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Trends in Teacher Education
Alka Behari
Introduction
Who are teachers? How can they be made? These are simple questions, yet they encompass a complex, contradictory and constantly changing set of responses. If teaching is considered an art, the selection and identification abilities would, perhaps, provide the answer. However, if teaching is considered a science then testing and verifiable ‘training’ experiences would be an answer. However, if teaching is visualized in a broad perspective then one may need to draw upon a combined approach to make ‘good’ teachers. Nevertheless, one may say, with confidence, that there is no single and unifying theory of teacher education existing today; therefore, the preparation of teachers and research are flexible frameworks rather than rigid conceptual modes.
In a democratic country such as India, where both individualism and diversity are enshrined in our constitutional ideals, there is bound to be flexibility and not to be conformity. So, we know today about the best practices and what works than ever before.
A Historical Backdrop
Looking at the historical perspective, one finds that teacher preparation was seen in the 1960s and 1970s to envisage a professional curriculum with technical theory and training in methodology, where students learnt rules for teaching various subjects and practiced them in the practicing school. Student-teachers observed model lessons given by ‘master’ teacher educators and, as apprentices, practiced approved methods, under close supervision. The trend changed, somewhat, in the 1980s, when it was realized that teaching should be concerned with the transmission of knowledge and the development of understanding. Moving further on, in the present decade, the role of ‘reflection’ and ‘critical’ inquiry in teacher preparation has gained tremendous importance. Further, it is also seen that the social, political and cultural forces continue to have shaped schools, teachers and teacher preparation. Currently, teachers need to have good knowledge of social, physical, emotional and cognitive well-being of the child as well as of pedagogy, subject matter content and its enactment. In addition, the teachers should have a thorough understanding of educational theory and practice. Side by side, one can assert that, along with expansion of knowledge, the research base in education, particularly teacher education, has exploded and diversified. Multiple research methodologies can be employed to examine all aspects of teacher education. In fact, since the days of Plato and Socrates, the question of effectiveness and quality has been at the core of research on teaching and teacher education. However, most of the thinking in the Indian context on quality improvement has addressed the need of increasing the repertoire of the teachers, through a target-oriented cascade model of training. This explains the popularity of the programmes such as PMOST run by the government, subsequent to the National Policy of Education, 1986.
Teaching as a Profession
From the conventional point of view, the notion of professionalism is connected with the assumption of expertise on the part of practitioners and the standards by which it is judged. As is often said, ‘professionals profess’, they profess to know better than others, the nature of certain work. In a simplistic understanding, teacher preparation is based upon the need to inculcate skills which are considered necessary for a teacher to operate effectively in the classroom. According to this point of view, teaching is like any other occupation, which requires the acquisition of a body of knowledge, in order that the job is undertaken. As, for example, a plumber possesses the techniques; therefore, a teacher is also expected to acquire knowledge related to ‘fill heads with facts’, testing whether this has been done and bringing about order in the classroom, so that the tasks could be performed. In this point of view, teaching may be seen as a simple job of short duration and long holidays. The status of the teacher, accordingly, has been that of a person who largely looks after children and makes them literate. This variability in the way in which teachers have been traditionally viewed has had an impact upon teacher education. On the other hand, one may perceive teaching in terms of upward mobility — and many people enter into teaching, just as they enter other helping or ‘caring’ occupations, such as nursing. Thus, teaching becomes gendered and class based, as are all caring professions. According to this, teacher training is given, by which future teachers can complete their formal education, acquire classroom competencies and are inducted into the world of schooling. It becomes clear that teaching has seldom been seen to possess the aura and mystique attached to other established professions, such as law and medicine. Rather, it is an activity which requires the possession of varying degrees of knowledge and skills with which the teachers transmit the knowledge to students. Thus, what become important are measurable skills and competencies, rather than broad-based and liberal academic study. This technical view of teacher training ‘suits’ schools that have established cultures into which newly qualified teachers should be inducted.
This is one side of the scenario, that is, the ‘school side’. On the other side, we must remember, are the teacher-training institutions which have the requisite expertise to provide students with a broad overview of pedagogy and educational issues. In spite of this, however, the teaching profession has not been able to develop a coherent and co-ordinated view of its role and function in relation to children, learning, parents and society. It is, also, said that teachers need to be trained in a manner, which ensures the successful transmission of core skills and knowledge, which would contribute to national development. However, putting such an arduous task on the shoulders of teachers does not appear to be matched by the status and power that we ascribe to the profession. In fact, teachers and teacher educators are, very often, blamed for falling standards, student indiscipline and so on.
What one now witnesses is a plethora of changes, which continue to affect both the structure and the content of teacher education, and force us to critique and review our understanding of teachers as professionals and teaching as a profession.
