Teachers Education in HP & Global Perspective
teacher education :
Introduction : Primary Teachers Education In Himachal Pradesh
One famous proverb says, “ Those who are incapable of learning have started teaching.” If we recruit untrained teachers in any department, it may become true.5 th September is the teachers day in India. I want to tell you that in Himachal Pradesh, there are presently many categories of teachers. Just from the history, I would like to discuss it. First of all, there were no more teacher education institutions in Himachal Pradesh at the time of its organization. It was a part of Punjab. Then gradually, it became state in 1971.Himachal Pradesh had a system that aperson having good marks in Matric was given opportunity to become a teacher. Then the time changed and a set up of teachers education institution occurred. But it did not stop the appointment off untrained teachers. When there are sufficient unemployed trained teachers are available, there is the new tragic. Volunteer teachers were recruited and regularized after some years in HP. They were given in service training, but they were not pre-trained teachers. Then it came the term of Vidya Upasaks who were recruited by an entrance test in 2000, but it was really sad that they were also not trained. They were trained for 7 years in service but still got the certificate of being untrained instead of training and regularization for the post of Junior Basic Teacher. Then Nursery Trained Teachers got the command and they were considered pre trained. So nursery was made equal to primary, whether it can be or not, you may think yourself. They became regular J.B.T. Then Gramin Vidya Upasaks were recruited in Himachal Pradesh where there were thousand of trained (Graduation + B Ed.) unemployed teachers in the state, these teachers were recruited without any pre- service training. After 6 years of service, they are now getting first time in –service teachers training to become J.B.T. Primary Assistant Teachers are also same. They have yet not been trained and no pre-service training has been done by untrained primary Assistant Teachers. Why the students are forced to read in the guidance of untrained teachers when there are plenty of trained teachers available in the state?
Know about Teacher Education in world perspective
Any of the formal programs that have been established for the preparation of teachers at the elementary- and secondary-school levels is called Teachers Education.
While arrangements of one kind or another for the education of the young have existed at all times and in all societies, it is only recently that schools have emerged as distinctive institutions for this purpose on a mass scale, and teachers as a distinctive occupational category. Parents, elders, priests, and wise men have traditionally seen it as their duty to pass on their knowledge and skills to the next generation. As Aristotle put it, the surest sign of wisdom is a man's ability to teach what he knows. Knowing, doing, teaching, and learning were for many centuries—and in some societies are still today—indistinguishable from one another. For the most part the induction of the young into the ways of acting, feeling, thinking, and believing that are characteristic of their society has been an informal—if serious and important—process, accomplished chiefly by means of personal contact with full-fledged adults, by sharing in common activities, and by acquiring the myths, legends, and folk beliefs of the culture. Formal ceremonies, such as the puberty rite, marked the point at which it was assumed that a certain range of knowledge and skill had been mastered and that the individual could be admitted to full participation in tribal life. (Residual elements of such ceremonies remain in some modern arrangements; it has been seriously contended that the study of the Latin language in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance school can be interpreted as a form of puberty rite.) Even in the formally established schools of the Greek city-states and of the medieval world there was little separation between, on the one hand, the processes of organizing and setting down knowledge and, on the other, those of teaching this knowledge to others.
This does not mean, however, that prior to the 19th century little attention was given to a training in teaching methods as distinct from “subjects.” The great works of medieval scholasticism were essentially textbooks that were designed to be used for the purpose of teaching. Today, as in the medieval world, methods of teaching and the organization of knowledge continue to be reciprocally influential. Nor are the problems that today surround the qualifications and certification of teachers wholly new. State, church, and local authorities everywhere have long recognized the importance of the teacher's work in maintaining or establishing particular patterns of social organization and systems of belief, just as radical and reformist politicians and thinkers have looked to the schools to disseminate their particular brands of truth. In medieval and post-Reformation Europe, for example, there was considerable concern with the qualifications and background of teachers, mainly but not entirely with reference to their religious beliefs. In 1559 Queen Elizabeth I of England issued an injunction that prohibited anyone from teaching without a license from his bishop. The license was granted only after an examination of the applicant's “learning and dexterity in teaching,” “sober and honest conversation,” and “right understanding of God's true religion.” Thus the certification of teachers and concern for their character and personal qualities are by no means new issues.
