I feel there are a number of strands to this issue which relate to a mismatch between the ethos and culture of schools and the ideologies and values which underpin the training framework established by governments.

Government frameworks for the training of teachers tend to reflect a set of values and assumptions about what good teaching is, how it looks in the classroom and what the purpose of education is. These frameworks tend to represent a set of assumptions, often implicit, about the relationship between the teacher and the learner.

The school, by and large, is a conservative technology. Its processes, roles, systems, hierarchies and purposes tend to lock together to create a resilient framework which is capable of absorbing the impact of change and then restoring itself to its previous form.

As such what you may be observing is the tension between two ideologies. The framework for teacher education may be constructed as what is hoped to be a “transformative” or “modernizing” model whilst schools may still be operating a conservative environment. In such a case the new teacher has been “enculturated” as well as “trained” in one mode of thinking but then finds themselves in another reality where they are “re-enculturated” in the ideology of the school.

This is observable in the UK too where teachers are often trained according to principles which often seem to clash with the realities of the schools they find themselves in.

Of course – to this equation we have to add the assumptions of pupils and parents about how teaching and learning should happen, the curriculum framework which itself carries implicit assumptions about the value of different types of knowledge and ways of learning…..and the value set of the teacher themselves.

So…..quite a tricky one!!! But very interesting.

I would infer that you are implying that either:

Teachers in India are not teaching well in general or

Teachers are not adapting to take advantage of modern views of teaching.

If so, then the problem is possibly two fold. Either the current curriculum for teacher training is inappropriate, or if it is appropriate, then the school culture is inappropriate. If, by your question, I can assume that the curriculum for teacher training is appropriate then the problem must lie with school culture, so any solution must deal with teacher's professional attitudes to overcome the resistent culture. Posdible solutions:

1. Work with schools to change the culture to be more accepting of change as a professional responsibility,

2. Systematically work on the culture of professionalism in new teachers so they carry a better culture with them to schools.

If I may suggest as an outsider, that perhaps Indian culture may still retain too strong an acceptance of authority, and that would mitigate against acceptance of change (and questioning of superiors) in the school culture.

I can't comment on the university teaching requirements, except to say that if one teaches, one should do it to the best of one's abilities, even at university.

I read the question slightly differently from Mark Gould. It sounded to me as if the teacher preparation curriculum is not appropriate or effective - " training is not adding to competencies."

This wording implies to me that researchers have looked at the knowledge and skills a candidate enters a teacher prep program with and compare them with the knowledge and skills they leave the program and there is little difference. Is this true? Is it uniformly true? Are there some programs for which it is not true, and if so, what are those programs doing differently? Are there differences in outcomes across different types of students within the same, generally ineffective program?

I guess a clarification of your question is in order if we are off the mark.

I feel there are a number of strands to this issue which relate to a mismatch between the ethos and culture of schools and the ideologies and values which underpin the training framework established by governments.

Government frameworks for the training of teachers tend to reflect a set of values and assumptions about what good teaching is, how it looks in the classroom and what the purpose of education is. These frameworks tend to represent a set of assumptions, often implicit, about the relationship between the teacher and the learner.

The school, by and large, is a conservative technology. Its processes, roles, systems, hierarchies and purposes tend to lock together to create a resilient framework which is capable of absorbing the impact of change and then restoring itself to its previous form.

As such what you may be observing is the tension between two ideologies. The framework for teacher education may be constructed as what is hoped to be a “transformative” or “modernizing” model whilst schools may still be operating a conservative environment. In such a case the new teacher has been “enculturated” as well as “trained” in one mode of thinking but then finds themselves in another reality where they are “re-enculturated” in the ideology of the school.

This is observable in the UK too where teachers are often trained according to principles which often seem to clash with the realities of the schools they find themselves in.

Of course – to this equation we have to add the assumptions of pupils and parents about how teaching and learning should happen, the curriculum framework which itself carries implicit assumptions about the value of different types of knowledge and ways of learning…..and the value set of the teacher themselves.

So…..quite a tricky one!!! But very interesting.

Issues highlighted by Adrian are powerful as the training is reflected by the government expectations and other ideological, ethical and values related aspects. Specifically, in the context of developing countries as in the case of Pakistan, the training of teachers is a complex job due to the diverse situation of poverty, social injustice, gender inequity and social & economic factors. The challenges like terrorism have made the situation more worst and it has also effected the demands of the society by the institutions of teachers' training to equip the prospective teachers with adequate concepts of religious and ethical issues. Therefore, the curriculum at every level needs to be relevant to the new demands and it needs more focus specific to the knowledge and skills provided to the student teachers as well as to prepare them for the real world situations of the classroom.

John Hattie reviews the impact of teacher training on student performance and finds it to be very low, suggesting that current teacher training practices are ineffective.

