Directly-elected lawmaker-cum-social worker Nick Lei Leong Wong has submitted a written interpellation urging the government to further reduce work-related stress and burnout among teachers and support teachers for a more secure retirement.
In his interpellation, which was released on Friday, Lei said that in order to promote smart teaching services, alleviate teachers’ work-related pressure and enhance teaching quality by means of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the Education and Youth Development Bureau (DSEDJ) launched its “Pilot Scheme on Smart Teaching” in the 2022/2023 academic year, with a view to progressively building a service platform centred on smart teaching functions such as a smart-question bank and smart marking, as well as using artificial intelligence and big data to achieve personalised and precise teaching and learning. The interpellation quoted the bureau’s statistics as pointing out that as of the current school year, the programme had covered 25 school divisions.
Lei acknowledged that the bureau has “very high” expectations for the programme to utilise information technology (IT) to reduce teachers’ preparation time and to use AI systems to automatically generate and correct examination papers. However, he added, in practice, some teachers consider that the setting and marking of examination papers was an interactive process in teaching and learning, which was difficult to completely replace by technology.
In the interpellation, Lei also quoted teachers as pointing out that the contents of examination papers come in various forms, some of which, such as quizzes, are open-ended, and that it was difficult to match all the answers of students with those of their peers in terms of the right and wrong settings, adding that even in the case of closed-book questions such as multiple-choice questions, the format of the students’ inputs may affect the answers in terms of deviation.
Regarding work-related stress among teachers, the Post has recently talked to a non-tertiary education school teacher, surnamed Ng, via WeChat, who divided her work pressure into three areas, namely, interpersonal, parental, and student performance.
“In addition to teaching, teachers also have to prepare lessons, which means that they also need to prepare power point presentations (PPTs) and lesson plans, plan teaching activities for students during classes, apart from preparing, correcting and grading home assignments, which may take a long time, such as a whole morning, a whole day, or even several days,” Ng said, adding that teachers are also required to attend various training courses after work from Mondays to Fridays, on Saturdays and even Sundays.
Apart from the tasks assigned by supervisors and principals, according to Ng, the pressure at work also includes communication with colleagues and parents, as well as students’ performance assessment, in which teachers are also tasked with helping students after school to improve their performance.
Concern about teachers’ secure retirement
Meanwhile, in his interpellation, Lei also raised concern about teachers’ secure retirement, saying that as the salary calculation of most of the schools in Macau consists of their teachers’ base salary combined with other allowances, the mandatory provident fund levies paid for some teachers by their schools are actually quite low when the proportion of their mandatory provident fund levy is calculated based on their base salary only, which made it difficult to protect their quality of life in retirement, urging the government to enhance retirement protection for teachers through other means, such as by increasing their annual allowance and adopting a gradual approach to raise the proportion of the allowance payable to teachers who have been in the teaching profession for a certain number of years.
This undated file photo taken from the People’s Alliance of Macau (API –民眾建澳聯盟) shows its president Nick Lei Leong Wong, a directly-elected lawmaker-cum-social worker, posing.