Teaching and Teachers
It is important to remember that quality and effectiveness is more that what can be achieved by the earlier discussed factory model of teacher ‘training’ . Teaching has to be understood as a complex process and one can describe various profiles of an ideal teacher, with implications for the elements of the teacher preparation programmes that produce them. This would, perhaps, enable us to answer the questions about effectiveness and quality better. In the first profile, the teacher-education programme prepares new teachers to behave like ‘good’ teachers in schools and classrooms. They are prepared to cope with real world problems, provided with technical skills and maintain status quo. In the second profile, knowledge of the core subject matter discipline enable the teachers to be ‘good’ subject teachers. Thus, the methods and pedagogy courses, during teacher preparation, assume importance. The third profile maintains that teacher education should address personal development and development of a personal style of teaching. In this point of view, teacher preparation would subsume knowledge of human development and skills to create a positive learning environment. In the fourth profile, teacher preparation should provide a source of innovation for schools. In the fifth profile, the reflective practitioner focuses on the need to challenge teachers to inquire into the nature of teaching, to think critically and make decisions about using particular skills.
Perspectives on Learning to Teach and Teacher Preparation
Drawing upon the above discussed profiles, varying perspectives emerge with respect to learning to teach. The context in which the teachers work has been found to be one of the major influences upon the ways in which teachers work. New teachers are influenced a lot by existing practices and beliefs within the school. Thus, they get socialized into the culture of the school. Another perspective, on learning to teach, emphasizes the knowledge and skills that contribute to classroom practice. Teachers, with experience, learn to understand their practice and have knowledge to deal with complex classroom situations. Recent research on the subject-matter knowledge of teachers indicates that teachers relearn their subject and develop a new body of knowledge, concerning the teaching of the subject — sometimes called pedagogical content knowledge. Yet another emerging perspective on learning to teach is that teaching is a practical, intellectual and even a moral activity. The term moral is included because, according to this view, teaching involves caring for children, keeping in mind their interests and needs, and, above all, respecting them as individuals. Therefore, a teacher needs to gain knowledge and understanding and be prepared to teach. In addition to this, teachers bring their own experiences of schoolwork and home, which provide them with the ways of thinking about teaching. This further shapes their preparation as teachers and their practice thereof. Thus, the personality of the teachers becomes important. In recent times, in teacher education, reflection has gained significance. Thereby, attempts are made to generate greater levels of reflection, among student-teachers, in the form of reflective journals and action research. Thus emerges the need to create a teacher-education course that helps students to become more analytical about their practice. However, it is very challenging. This is because it is difficult to foster reflection in schools, where more value is placed on immediate and spontaneous action, rather than analysis and reflection. However, researches in the area are focussing on identifying the skills, attitudes and conditions that promote reflection and enable greater levels of learning.
After discussing the above perspectives, it is imperative to highlight that the researches on teaching and the professional development of teachers point towards the complexity of teachers’ work. Each of the dimensions mentioned identifies an important set of variables and provides only a part of the scenario of the whole process of professional development. Learning to teach involves the development of technical skills, as well as an appreciation of moral issues in education, an ability to negotiate and develop the practice within the culture of the school and an ability to reflect and assess one’s practice. Such a view of teaching is, thus, in great contrast to the narrow understanding in terms of competencies and subject matter knowledge, as indicators of quality in teaching tend to oversimplify the complexity of the teacher’s work.
Viewing Trends in Teacher Education in the Context of Criticisms of Teacher Education
One may visualize the criticisms related to two aspects, namely, the organization of professional expertise required for classroom instruction and the course of development leading to a complete performance as a teacher.
Some of these criticisms could be listed as:
- All one needs is subject-matter knowledge, the rest is not necessary.
- Anyone can teach by following the prescribed text books.
- Most teacher educators know only theory, because they have no/little idea about the reality of schools, curriculum or children.
- The theory-practice gap is wide.
- One can really learn to teach by teaching, not by learning about teaching.
- Teacher educators know only how to critique the existing practice.
- Teachers are born, not made.
However, if one looks at teacher education and the trends, it becomes clear that each one of the above mentioned criticisms can be refuted. Trend studies of researches, in the area of teacher education, reveal that there is a lot of empirical evidence to show that it is those teachers who are high, both in teaching experience and subject-matter knowledge (i.e. they have subject competence and pedagogical education and experience), who are the strongest. What is now emerging is a model of development of expertise, which suggests that it takes quality time to proceed from a novice stage of development to the more mature stage in teaching. Regarding subject matter, it may be asserted that it is important for future teachers to be able to translate subject-matter knowledge into cognitive structures, which are useful for their students. The criticism of the missing theory practice interface and the alienated role of teacher educators can be addressed by the growing realization, that a strong field-based programme of teacher education is a necessity, so that student-teachers can practice what is termed professional and procedural knowledge (e.g. how to do things such as making a lesson plan) in real-world contexts. This, also, calls for a much-wanted scheme of mentoring in teachers. The trained mentor teachers would enable us to bridge several of the existing gaps in present teacher-education programmes.
