher. It was clearly painful (and actually it's dangerous.) When I brought this to the attention of the school authorities a few minutes later, they did nothing. I was told that this particular class was the 'sin bin'. Needless to say, that school has a very high turn over of native speaker teachers since they are not backed up. 

Once when I presented some report findings in one school that basically many children can't learn because there are too many disruptions, and offered some possible solutions like including a behaviour management element such as Kelso in their teaching, the administration just gave me blank looks. This didn't make any sense to them. How can you teach little children non-violent problem solving strategies? 

The number one complaint that I hear from foreign teachers is that there is no proper control and the kids can do whatever they like. For example, a 7th grader is running down the corridor and bumps into an American teacher who is carrying hot tea. She burns her hand and the student doesn't stop, doesn't apologise even when another teacher tells him to. These kinds of incidents tend to demoralise native speaker teachers. 

I was reminded recently of the TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey) findings. Unfortunately Turkish teachers were not involved in this research. It would be interesting to replicate this research here.    

"In about half of the TALIS-participating countries/economies, one in four teachers reports spending at least 30% of lesson time handling classroom disruptions and administrative tasks.. One in two teachers in Brazil, Malaysia and Singapore reports spending 15% or more of lesson time on keeping order in the classroom." - in some other countries one in four teachers reports spending at least 40% of lesson time on these tasks. 
http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/TALIS-Teachers-Guide.pdf

Also take a look at this article. 

Based on my and other trainers' and teachers' experiences, we created a sample behaviour management document and another document offering practical advice to teachers. Feel free to use them if you need them or share copies with any teacher who is interested. 

If you have any other comments, please let me know and I will make changes to this post accordingly. 

CTS-English Marmara region courses begin

How do teachers know it’s the end of summer?

Because they are ‘invited’ to join some teacher development sessions, of course! 

This summer 120+ English teachers in the Marmara region of Turkey will be joining our CTS-English courses (for primary and secondary school teachers.) This course is our in-house version of CELTA for teachers of students under 17.

We have 18 experienced teacher trainers from around Europe working with us. For some it is the first time they are working in Turkey (although most have had Turkish students at their universities or teaching centres.) Others worked in Baku and have already had some experience of the CTS-English course.

Let me share some of what goes on before our courses begin. Then as the course unfolds we will share some of the insights we gain. 

Before starting:

We have two priorities at our end 

- arranging all the flights, accommodation, transportation and locations for the courses

- preparing the materials for the course, wherever possible based on the books teachers will work with

These practical issues are important because we want the trainers to be as comfortable as possible with the work they are doing. 

What do trainers need?

We know from Maslow's work that people need to have the areas at the bottom levels of the pyramid satisfied before they can focus on the higher levels. We have two groups of people to consider: trainers and the course participants. What do trainers need? (We'll talk about teachers later.) 

What do trainers need to be able to help the teachers become more confident professionals? to help them reflect on their own classroom practises and students? to be creative? to benefit as much as possible for the course?  

Typically the trainers want information. They want to know about the participants, the expectations of the stake-holders and information about the cultural background. Culture is an important part of adapting to life in a new location so we try to give some guidance about interpreting behaviours. Otherwise there is a danger that people filter all their experiences through their own cultural schemata and misinterpret what they experience. 

Here is part of a letter I sent round the group:

By the way, I would love to hear your reactions to these ideas in the comments section. 

“Although many women work in Turkey and there are is a very high percentage of women graduating with science degrees from universities, there is still a conservative streak in most people. They do sometimes find it very hard to understand how a woman can go to a foreign country by herself without her husband or family. It's a little easier for them to understand older women who are married with children but as for younger women, well it just seems odd to some people. They think that Westerners don't protect and look after the women in their family properly.

There are quite a lot of ways in which this culture treats women with respect which seem odd at first to foreigners. For example when you buy a coach ticket to travel from one city to another, they automatically put a woman next to another woman. It's marked on the computer system so that no one will make a mistake. I have travelled in rural areas and when a man has try to come and sit next to me I simply said no the seat is only for a woman, and he got up immediately and left me alone. Because he thought I was a foreigner, he thought he could sit next to me, chat me up, i.e. treat me differently from a Turkish girl or woman, but as soon as I reacted, he moved away. Don’t let anyone behave in a familiar way – they certainly can’t try that on a Turkish woman.

If you buy something in a shop, if the shopkeeper is male and is handing the bag to a female customer, he will probably hold the bag out to you in such a way that you can take it from him without touching his hands. This is a sign of respect, and also a sign that he does not want any physical contact with a woman who is not in his family. Apart from a small percentage of people who have lived abroad or are from very ‘Westernized’ families, males and females generally minimize the amount of contact that they have with each other. So two women will kiss and hug each other when they meet but a man and a woman might only greet each other verbally. I don't offer my hand (to shake hands) with a man. I wait and see if he extends his hand to me. Some men shake hands with women and some men prefer not to. This is also about being ritually clean for prayer. Even the concierge in our apartment building, who does the shopping for us, takes money out of my fingers without touching my fingers and puts the money in the palm of my hand without touching my hand. This is not meant to be insulting, quite the reverse it's a compliment and shows respect. Some taxi drivers try it on by deliberately flicking their fingers over my palm when giving me my change. This is the opposite behavior, and disrespectful.   

Many times I have been in clothing shop and the sales assistant has tried to interest me in something that I would never want to buy. I used to say, ‘oh well you know I don't really like the color’, ‘I don't really like that style’, etc. This way of talking is very British! I eventually realized the best way to stop a sales assistant from trying to push me to buy something that I really don't like is to say, ‘my husband doesn't like (leopard skin prints, glitter T-shirts, etc)’.  At first it made me angry that my word was not taken seriously but as soon as I mentioned my husband sales assistant backs off…. and then with time I realized that this all carries a different meaning here. Decisions made by husband and wife and the shared life of a husband and wife are given an importance which maybe has been lost a bit in Western Europe. Its quite normal that a husband’s preferences are given importance, isn’t it? But I doubt very many British women say that directly to a shop assistant. Culture…

One day I was talking to a taxi driver whose daughter won a place at a university in a city about 90 minutes from Istanbul. He requested his wife to move to the other city with their daughter. They rented an apartment for the two of them there so the wife could keep an eye on the daughter and make sure that she didn't get into any bad habits or hang out with the wrong kind of friends. He continued to work as a taxi driver in Istanbul for four years until his daughter finished university. This is considered totally normal. I know many families who moved to a new city, sometimes even retiring from their previous jobs, in order to be able to look after they university-aged children. Children are watched over until they are married, especially girls. The idea that for example UK families allow their children to go off to university and share a flat with other students, possibly even with male and female students in the same flat (!) Is considered quite bizarre by most people in Turkey. Not everyone, mind, but many!”

This is just one small area where the trainers may experience a bit of culture shock.... and of course there are many more.

Parochial care:

We try hard to provide support to trainers even if they are not close by. Using email, text messages and phone calls we try to maintain direct lines of communication. We give SIM cards to one trainer in each group so we can reach them. We also appoint a key contact person in their school who should follow them and help them with their questions. 

This year we called each person in the schools but I think for next year we should produce a booklet in English and Turkish for the key contact people where we outline the typical issues that come up and explain what we would like them to do. (This has been added to my to-do list)

Next.... we will consider the support and parochial care teachers need to benefit fully from a professional development course.