Natasa Simic is a researcher in the Institute of Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy from Belgrade University.

What is the current situation in Serbia regarding the crisis of teachers shortage and how does it relate to teachers' motivation?

It’s a very complex issue, we actually have struggled with the number of teachers and the interest of young people in the teaching profession for nearly a decade. The main issue is related to teachers' status; the view and the perceptions of the general public about the teaching profession.

Our research showed that although teacher’s salaries are not competitive, they really like their job and they love working with children; what they are not happy with is the lack of recognition of their work.

The general status of their profession and the misconceptions that people have, for example, that teachers have long holidays and that they don’t work that much, is something that really hurts teachers as the general public don’t understand their position and the many obligations and responsibilities they have. When we conducted the research on the motivation of students for the teaching profession, there were two groups of distinct pre-service teachers, those who really want to work with children - who are intrinsically motivated for the profession - and a small group of pre-service teachers with extrinsic motivation. The latter group would like to embrace the profession because of their idea that teachers have long holidays and short working hours. Actually, they are not aware of all the duties teachers have, they believe they will have a lot of leisure and family time.

One additional thing that is concerning, is that these teachers typically have a need or desire to be authorities in front of kids. We fear that these teachers, who can maybe misuse their opportunity to be in front of 20 or 30 students, will use their authority in a negative way.

Was your research only focused on Serbian teachers? If so, were you able to find this same trend in the motivation of pre-service teachers?

When we did the study we explored the situation in other countries. I read many reports from different countries, but in general we collected data only from Serbian teachers.

We identified a trend, the majority of pre-service teachers were intrinsically motivated and around 10 to 20% were extrinsically motivated and more interested in using their authority and having a lot of time for leisure. What we also see as a trend is that those who are really enthusiastic when they enter the profession, suffer a decrease in their motivation due to the reality shock.

Many of them get exhausted very soon because they want to achieve a lot but face many obstacles - lack of resources, lack of understanding on the part of other colleagues or parents -, and some of them experience burnout and leave the profession.

We lose many great students and enthusiastic teachers in the first three or even less years. Those who remain try to cope with all these issues in their everyday work and you can see that their motivation is lower than in the beginning, but they still express that they like teaching and working with children, what burdens them are other aspects related to the profession, such as working with other teachers, the schools principals, politics, parents and administrative work.

What is your opinion about what can be done to adjust the curriculum and better prepare teachers for the job?

Initial teacher training is the most important part in their professional development. However, there are few positive examples in Serbia, usually this pedagogical part of psychological school practice is not the most important in their curriculum, which is more focused on maths or chemistry, but then they lack school practice. Usually, the pedagogical part is included as a formal activity: they go for a week, observe some classes, get a certificate and that’s it. They are not accompanied by mentors, aren’t exposed to good practices, so there are a lot of possibilities to improve pre-service education.

Another problem are the teachers that work at a faculty level, and who could teach these pedagogical and psychological courses, but their position in the faculties is also bad, they are not perceived as scientists, they struggle with publishing their papers and are not acknowledged by their colleagues. In these conditions, they are also not that motivated to teach future teachers, so it’s a vicious circle.

Another problem is that teachers lack support in the first years, when they enter school they are monitored by a mentor during one year, but it’s not used as an opportunity to empower teachers.

What pre-service teachers miss is definitely this psychological support, even if they have good mentors, who use innovative methods or have good relations with parents and students, they are not trained to provide any kind of psychological support and usually the future teachers are under stress and don’t know how to cope with it.

In Serbia, one problem is that the system is centralised. That's something that has been happening intensely in the last few years, the Ministry appoints principals, so school teachers don’t have any power to choose or to reject someone. Typically these people are not the most successful teachers or the best managers, and when they see young and enthusiastic people, they give them so much work, they actually end up speeding up burnout.

In the different dimensions that you pointed out - political, organisational, teachers and students - what type of measures would you implement to improve this situation, if you had the power to?

First, I think the status and position in society is the burning issue. You can attract more people to this profession if the status is better; teachers will be happier and probably more productive if their status is better. I think that increasing the salaries should be one of the priorities and also providing resources, so that teachers could have Internet connections, computers, freedom to choose their professional development. Teachers don’t have the basic resources, like computers, and they cannot implement some of the things they learn.

Currently, teachers have to attend and participate in different types of workshops or conferences for their professional development, but usually they have to pay for it. And then there are situations in which the school chooses one seminar and pays for it, and of course teachers attend it even if they are not interested in the topic or are already proficient in that specific topic or area; they cannot create their own career path.

This is the first thing at a system level that I would change - advancement opportunities and more freedom and autonomy to choose which direction for their professional development. Again this is a problem of centralisation, of lack of autonomy, if teachers would be allowed to choose their principals it would be a better option. When you have a principal who is appointed by a Minister, it’s a more political figure and teachers don’t feel comfortable sharing their ideas; critical thinking is not supported, instead status quo is, teachers refrain from trying out new methods because they will be accused of working too much, and they actually don’t get more money by doing it. This atmosphere totally empties what we in literature describe as the professional learning community - this is a non-learning closed community.

Another problem regarding the career path is that there are no advancement opportunities in the system, they are prescribed by the law, but in reality, all teachers have the same salary. Then you have those teachers who are very motivated and spend their own money to attend training and learn new things, and at the end they have the same position, the same title and the same salary as others. Maybe the basic salary doesn’t have to increase a lot, but there must be a system to reward those who are more engaged, that can include, for instance, new opportunities to go abroad and job shadowing bringing innovative practices back to Serbia to be implemented here.

At a school level, more freedom and autonomy to speak up is needed, and at the level of teachers we should go back to pre-service teacher education so they have more competences and experience from school practices. A better connection between schools and universities, and between universities is also needed if we want to change the current situation.

At our faculty we invite teachers from chemistry to join psychology students, who will be future school counsellors, and they work together on preparing individual education plans. These types of exchange are always useful but they are not encouraged and, consequently, don’t happen as regularly as they should.

Explore recent studies from the author Natasa Simic here.