From the lecture hall directly in front of the class. This is roughly how the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder imagines the future teaching degree in Bavaria. The CSU politician wants to introduce a mandatory practical semester for student teachers and thus counteract the shortage of teachers in Bavaria, said Söder at the end of January at an election campaign event in Kloster Banz. But the voices against the proposal are just as loud as he announced his proposal to reform the teaching profession.
Associations warn against scaring students away with a practical semester: “Anyone who doesn’t get the best support and notices how chaotic it is, we’ll lose it,” warns Simone Fleischmann, President of the Bavarian Teachers’ Association (BLLV). In the current teacher shortage situation, good support from experienced teachers is hardly possible.
One thing is clear: Bavaria needs more teachers. In 2022, ten percent of the positions in Germany could not be filled. This was shown by a Forsa survey of 1,308 head teachers, including 250 in Bavaria. Many Bavarian schools are already employing career changers. But even that is not enough. So now the students should move from theory to practice earlier – to fill in the gaps.
But it’s not that simple, warns the BLLV. The association has published a position paper that describes how the practical semester should ideally look like. It includes regular orientation talks, portfolios, parents’ evenings, conferences, job shadowing and yes, also self-guided lessons – but only under supervision and good guidance. But who should instruct students well when teachers are already overwhelmed with their own tasks, asks the President of the BLLV. “Actually, trained teachers should take the time to teach students something. Hours should be scheduled to get together. In the current situation, they can’t do it at all.”
In other federal states, students are already being used for substitution hours
In other federal states, the practical semester has existed for a long time. But here, too, students are increasingly reporting that they are being used for substitute classes. Georg C. Hoffmann, chairman of the Young Philologists at the German Association of Philologists, has collected reports on the practical semester. “It often happened that we were ‘allowed’ to step in,” one student wrote to him. And another: “The teacher basically did not provide any material for the canceled hours, but said we should think of something for the units.”
Beginners all alone in front of the class? Experts at Bavaria’s universities take a critical view of this. “The idea of filling staff gaps is the wrong approach,” says Andreas Hartinger, chair of primary school education and primary school didactics at the University of Augsburg. Hartinger is generally open to a practical semester in which students take on responsibility for their own teaching. Ideally, however, this should only take place after the third or fourth semester and only under supervision. “If that doesn’t happen, it can lead to crashes.” Barbara Drechsel from the University of Bamberg does not see any added value in the practical semester compared to previous internships in Bavaria. It does not increase the effect on the competences or the appearance of students.
The Bavarian Parents’ Association is no less skeptical: Older students could perhaps be motivated if someone “who is almost the same age leads the class,” says deputy state chair Henrike Paede. But if the students had to fill in the gaps, the quality of the teaching would suffer.
But what exactly would such a practical semester look like? In the end, that would probably also depend on the respective university. Teaching falls under academic freedom. Universities and colleges can decide for themselves how they want to implement the practical semester. “They can check the quality and support teachers if they want to. Otherwise it just won’t happen,” says Gerhard Brand, the federal chairman of the Association for Education and Training.