THE ROLE OF TEACHERS-PRACTITIONERS IN THE CYCLE OF EDUCATIONAL POLICIES AND REFORMS

Abstract

With the increasingly emphasized platitudes “Europeanization”, ”modernization”, and “updating”, the educational process in the Republic of North Macedonia (RNM) is constantly under pressure from the so-called creation of educational policies, reform, and changes translated into concepts, strategies, decrees, regulations, protocols, etc. The question arises, why the reforms projected by certain educational policies are unsuccessful, and often are not directly implemented into practice? The answer can be found, if an analysis of the communication between state institutions, decision-makers, and employees in educational institutions, i.e. teachers, is made. In this sense, with this paper, we want to analyze how teachers experience these reforms and how much they participate in them. Teachers-practitioners are assigned the main role in the implementation of educational policies and reforms, putting them into practice.
Teachers, in fact, are only active in this phase (imposed). However, to achieve meaningful results and truly implement reforms, teachers need to be involved in all stages of the cycle. The identification of the problem can only be said by the practitioners who are directly and daily dealing with the problems. Teachers are an important source of information that plays a significant role in the adoption of educational policies. This means that continuous cooperation and partnership should be established between those who make decisions in the field of education and teachers, as well as recognize and respect teacher-practitioners as important actors in the process of reforming education. Only in that way, the reforms will not meet resistance, will be relevant, the expected goals will be achieved and teachers will be motivated to apply them.
With this research, we want to see how much are the teachers involved in the creation of these educational policies, reforms and strategies, and concepts, in other words, how much are practitioners asked in the creation of educational policies.