One needs to understand a broad framework of ‘good’ or effective teaching before one, actually, enters the world of work. Teaching has to be understood as a collaborative and shared experience among all the teachers of a school. Regarding teachers being born, not made, the recent trends are pointing towards and giving evidence to studies of expertise, which is a new area of cognitive psychology. It is also emerging that teacher-education is about deliberate practice. This gets reiterated by the understanding that it is an extremely complex and developmental a process. What follows is that there is a need for high quality teacher education programmes —programmes which are on-going and continuous.
What then of Teacher Education
What kind of individuals should the high-quality teacher-education programme prepares? Five sub-questions can be raised to answer this major question:
- Does he/she have experience of teaching?
- Does he/she have some generic skills of teaching?
- Does he/she have some personal characteristics?
- Does he/she know and understand his/her subject?
- Does he/she understand the educational function of his/her subject?
If the answer to each of these questions is yes, we have a good reason to be satisfied. Practical experience of teaching does enlarge an understanding. Therefore, what need to be further thought about are the duration, nature and form of the practicum in a teacher-education programme. The generic skills are not the essence, but one component of teacher education. Possession of desirable personal characteristics may be considered important criteria in teacher selection and their development can, definitely, be fostered by teacher-education programmes. The notion of pedagogical knowledge is widely accepted and so, also, they need to understand educational theory.
Thus, to put it simply, we not only need, for example, mathematics teachers who are able to teach modern mathematics effectively, but who are able to impress children with a love for the subject itself. There is, also, an increasing demand in schools for the ‘new’ specializations, such as teaching English as a second language, teaching foreign languages, providing multi-cultural education and maintaining inclusive classrooms. The demand is to improve the quality of experiences made available to our future teachers.
In a nutshell, one can say that we need reflective practitioners, no doubt, but they should have a sound understanding of philosophy, psychology and sociology — that is, they should be informed by general principles of teaching and learning. This is the challenge for teacher education in the future.
Conclusion
Teaching is a complex and highly skilled activity which, above all, requires teachers to exercise judgement in deciding how to act. High-quality teaching and, thus, pupil learning are dependent on the existence of such professional expertise. Thus, from a study of the trends in teacher education and teaching, it clearly impinges that teachers need to be well educated, sensitive, intelligent and capable of learning from both theory and experiences. They need to be action researchers and reflective practitioners, who like children and working with them and their ideas.
Thus, one may begin to understand that teacher education is undergoing massive transitions. The need to prepare a teacher in a more holistic perspective, which encompasses all the above-discussed profiles, appears to be significant. As teacher educators, we have to reiterate ourselves that teaching is a praxis. The professional development of teachers has to have two distinct, but interrelated foundations — practice based on reflection and reflection based on practice. Thus, the theory-practice interface needs to be strengthened. As an example, in Delhi, the development of a four-year integrated degree programme for teacher education, at the elementary level, is a case in point. It is a step to professionalize the field of elementary education. At the same time, we need to prepare teachers at all levels, who would not merely ‘adjust’ to the school culture, but would rise above and contribute to the process of social change — this being perceived in the context of the notion of school as a sub-system.
The trend report on ‘Teacher and Teaching’, in the sixth survey of educational research, says: “teachers, teaching and teacher education are closely linked. Their inter-relation and inter-connectedness is, almost, axiomatic. There is a need to have a critical look at the making and unmaking of teaching as a profession and teacher education as a discipline.”
Further Reading
Hartley, D. and Whitehead, M. (Eds.), 2006, Teacher Education: Major Themes in Education. New York: Routledge.
Muijs, D. and Reynold, D., 2001, Effective Teaching. London: Sage Publications.
National Focus Group, 2005, Teacher Education for Curriculum Renewal, Position Paper, National Curriculum Framework (NCF). New Delhi: NCERT.
Saha, L. and Dworkin, A.G. (Eds.), 2009, International Handbook of Research on Teachers and Teaching. New York, Parts I and II: Springer Science + Business Media L.L.C.
Sikula, J., 1996, Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company.
Zeichner, K.M. and Tabachnich, B.R., 2001, Reflections on reflective teaching. In Soler, J., Craft, A. and Burgess, H. (Eds.), Teacher Development: Exploring Our Own Practice. London: Sage Publications.