What is new for most societies—European, American, African, and Asian—is the attempt to provide a substantial period of formal education for everyone and not just for the small proportion of the population who will become political, social, and religious leaders or for those few who possess surplus time and money for the purpose. Universal literacy, already achieved in most European and American and many Asian societies, has become the goal of all. In an increasing proportion of countries every child now proceeds automatically to secondary education; many remain at school until 16 or 18 years of age, and large numbers go on to some form of postsecondary education and training. The scale and variety of educational provision that all this requires makes the supply, education, training, and certification of an adequate number of teachers a worldwide issue of education policy and practice. In developed and developing countries alike, no factor is of greater importance in relation to the quantity and quality of education; it is significant that a substantial proportion of the budget of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is devoted to the improvement of teacher preparation.
The term “teacher” in this article is used to mean those who work in schools providing education for pupils up to the age of 18. Thus, “teacher education” refers to the structures, institutions, and processes by means of which men and women are prepared for work in elementary and secondary schools. This includes preschool, kindergarten, elementary, and secondary institutions for children from the age of two or three to 18.
Teacher Education, as it exists today, can be divided into two stages, preservice and in-service. Preservice education includes all the stages of education and training that precede the teacher's entry to paid employment in a school. In-service training is the education and training that the teacher receives after the beginning of his career.
teacher education in the 20th century: a study of its organisation
Among the countries of the world the arrangements for the preparation of teachers vary widely. In some countries “monitors” still receive short courses of training as their preparation to teach large classes of young children. In North America, and to an increasing extent in other developed countries, most teachers are university graduates who begin their teacher preparation after completing four to six years of secondary education. Between these extremes many other arrangements exist. At one level, which for present purposes might be called Normal School A, entry is prior to the usual age of completion of secondary education. Training is limited to the achievement of competence in teaching a range of the subjects taught at the primary level and does not last more than five years.
The second level, which may be called Normal School B, also begins prior to the age of completing secondary education but usually after the “first certificate” at approximately age 16 or at the end of the period of compulsory schooling. This level provides combined courses of education and professional training, the former not necessarily limited to subjects taught at the primary level and extending beyond the usual age of completion of secondary education.
A third level, the college level, requires a full secondary education, usually ending at 18 but not necessarily with the same qualifications as are demanded of university entrants. Two- or three-year concurrent courses of general and professional education lead to the award of a teaching certificate, often valid for work in primary, intermediate, and lower secondary schools.
Finally, there is the university level, in which, after completing a full period of secondary education, the future teacher enters a multipurpose institution of higher education to follow three- to five-year courses of combined general education and professional training, the latter being either concurrent or consecutive, that lead to the award of a university degree and teaching qualification. Such qualification is considered valid for work at primary or secondary levels, or at both, according to the nature of the course followed.
Until the middle 1960s the normal-school pattern applied to students preparing for primary work in many European countries (Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Iceland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey), in Latin America, and in a number of Asian countries, although in many places there was more than one route to the attainment of qualified teacher status. The education and training of secondary school teachers was complicated by the general growth of secondary education for all. This encouraged the tendency to educate and train both primary and secondary teachers alongside one another in postsecondary colleges or in multipurpose universities.
General education
The sequencing, balance, content, and organization of general and specialist academic work, courses in education, and professional studies and teaching experience has been a subject of discussion since the earliest days of organized teacher education. The importance of the element of general education has been defended on various grounds. Sometimes such academic work may be highly specialized. Students in many colleges of education in England study only one principal subject, to which they devote about one-third of their total time, and teachers who graduate from universities have often pursued three-year courses for single-subject honours degrees. In the United States and elsewhere the academic element is broader, and the first two years of college or university work may embody a wide range of elective subjects from diverse disciplinary fields. Both patterns have their critics, the first because it produces narrow intellectual specialists, the second because it encourages dilettantism and inadequate depth. Where a pattern of electives is combined with a units/credits system, as in some universities in Japan and the United States, it is claimed that one result is an undesirable fragmentation of study and effort. In his influential Education of American Teachers (1963), James B Conant recommended that half the course requirements of the four-year program of preparation for elementary teachers should be given over to general courses, a further quarter to an “area of concentration,” and the remaining quarter to professional studies, including school experience. Prospective secondary teachers would spend still more time on the subjects they were preparing to teach, with less than 10 percent of their time devoted to practice teaching and special methods. Such a subject emphasis for secondary teachers can be found in many countries. In France the École Normale Supérieure still places freedom of study and the nurture of intellectual curiosity above questions of professional teacher training. Generally speaking, wherever there is a stress upon academic excellence and the achievement of high standards of scholarship, there is likely to be skepticism as to the claims of professional training for teaching. Oxford University had still not appointed a professor of education by the beginning of the 1970s.
