Teacher Education

In 1995 there were approximately 46 million primary and secondary school teachers in the world's formal education systems. A little more than 3 million of them were in the United States and Canada.

Initial teacher education throughout the world has five main features, all representing decisions regarding key issues. These are: recruitment, curriculum, structure, governance, and accreditation and standards. This article focuses on the first three issues.

Recruitment

Among the most important features of teacher education are the criteria and procedures by which candidates are selected or recruited for entry to programs and institutions. Unlike some other professions, teaching often suffers from a shortage of qualified candidates for admission. Therefore, teaching often does not enjoy the privilege of being able to select the best qualified from among a large pool of applicants. The problem for a system is, first, ensuring that there is a large enough pool of qualified graduates to meet the needs of the professions and, second, attracting enough qualified applicants to enter teaching in competition with the other professions.

How much schooling should a candidate for admission to teacher education have? How valuable are experiences outside school for prospective teachers? If the demand for fully qualified applicants for admission to teacher education programs is greater than the supply, are there alternative qualifications that might satisfy the demand? These are some of the issues confronted in attempts made to recruit candidates for entry to teaching. Factors influencing recruitment include the status of the teaching profession; the supply of, and demand for, teachers; and the economic resources of the system.

An example of the status of the profession affecting recruitment can be seen in Thailand. In 1996 it was reported that the low status of the teaching profession in Thailand was discouraging competent people from entering teaching and that some entrants were not seriously committed to becoming teachers. For Thailand, therefore, the need to improve the status of teaching and to provide other incentives for joining the profession was important.

Raymond Bolam pointed out that the career structure of the profession is also influential, contrasting the situation in the United Kingdom, where a head teacher might earn four times as much as a beginning teacher, with the situation in Spain, where head teachers received only a small increase in salary above that of their colleagues. Presumably, in Spain, candidates motivated by prospects of economic advancement are less likely to enter teaching than they are in the United Kingdom, other things being equal.

Another important aspect of recruitment concerns the number of years of schooling candidates have completed before entry to training institutions. While in most developed countries completion of a full eleven or twelve years of schooling is a normal requirement, that is an unrealistic expectation in a country that is unable to produce a sufficient number of such graduates to meet its needs for teachers. Toward the end of the twentieth century, in the central and south Asian countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, the mean number of years of schooling required before entry to teacher training was 10.7 years. In the southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines, it was 10.5 years, while in the Latin American countries of Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia, it was 9.3 years. In the African countries of Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Kenya, the mean was 9.6 years.

This is not to say that the only qualifications accepted for entry to teacher education are the number of years of schooling or level of academic achievement. In some countries, candidates are recruited without completing the full secondary education available because of their valuable experience in other types of activities beyond formal schooling, such as employment and community development work, and their strong motivation to become teachers. In Australia, for example, universities like the University of Sydney offer such candidates programs specially designed to take advantage of their strengths.

Structure

Most systems provide teacher education in face-to-face situations to students attending institutions of higher education. However, many teachers around the world receive substantial components of their training through distance education. Beginning near the end of the 1950s, this approach involved the use of postal services for the delivery of learning materials to students remote from an institution, and the sending back of completed assignments by the students. The correspondence elements of this model were supplemented with tutorials conducted at centers located within reach of enough students to form a group. On a number of occasions tutors would meet with the groups to render the process in more motivating social contexts and to deal with students at a more personal level. Sometimes students traveled to the campuses for residential schools. Telephone hook-ups were also arranged by land line or even satellite. Two Australian universities, the University of New England and the University of Queensland, pioneered this approach to distance teacher education. As technical electronic advances occurred with the introduction of personal computers and electronic mail the process became much faster and more efficient. Distance education is a relatively inexpensive approach that is especially useful in locations where populations are sparse and distances are great.

The duration of teacher education programs varies across systems from a year or less to four or even five years. That range exists in quite a variety of countries and seems not always to depend on the economic development level of the countries concerned. Among the African developing countries of Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Morocco, and Kenya, the range in 1990 was from one to five years. In Australia, recruits who have completed three-or four-year university bachelor's degrees can complete a professional teaching qualification in one year, while most choose to enter teaching immediately after completing secondary schooling and then take up to four years to complete a bachelor of education degree.

