Faced with the continuing shortage of teachers in the school system, the attitudes displayed by officials at the Ministry of Education would suggest that they are helpless or overwhelmed by this situation. However, university research suggests possible solutions that could well allow school service centres (CSS) to counter this shortage of teaching staff.
Here, I present four possible solutions resulting from an exploratory research on the analysis of the teacher shortage. This research was conducted as part of my master’s degree, under the supervision of Martial Dembélé, professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Montreal.
1. Diversify the data. Providing a sustainable solution to the current teacher shortage will necessarily require the establishment of strategic planning mechanisms capable of anticipating the quantitative and qualitative needs of the teaching workforce. To do this, the availability of data, their reliability and their communicability are essential for effective decision-making.
However, the data needed for this planning do not come exclusively from the education sector. They also come from other sectors that have an impact on school enrollment, including immigration, the economy with the unemployment rate, and demography with the birth rate, to name just a few. Diversifying data sources seems necessary to us because the shortage is a multifactorial phenomenon involving factors internal and external to education. It will thus make it possible to take into account all the complexity surrounding the phenomenon and the evolution of trends in factors that have more impact on the demand for teachers.
2. Multiply the surveys. The factors of teacher shortages within the profession include the attractiveness of the profession, retirements and dropouts. Among these factors, dropouts are the most difficult cause to anticipate. Because, according to studies, personal factors, such as the resilience of the teacher and his relationship with the profession, must be considered alongside organizational factors and those related to the exercise of the task.
Studies also show that leaving does not happen spontaneously, but always begins with an intention, a variable that these studies focus on to understand the causes that prompt teachers to leave the teaching profession. It is with this in mind that I propose to regularly assess the intention to leave using surveys in order to help teachers most at risk of dropping out.
3. Promote a better image of the profession. The various problems surrounding the teaching profession, including difficult relationships between teachers and students and psychological distress among teachers, send a bad image to young people and can therefore dissuade them from choosing teaching as a first career. Combined with external attractiveness factors such as the length of training and salary, these internal problems continue to project, against the grain of professionalization efforts, the orthodox image from before the Quiet Revolution, according to which teaching would be a vocational activity and not a professional exercise.
One way to counter this negative perception is to act on working conditions. To achieve this, I propose to focus on the specialization of the task, unlike people opting for a reduction in workload.
4. Provide a support position for each teaching position. In addition to the essential tasks of teaching (planning, teaching, evaluating and collaborating), the teacher sees himself as being, at the same time or depending on the situation, a psychologist, sociologist, expert in conflict resolution, expert in interculturality, etc. In short, the teacher has the obligation to be versatile.
Because teaching is a complex and very demanding activity. Compared to the medical profession, where most tasks are specialized (the medical profession is made up of 60 specialties, according to the Collège des médecins du Québec), which requires the intervention of several specialists, depending on the case, teaching rests only on the shoulders of teachers and a few specialist colleagues who are often unavailable. This situation creates pressure on teachers, pushing them to burnout and, consequently, to abandon the profession.
As an alternative, it would be desirable to opt for a specialization of the teaching task by starting by limiting professional responsibilities to the four functions mentioned above. Considering that this limitation of responsibilities does not reduce the complexity of the learning needs of students, the creation of a teaching support position for each position in preschool, primary and secondary education would be a step in the right direction.