In countries where technical or vocational education forms an important part of secondary school provision, there have sometimes been specialist institutions for the training of teachers for this work. Such teachers tend to have lower status than the secondary school staff who teach academic subjects, and efforts have been made to upgrade the position of the teacher of agricultural and industrial arts, home economics, and handicrafts. Nearly all the universities in England and Wales that now offer the bachelor of education degree for college of education students include technical subjects within their list of approved options.
The element of educational courses in the teacher preparation program has been the object of criticism from academic specialists, defenders of liberal culture, and practical-minded professional educators. The growing range of speculation and empirical data generated by the burgeoning social sciences, philosophy, and history, have provided a rich ore from which those responsible for teacher preparation mined the materials they needed for the construction and legitimation of their pedagogic systems and principles. But such borrowing has done little to establish any very coherent system of educational ideas, or to provide the basis for a systematic theory of teaching adequate to sustain the variety and complexity of teacher preparation programs. In his Evolution of American Educational Theory (1964), C.J. Brauner was forced to conclude that
middleman theorists, inexpert as scholars, had naïvely striven for some impossible synthesis that would be at once faithful to scholarship, useful to the practitioner, intelligible to the populace and thus comprehensive as a discipline, workable as a general method, and defensible as a social institution.
Practical training
Professional and practical studies constitute the third major element in the teacher-preparation program. “Teaching practice” has always been important, initially carried out in the model or demonstration school attached to the normal school or college, later in the schools of the neighbourhood, and more recently in a variety of school, college, and community settings. The model and demonstration school was frequently criticized for the unreality of its teaching settings; some model schools attached to universities tended to become academically oriented and ceased to play an experimental role. In some countries, experienced teachers view the work of teacher-preparing institutions with a certain amount of disdain. It is sometimes claimed that college and university staff lack the recent, firsthand experience of schools that is needed if training is to be fully effective. Efforts have been made to reduce the separation between school and college; these include the transfer of college staff to periods of classroom teaching and of experienced teachers to college work, dual appointment to a college and to a school where the “teacher-tutor” assumes responsibility for supervision of the student's school-based work, the involvement of teachers' organizations in the determination of national policy on teacher education, the involvement of individual teachers in the government and committee work of teacher-preparing institutions, and the use of periods of school-based teacher education in which a tutor and group of student teachers are attached to a school or a number of schools for an extended period of observation, practical teaching, and theoretical study.
Appointment procedures :
Generally speaking, in federal countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, each state or province sets its own requirements for certification, which inevitably do much to shape the content and organization of the teacher-education programs.. In other countries, such as England and France, requirements are determined on a national basis. Responsibility for recommending the granting of qualified teacher status may, however, be delegated. In England this responsibility is exercised by regional consortia of colleges, local educational authorities, universities, and teacher interests known as area training organizations that were established after 1944.
There are likewise considerable variations among countries in the way in which teachers are appointed to their first posts after graduation from college or university. In a small number of countries, students have a completely free choice among all the schools of the type in which their training qualifies them to teach, and they make their applications directly to the school in which they wish to serve. A more common pattern is that of appointment to the service of a local, state, or provincial authority, which then places the teacher in a school where a suitable vacancy exists. In some places there is a tendency for beginning teachers to be placed in schools in more remote or less desirable areas. In countries that have universal military service, such as Israel, it is sometimes possible for trained teachers to satisfy military requirements by being drafted to a school of the government's choice.
In-service training
Training on the job involves more than courses, conferences, and other organized study programs. Such efforts belong to a much broader system of communication whereby all those who are involved in the educational enterprise—teachers, administrators, research workers, curriculum-development specialists, teacher trainers—keep in touch with one another and with developments in their respective fields. One must therefore consider the media that are available for in-service education as well as institutional arrangements by means of which such training is provided.