The crucial factor is the foundation on which the professional training is based. Sometimes systems try to compensate for lack of a full secondary education in its recruits by adding time to the training program in which to supply missing knowledge and skills. However, this can increase the costs of teacher education to prohibitive levels.

One of the chief controversies in initial teacher education in more developed countries in the second half of the twentieth century was whether professional components of programs should be offered concurrently with academic components or consecutively. It became commonly accepted that concurrent programs were preferable. However, fluctuations in teacher supply and demand, and the demands of other programs in universities often resulted in decisions being adopted on the basis of practicalities rather than ideals, so that consecutive programs began to take precedence. Continuous, or concurrent, programs tend to introduce professional components early and in close association with general education and specialist academic studies. Consecutive programs, sometimes called "end-on" programs, delay the introduction of professional components until general and specialist studies have been completed.

Especially controversial during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were the relationships between the university or college offering the programs and the schools for which the student teachers were being prepared. Traditionally, schools provided professional experiences during the practicum component of the program, perhaps for up to three periods of three or four weeks a year. However, the role of the schools in initial teacher education generally became greater during those decades. In some cases, the school became the locus of the program, with student teachers being based in schools rather than in universities or colleges. Crucial to this controversy was the role of experienced teachers employed in the schools. Whereas it had been more usual for them to act as advisers and supervisors of initial school experience, they now sometimes undertook much more onerous responsibilities, such as designing and coordinating the whole program, with universities providing a supporting role and awarding the final qualification.

The types of institutions offering initial teacher education programs also vary from system to system. In some places, teacher education, especially at the elementary level, is offered in single purpose, state-run or private colleges known often as teachers colleges or colleges of education. In other countries, teacher education is offered by multipurpose institutions, sometimes called polytechnics, which are tertiary education institutions emphasizing training for a variety of occupations, for example paramedical services, occupational therapy, and journalism. During the 1990s both England and Australia restructured their higher education systems so that all such institutions became new universities or additional components of existing universities.

All of these institutions work in conjunction with early childhood, elementary, and secondary schools, which provide practice teaching experiences for teacher education students.

Curriculum

What do student teachers need to learn in order to become effective teachers in the contexts in which they will be employed? That is the most fundamental of all the questions that can be asked about teacher education. Initial teacher education programs usually have five strands: general education, specialist subjects, education foundation studies, professional studies, and the practicum, including practice teaching.

General education programs attempt to ensure that intending teachers have a sound grounding in the predominant knowledge, attitudes, and values of the cultures in which they are preparing to teach. General studies in history, the arts, science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, government, psychology, and sociology are common components of this strand.

Specialist subjects involve studies in depth, which qualify students to teach specific areas of knowledge. Literature and literacy, languages, history, geography, mathematics, science, computing, domestic science, physical education, and industrial arts are examples. Student teachers preparing to teach in elementary schools are usually expected to teach a broader range of content, whereas postelementary teachers are usually more specialized.

Education foundation studies include studies of the history of educational thought, principles of learning and teaching, human growth and development, comparative education, and sociology of education. Curriculum and instruction subjects provide units on principles and practice of planning, delivering and assessing learning experiences for students and include such matters as programming, classroom management skills, test construction, individualizing instruction, small group teaching methods, laboratory instruction, and cooperative learning techniques.

In some systems, the distinction between these theoretical and applied learnings is eschewed on the grounds that theoretical studies have little relevance to newcomers unless they are seen to arise from practice, and attempts are made to integrate the two. This was well exemplified in England in 1992, when, partly on the grounds that the content of teacher education was too theoretical, Kenneth Clarke, then the Secretary of State for Education, announced that 80 percent of programs in secondary teacher education should be "school-based." In North America, Bruce Joyce and Beverly Showers, among others, called for a more central role of the school in teacher education. A somewhat similar complaint about the excess of theory in the curriculum of teacher education programs was reported in 1991 by Andrea B. Rugh and colleagues with reference to Pakistan, and in 1986 by Linda A. Dove regarding Papua New Guinea.

