From needs analysis to curriculum development
For the last four decades, in order for somebody to be considered employable in Greece, all they needed to present was a certification to prove English acquisition of some level from B2 to C2 level according to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) to score qualification points for the national, independent qualifications assessment board called ASEP.
Certificate acquisition became an instant trend. Knowledge acquisition was rendered obsolete and unnecessary
Thus, the TEFL (Teaching English as a foreign Language) world and community in Greece suffered the mirror effect.
ELT (English Language Teaching) publishers and…
The public sector in Greece was the country’s main employer for over 4 decades. In the early 1990s the government introduced a series of measures in order to reduce the increasing influx of under qualified employees in a rapidly overstaffed near saturated public sector.
One of the measures introduced was language acquisition. Another measure was founding the national independent qualifications assessment board called ASEP. The combination of the former and the latter was to later take a toll on on one of Greece’s biggest private service providing industries that counts over 8,500 private schools.
For the last four decades, in…
Why is the Greek educational system so slow in responding to reforms in education and has this had any kind of impact on the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) field in Greece?
Taking a look at the infrastructure of Greek society, there are some very solid assumptions to be drawn and conclusions to be made before that question can be answered.
At least two generations have been conditioned and raised in a completely obsolete and unchanged-for over 40 years- educational system whose personal experiences and conditioned perceptions have led them to believe that learning is what happens at…
Education as a whole has been in a recession for over 40 years. It has been globally acknowledged that the industrial model of education no longer provides any service to its purpose.
Many more go one step further to advocate that the current education systems are becoming toxic for our own students, not before providing very valid and solid arguments that suggest just that such as in the cases of TED talks
by Goffrey Canada and
by Joshua Katz.
Our students and children are being taught how and what to think while standardized rigid testing can no longer…
The story behind the story…
Teaching English as a Foreign Language as it is most commonly known is one of the biggest service providing industries in Greece.
Greece has one of the biggest percentages of non-native English speaking populations in the world. This is the direct result of the fact that Greece’s largest industry and champion bread winner is its tourist industry.
Going as far back as post world war I Greece, there was a great demand for English teachers and a very short supply. As a result, at some point the British Council set up its offices in Athens in 1939. …
On Sunday June 12th I had the opportunity of not only attending but also participating as a guest panel speaker at the Athens Oxford Day 2016 organised by Oxford University Press Greece as part of Oxford University’s aim for continuing education and promoting English Language Teaching in Greece.
The venue was at the Eugenides Foundation and added a posh sense to the day.
The event began at 10.00 am on Sunday morning and ended at 5.30 pm in the evening. The presentations and the speakers were all unknown to me as I am located and live in a different city.
…
A whole month of every year is dedicated by the Greek Educational system (from mid May- mid June) to strict raw streamline testing.
In my attempt as an educator to let my students know that I am on their side, that I sympathize with them during this monthly ordeal they are faced with, I find myself posting the same song on Facebook year upon year. It could be no other than Pink Floyd’s “Another brick in the wall”.
It took Finland over 40 years to create an educationl system which would be student friendly and therefore would benefit the country and its economy in the long run. That is the story of Finland’s educational success story in a nutshell which also manages to have the “happiest” students in the world in the process.
My daughter was happy, she was learning, the system seemed to be working.
Now let’s take the Greek version of education. My daughter who just turned 8 is in her 2nd year of primary school. In her 1st year she had a very talented &…
The Greek Educational system is one of the most fundamentally flawed systems to be encountered globally.
It is not the curriculum itself that imposes real learning to take place outside the classroom environmnet that makes Greece one of the few countries where children go to school in the morning and then have to go to private schools (tutoring) again in the afternoon only to be taught what they were not in their public schools in the morning. …
Where does education stand today?
There is and has been much concern over the last decade about where education is heading, the real purposes it is serving and the skill sets it is providing students.
In addition, there has always been that constant ongoing conflict between academians/scholars on the one side and educators/teachers on the other. The former are more than just often totally disconnected and oblivious to the realities and challenges of a 21st century classroom environment and who still advocate 20th century textbook methodologies and approaches while the latter fight their everyday battles in the digital era, in…