Printed matter forms the most obvious kind of communication medium among teachers. In all countries there are both general and specialist educational journals and newspapers; educational bodies of various kinds issue their own newsletters, broadsheets, and bulletins. The volume of material published in this form has increased enormously. In some countries books, journal articles, and research reports are systematically abstracted and distributed, and some schools have their own library and information services.
A second group of media for in-service training includes lectures and related types of face-to-face instruction and discussion. Greater use is now being made of seminars, working parties, discussions, and other group activities that require a higher level of individual participation. Alongside these methods, a beginning has been made with the use of case studies and simulation materials. Among the advantages of such techniques are the high degree of personal involvement they encourage, the “realism” of the problems dealt with, a reduction in the didactic element (especially important in work with senior staff), and the opportunities for questions of theory and principle to arise in the discussion of actual teaching and administrative incidents.
Multimedia approaches to in-service studies are encouraged by closed-circuit and broadcast television facilities within individual school systems and local areas. The work that professional and specialist associations have long performed in bringing teachers together for the discussion of issues of mutual concern is now being extended by such developments as the establishment of teachers' centres in Britain. These help to disseminate a wide range of new educational practices and ideas, including those that derive from the teacher-controlled Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations. In North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and some other European countries, credit-bearing courses are now available for teachers through broadcast television, radio, and correspondence tuition.
The use of a wider range of media has diversified the institutional settings in which in-service teacher education is provided. Universities, colleges, teachers' centres, and teachers' homes are now among the places where the teacher can pursue his education and seek to improve his qualifications. Given the larger number of teachers on the staffs of many schools, there is also scope for school-based in-service education. A new idea or principle may find more ready acceptance within a group of like-minded people than when it must make its way against the organizational conservatism of a particular school. Department discussions, staff working parties, and other forms of school-based meetings enable matters of curriculum and organization to be discussed in depth, facilitate the induction of younger members of the profession, and help to limit the isolation of the teacher within the classroom. School-based in-service education has the important merit of recognizing that there is a gap between the ideas, techniques, and approaches that teachers acquire as a result of their training and the application of these ideas and approaches within the social system of the school. With the growth of team teaching and interdisciplinary work, and the reinterpretation of the teacher's role as an organizer and manager of learning resources rather than a solo performer on the classroom stage, the importance of bridging this gap will become increasingly important.
Introduction : Primary Teachers Education In Himachal Pradesh
One famous proverb says, “ Those who are incapable of learning have started teaching.” If we recruit untrained teachers in any department, it may become true.5 th September is the teachers day in India. I want to tell you that in Himachal Pradesh, there are presently many categories of teachers. Just from the history, I would like to discuss it. First of all, there were no more teacher education institutions in Himachal Pradesh at the time of its organization. It was a part of Punjab. Then gradually, it became state in 1971.Himachal Pradesh had a system that aperson having good marks in Matric was given opportunity to become a teacher. Then the time changed and a set up of teachers education institution occurred. But it did not stop the appointment off untrained teachers. When there are sufficient unemployed trained teachers are available, there is the new tragic. Volunteer teachers were recruited and regularized after some years in HP. They were given in service training, but they were not pre-trained teachers. Then it came the term of Vidya Upasaks who were recruited by an entrance test in 2000, but it was really sad that they were also not trained. They were trained for 7 years in service but still got the certificate of being untrained instead of training and regularization for the post of Junior Basic Teacher. Then Nursery Trained Teachers got the command and they were considered pre trained. So nursery was made equal to primary, whether it can be or not, you may think yourself. They became regular J.B.T. Then Gramin Vidya Upasaks were recruited in Himachal Pradesh where there were thousand of trained (Graduation + B Ed.) unemployed teachers in the state, these teachers were recruited without any pre- service training. After 6 years of service, they are now getting first time in –service teachers training to become J.B.T. Primary Assistant Teachers are also same. They have yet not been trained and no pre-service training has been done by untrained primary Assistant Teachers. Why the students are forced to read in the guidance of untrained teachers when there are plenty of trained teachers available in the state?
Know about Teacher Education in world perspective
Any of the formal programs that have been established for the preparation of teachers at the elementary- and secondary-school levels is called Teachers Education.