In some parts of the world, the role of the teacher is wider than in others and the curriculum of teacher education is adjusted accordingly. In 1991 Beatrice Avalos described situations in Tanzania and Papua New Guinea that are useful examples of the risks encountered in such widening of the curriculum. In Tanzania, adherence was given to the belief that education should produce citizens who were self-reliant, especially as most children would not receive more than a basic education. Schools were to be community schools that inculcated "socialist" work habits; were self-supporting financially; emphasized knowledge and skills useful to the village or rural community; and encouraged the participation of the community in school activities. Pursuit of these goals necessitated a broadening of the teacher education curriculum at the same time as the length of the program was shortened in order to produce graduates more quickly. In consequence of these changes, the curriculum became overcrowded and content-centered with little time for practical components. Avalos claimed that the teachers did not even achieve sufficient competence to teach basic literacy and numeracy, and concluded that great caution needs to be exerted in training teachers for more than one purpose.

Providing actual teaching experience in real school situations (the practicum) is one of the most challenging tasks for planners of teacher education. Traditionally, in the elementary school context, the student teacher was placed with a volunteer school teacher and would be assigned lessons to design, prepare, and present under that teacher's guidance. Usually these lessons would number about three per day, after an initial period of orientation and observation, for about three weeks each year of the program. The teacher would provide feedback on a selection of those lessons but, in order to develop confidence and independence, would not be present for all of the lessons, especially toward the end of the period of practice teaching. The college or university in which the student teacher was enrolled would usually appoint one of its own faculty to supervise this process and that person would visit and observe the student teacher on several occasions and would have the responsibility of reporting on progress and awarding a grade, after discussing the experience with both the student and the cooperating teacher. Student teachers would often have other assignments to complete as well as those involving face-to-face teaching. For example, they might be required to establish a file on school organization and curriculum resources in the school. In the context of the secondary school, in which the student teacher might be obtaining experience in a number of specialist subject areas involving more than one school department, a corresponding number of cooperating teachers and college or university supervisors might be appointed.

This traditional approach to the practicum has been criticized on the grounds that it militates against bridging the gap between theory and practice, when the two might be learned more effectively if integrated. In some cases the problem was approached by trying to make the university or college the site of more practically orientated school experiences. Thus, such innovations as laboratory schools were established at the university. Over the last three decades of the twentieth century, the bridge was sought in the form of simulations, such as microteaching. Microteaching usually occurred on the campus of the college or university. It consisted of scaled-down teaching situations in which shorter than normal lessons would be taught to smaller groups of students with limited numbers of teaching skills to be practiced in pursuit of a small number of learning objectives. Usually, teaching spaces were developed and built specifically for the environment of microteaching. The lessons would be videotaped, so that the student teacher could view the lesson, often in consultation with peers and a supervisor or mentor, and obtain feedback which could be used in replanning the lessons.

While the controlled context in which microteaching occurs has facilitated much research on its effectiveness, there has been concern about the extent to which skills developed under microteaching conditions are transferred to normal classroom situations. It has been argued that there is no adequate substitute for real experience in normal classrooms and seldom, if ever, was reliance placed on microteaching as a complete substitute for actual classroom experience. Indeed, some systems have sought to make school experience the central component of teacher education in what has become known as "school-based teacher education" or, at least, by providing much more enduring periods of school experience at some stage of the teacher education program. A medical model has sometimes been applied, with student teachers approaching the end of their programs becoming "interns" attached to schools for a semester, or even a year.

Critics often claimed that professional experiences gained through such innovations as microteaching and such models as "performance-based" or "competency-based" teacher education gave too much emphasis to the "performance" or "behavioral" aspects of teaching at the expense of insight and reflection. Accordingly, calls for more reflective approaches were made and were accepted. The concept of reflective teacher education generated much literature in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1998, Marvin Wideen and colleagues, after an extensive review of research on the effectiveness of innovations in teacher education, including reflective practice, found little encouragement for their adoption, and concluded that such innovations have little ability to affect beginning teachers within teacher education structures common at the end of the twentieth century.

Challenges

Major challenges for initial teacher education in the twenty-first century include:

1. The raising of the status of the teaching profession to a level at which it attracts the best qualified applicants.
2. Harnessing rapidly developing technology to provide maximum learning opportunities for student teachers, especially those in remote areas and those in developing countries, where conventional resources such as libraries are impossible to resource adequately.
3. Discovering the optimum balance between theory and practice in the curriculum of teacher education in the many and varying contexts in which it is provided.
4. Developing teacher education structures and curricula that provide optimal balances among the academic, humanitarian, aesthetic, and moral domains of human experience.
5. Designing research that takes account of the many complex factors that impinge upon the process of teacher education, so that a greater understanding may be gained of the ways in which students learn to teach in the myriad of contexts in which they live.