Between rhetoric and actual practice in compulsory teachers’ meetings. A case study of Mexican teachers’ experience

Abstract

This work depicts basic education teachers and agents’ attitudes within the officially-mandated Teachers’ Meetings sessions. The Ministry of Education’s rhetoric states that such meetings are to be collective spaces for reflection and commitment development to foster students learning processes and, thus, eradicate any possibility of educational failure or lagging behind. However, this research aims to unveil the existing gap between such a rhetoric and what truly takes place inside the sessions allotted for Teachers’ Meeting in basic education schools. The study followed an interpretative paradigm in qualitative research methodology, specifically the multiple case study, as it aimed to understand the practices carried out inside Teachers’ Meetings. Teachers, specialists, and principals’ impressions were gathered through the application of data-collection techniques such as observation, interviews, and focus groups. The results showed that while school authorities hold an optimistic vision for the outcomes of such meetings, the sessions’ content drifts far away from each institution’s needs. The reason is that the official rhetoric fails to address the real problems faced by each individual school. Likewise, it was found that, according to teachers’ experience, improvement strategies ought to be contextualized to the reality faced by the students in each school. This work concludes that there is no alignment between the official rhetoric and the actual practices followed in the Meeting sessions, for these usually focus on administrative workload issues which have nothing to do with any intention of improving the quality of education, and, thus, seem to merely give the appearance of institutional compliance.