While arrangements of one kind or another for the education of the young have existed at all times and in all societies, it is only recently that schools have emerged as distinctive institutions for this purpose on a mass scale, and teachers as a distinctive occupational category. Parents, elders, priests, and wise men have traditionally seen it as their duty to pass on their knowledge and skills to the next generation. As Aristotle put it, the surest sign of wisdom is a man's ability to teach what he knows. Knowing, doing, teaching, and learning were for many centuries—and in some societies are still today—indistinguishable from one another. For the most part the induction of the young into the ways of acting, feeling, thinking, and believing that are characteristic of their society has been an informal—if serious and important—process, accomplished chiefly by means of personal contact with full-fledged adults, by sharing in common activities, and by acquiring the myths, legends, and folk beliefs of the culture. Formal ceremonies, such as the puberty rite, marked the point at which it was assumed that a certain range of knowledge and skill had been mastered and that the individual could be admitted to full participation in tribal life. (Residual elements of such ceremonies remain in some modern arrangements; it has been seriously contended that the study of the Latin language in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance school can be interpreted as a form of puberty rite.) Even in the formally established schools of the Greek city-states and of the medieval world there was little separation between, on the one hand, the processes of organizing and setting down knowledge and, on the other, those of teaching this knowledge to others.
This does not mean, however, that prior to the 19th century little attention was given to a training in teaching methods as distinct from “subjects.” The great works of medieval scholasticism were essentially textbooks that were designed to be used for the purpose of teaching. Today, as in the medieval world, methods of teaching and the organization of knowledge continue to be reciprocally influential. Nor are the problems that today surround the qualifications and certification of teachers wholly new. State, church, and local authorities everywhere have long recognized the importance of the teacher's work in maintaining or establishing particular patterns of social organization and systems of belief, just as radical and reformist politicians and thinkers have looked to the schools to disseminate their particular brands of truth. In medieval and post-Reformation Europe, for example, there was considerable concern with the qualifications and background of teachers, mainly but not entirely with reference to their religious beliefs. In 1559 Queen Elizabeth I of England issued an injunction that prohibited anyone from teaching without a license from his bishop. The license was granted only after an examination of the applicant's “learning and dexterity in teaching,” “sober and honest conversation,” and “right understanding of God's true religion.” Thus the certification of teachers and concern for their character and personal qualities are by no means new issues.
What is new for most societies—European, American, African, and Asian—is the attempt to provide a substantial period of formal education for everyone and not just for the small proportion of the population who will become political, social, and religious leaders or for those few who possess surplus time and money for the purpose. Universal literacy, already achieved in most European and American and many Asian societies, has become the goal of all. In an increasing proportion of countries every child now proceeds automatically to secondary education; many remain at school until 16 or 18 years of age, and large numbers go on to some form of postsecondary education and training. The scale and variety of educational provision that all this requires makes the supply, education, training, and certification of an adequate number of teachers a worldwide issue of education policy and practice. In developed and developing countries alike, no factor is of greater importance in relation to the quantity and quality of education; it is significant that a substantial proportion of the budget of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is devoted to the improvement of teacher preparation.
The term “teacher” in this article is used to mean those who work in schools providing education for pupils up to the age of 18. Thus, “teacher education” refers to the structures, institutions, and processes by means of which men and women are prepared for work in elementary and secondary schools. This includes preschool, kindergarten, elementary, and secondary institutions for children from the age of two or three to 18.
Teacher Education, as it exists today, can be divided into two stages, preservice and in-service. Preservice education includes all the stages of education and training that precede the teacher's entry to paid employment in a school. In-service training is the education and training that the teacher receives after the beginning of his career.
teacher education in the 20th century: a study of its organisation
Among the countries of the world the arrangements for the preparation of teachers vary widely. In some countries “monitors” still receive short courses of training as their preparation to teach large classes of young children. In North America, and to an increasing extent in other developed countries, most teachers are university graduates who begin their teacher preparation after completing four to six years of secondary education. Between these extremes many other arrangements exist. At one level, which for present purposes might be called Normal School A, entry is prior to the usual age of completion of secondary education. Training is limited to the achievement of competence in teaching a range of the subjects taught at the primary level and does not last more than five years.
The second level, which may be called Normal School B, also begins prior to the age of completing secondary education but usually after the “first certificate” at approximately age 16 or at the end of the period of compulsory schooling. This level provides combined courses of education and professional training, the former not necessarily limited to subjects taught at the primary level and extending beyond the usual age of completion of secondary education.
A third level, the college level, requires a full secondary education, usually ending at 18 but not necessarily with the same qualifications as are demanded of university entrants. Two- or three-year concurrent courses of general and professional education lead to the award of a teaching certificate, often valid for work in primary, intermediate, and lower secondary schools.
Finally, there is the university level, in which, after completing a full period of secondary education, the future teacher enters a multipurpose institution of higher education to follow three- to five-year courses of combined general education and professional training, the latter being either concurrent or consecutive, that lead to the award of a university degree and teaching qualification. Such qualification is considered valid for work at primary or secondary levels, or at both, according to the nature of the course followed.
Until the middle 1960s the normal-school pattern applied to students preparing for primary work in many European countries (Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Iceland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey), in Latin America, and in a number of Asian countries, although in many places there was more than one route to the attainment of qualified teacher status. The education and training of secondary school teachers was complicated by the general growth of secondary education for all. This encouraged the tendency to educate and train both primary and secondary teachers alongside one another in postsecondary colleges or in multipurpose universities.
General education
The sequencing, balance, content, and organization of general and specialist academic work, courses in education, and professional studies and teaching experience has been a subject of discussion since the earliest days of organized teacher education. The importance of the element of general education has been defended on various grounds. Sometimes such academic work may be highly specialized. Students in many colleges of education in England study only one principal subject, to which they devote about one-third of their total time, and teachers who graduate from universities have often pursued three-year courses for single-subject honours degrees. In the United States and elsewhere the academic element is broader, and the first two years of college or university work may embody a wide range of elective subjects from diverse disciplinary fields. Both patterns have their critics, the first because it produces narrow intellectual specialists, the second because it encourages dilettantism and inadequate depth. Where a pattern of electives is combined with a units/credits system, as in some universities in Japan and the United States, it is claimed that one result is an undesirable fragmentation of study and effort. In his influential Education of American Teachers (1963), James B Conant recommended that half the course requirements of the four-year program of preparation for elementary teachers should be given over to general courses, a further quarter to an “area of concentration,” and the remaining quarter to professional studies, including school experience. Prospective secondary teachers would spend still more time on the subjects they were preparing to teach, with less than 10 percent of their time devoted to practice teaching and special methods. Such a subject emphasis for secondary teachers can be found in many countries. In France the École Normale Supérieure still places freedom of study and the nurture of intellectual curiosity above questions of professional teacher training. Generally speaking, wherever there is a stress upon academic excellence and the achievement of high standards of scholarship, there is likely to be skepticism as to the claims of professional training for teaching. Oxford University had still not appointed a professor of education by the beginning of the 1970s.
In countries where technical or vocational education forms an important part of secondary school provision, there have sometimes been specialist institutions for the training of teachers for this work. Such teachers tend to have lower status than the secondary school staff who teach academic subjects, and efforts have been made to upgrade the position of the teacher of agricultural and industrial arts, home economics, and handicrafts. Nearly all the universities in England and Wales that now offer the bachelor of education degree for college of education students include technical subjects within their list of approved options.
The element of educational courses in the teacher preparation program has been the object of criticism from academic specialists, defenders of liberal culture, and practical-minded professional educators. The growing range of speculation and empirical data generated by the burgeoning social sciences, philosophy, and history, have provided a rich ore from which those responsible for teacher preparation mined the materials they needed for the construction and legitimation of their pedagogic systems and principles. But such borrowing has done little to establish any very coherent system of educational ideas, or to provide the basis for a systematic theory of teaching adequate to sustain the variety and complexity of teacher preparation programs. In his Evolution of American Educational Theory (1964), C.J. Brauner was forced to conclude that
middleman theorists, inexpert as scholars, had naïvely striven for some impossible synthesis that would be at once faithful to scholarship, useful to the practitioner, intelligible to the populace and thus comprehensive as a discipline, workable as a general method, and defensible as a social institution.
Practical training
Professional and practical studies constitute the third major element in the teacher-preparation program. “Teaching practice” has always been important, initially carried out in the model or demonstration school attached to the normal school or college, later in the schools of the neighbourhood, and more recently in a variety of school, college, and community settings. The model and demonstration school was frequently criticized for the unreality of its teaching settings; some model schools attached to universities tended to become academically oriented and ceased to play an experimental role. In some countries, experienced teachers view the work of teacher-preparing institutions with a certain amount of disdain. It is sometimes claimed that college and university staff lack the recent, firsthand experience of schools that is needed if training is to be fully effective. Efforts have been made to reduce the separation between school and college; these include the transfer of college staff to periods of classroom teaching and of experienced teachers to college work, dual appointment to a college and to a school where the “teacher-tutor” assumes responsibility for supervision of the student's school-based work, the involvement of teachers' organizations in the determination of national policy on teacher education, the involvement of individual teachers in the government and committee work of teacher-preparing institutions, and the use of periods of school-based teacher education in which a tutor and group of student teachers are attached to a school or a number of schools for an extended period of observation, practical teaching, and theoretical study.
Appointment procedures :
Generally speaking, in federal countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, each state or province sets its own requirements for certification, which inevitably do much to shape the content and organization of the teacher-education programs.. In other countries, such as England and France, requirements are determined on a national basis. Responsibility for recommending the granting of qualified teacher status may, however, be delegated. In England this responsibility is exercised by regional consortia of colleges, local educational authorities, universities, and teacher interests known as area training organizations that were established after 1944.
There are likewise considerable variations among countries in the way in which teachers are appointed to their first posts after graduation from college or university. In a small number of countries, students have a completely free choice among all the schools of the type in which their training qualifies them to teach, and they make their applications directly to the school in which they wish to serve. A more common pattern is that of appointment to the service of a local, state, or provincial authority, which then places the teacher in a school where a suitable vacancy exists. In some places there is a tendency for beginning teachers to be placed in schools in more remote or less desirable areas. In countries that have universal military service, such as Israel, it is sometimes possible for trained teachers to satisfy military requirements by being drafted to a school of the government's choice.
In-service training
Training on the job involves more than courses, conferences, and other organized study programs. Such efforts belong to a much broader system of communication whereby all those who are involved in the educational enterprise—teachers, administrators, research workers, curriculum-development specialists, teacher trainers—keep in touch with one another and with developments in their respective fields. One must therefore consider the media that are available for in-service education as well as institutional arrangements by means of which such training is provided.
Printed matter forms the most obvious kind of communication medium among teachers. In all countries there are both general and specialist educational journals and newspapers; educational bodies of various kinds issue their own newsletters, broadsheets, and bulletins. The volume of material published in this form has increased enormously. In some countries books, journal articles, and research reports are systematically abstracted and distributed, and some schools have their own library and information services.
A second group of media for in-service training includes lectures and related types of face-to-face instruction and discussion. Greater use is now being made of seminars, working parties, discussions, and other group activities that require a higher level of individual participation. Alongside these methods, a beginning has been made with the use of case studies and simulation materials. Among the advantages of such techniques are the high degree of personal involvement they encourage, the “realism” of the problems dealt with, a reduction in the didactic element (especially important in work with senior staff), and the opportunities for questions of theory and principle to arise in the discussion of actual teaching and administrative incidents.
Multimedia approaches to in-service studies are encouraged by closed-circuit and broadcast television facilities within individual school systems and local areas. The work that professional and specialist associations have long performed in bringing teachers together for the discussion of issues of mutual concern is now being extended by such developments as the establishment of teachers' centres in Britain. These help to disseminate a wide range of new educational practices and ideas, including those that derive from the teacher-controlled Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations. In North America, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and some other European countries, credit-bearing courses are now available for teachers through broadcast television, radio, and correspondence tuition.
The use of a wider range of media has diversified the institutional settings in which in-service teacher education is provided. Universities, colleges, teachers' centres, and teachers' homes are now among the places where the teacher can pursue his education and seek to improve his qualifications. Given the larger number of teachers on the staffs of many schools, there is also scope for school-based in-service education. A new idea or principle may find more ready acceptance within a group of like-minded people than when it must make its way against the organizational conservatism of a particular school. Department discussions, staff working parties, and other forms of school-based meetings enable matters of curriculum and organization to be discussed in depth, facilitate the induction of younger members of the profession, and help to limit the isolation of the teacher within the classroom. School-based in-service education has the important merit of recognizing that there is a gap between the ideas, techniques, and approaches that teachers acquire as a result of their training and the application of these ideas and approaches within the social system of the school. With the growth of team teaching and interdisciplinary work, and the reinterpretation of the teacher's role as an organizer and manager of learning resources rather than a solo performer on the classroom stage, the importance of bridging this gap will become increasingly important.
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