Hattie, J. (2009), Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement , Routledge

Korthagen & Kessels also highlight some of the deficiencies of teacher education. The dominant model is based on a separation between theory and practice: teachers are expected to internalise theoretical frameworks during their training, and later apply them in the context of their work. This model fails for teacher training, for the same reasons it fails for most other educational contexts: if theory and practice are detached in training, they remain detached in later professional contexts.

Korthagen, F. A. & Kessels, J. P. (1999), 'Linking theory and practice: Changing the pedagogy of teacher education', Educational researcher 28 (4) , 4-17

According to the EPPI survey, collaborative, sustained CPD, situated in practice, is more effective than other forms. http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default.aspx?tabid=136

In our papers, we offer an alternative based on a model of "design inquiry of learning", where teachers analyse the context of their teaching, identify challenges within it, research prior works addressing similar challenges in similar contexts, devise a solution to address their challenge in their context, prototype it, evaluate it, and reflect on the process.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256841554_Learning_design_studio_educational_practice_as_design_inquiry_of_learning?ev=prf_pub

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256841282_The_learning_design_studio_collaborative_design_inquiry_as_teachers_professional_development?ev=prf_pub

Conference Paper Learning Design Studio: Educational Practice as Design Inqui...

Article The learning design studio: Collaborative design inquiry as ...

Re. "John Hattie reviews the impact of teacher training on student performance and finds it to be very low, suggesting that current teacher training practices are ineffective."

The notion that the effectivness of teacher training and "student performance" is directly linked useful, meaningful or measurable is contestable. Does this encompass all of the different forms of teacher education, over time and internationally... to draw a single and overarching conculsion that?........."teacher training practices are ineffective."

I think that is a rather bold and all encompassing judgement on such a complex and multi-focused enterprise as teacher education. I think it is also very important to recognise the difference between teacher "training" and teacher education.

The notion of a "theory-practice" divide is attractive in terms of political rhetoric but fails to address the realities of the changes in teacher education over 3 decades and a global diversity of practice.

A further concern I have is the notion of a teacher education evaluation framework which appears to measure the effectivness of teacher education in terms of "student performance". I am unclear:

1. Why teacher effectivness would be measured by "student performance". The "performance" of pupils is the result of many things. Teacher education and the work of teachers has a moral, cultural and ethical dimensions which are not measures in the "output" statistics.

2. How any analysis could be constructed to draw meaningful conclusions given the vastly different ways teachers are trained in the UK alone, let alone international variation evades me.

A small addition to Adrian's point about 'Why teacher effectivness would be measured by "student performance". ' Most of the studies talked about seem to measure student learning as measured by formal assessment. It is possible tha the effectiveness of teachers is better correlated with higher level cognitive and psychological outcomes such as ability to respond to the demands of a complex task such as a job. Or willingness to engage in future educational tasks. The job.of a teacher is not JUST to make students learn content but to teach high order cognitive skills and dispositions which are difficult to measure.

The notion of measuring teacher "effectivness" (or the effectivness of teacher education) in terms of "performance outcomes" - almost always as results in public examinations is extremely problematic and has been abandoned by all but politicians who constantly grasp at "performance related pay".

Whilst a technicist model of the teacher's work might reduce it to:

Knowledge input -> Pedagogic process -> Examination outcome.

I know of no practitioner who sees the vocation of teaching in this way.

The above model does not map to the complex and multifaceted demands which society places on teachers or the way teachers are deployed in practice e.g. in many schools those considered to be the best teachers will be deployed to teach the least able or least motivated pupils.

As such, the task of "training" teachers encompasses more than just the aquisition of pedagogic techniques which can be transfered from practitioner to practitioner as "best practice" or indeed from e-learning tool to teacher. Techniques are contingent on context, are contingent on the value set of the individual teacher and are contingent on the culture of the society and school within which they are applied.

One of the problems currently faced by teachers in many countries is an economically driven reductionist notion of teaching. One where the art of teaching is compressed into a set of "rules" and rituals which, if performed in the right sequence at the right time will lead to learning.

As every professional teacher would I believe affirm...."it's not as simple as that".

It is true that the teachers' performance or effectiveness is a complex job and i think it changes according to the school culture also but it is also true that to evaluate the effectiveness of teacher in terms of students' performance is a public demand and state governments apply this criteria under political pressure. The causes behind this pressure lie in the social and economic needs of individuals which are strongly correlated to the global demands of highly skilled workers with new technologies with high returns. This situation has overthrown the concept of values, cultural aspects and ethical dimensions. This has also made, the higher order cognitive skills, meaningless to the parents. Now we are living in a world of race between economic powers with emerging trends of futuristic authorities in the world. The globalization has given rise to the conflicts rather than to close the humankind in cultural values with universal truths, a positive dimension. This trend has developed a huge gap between the individuals with education and those who are far from the education and new technology especially in the context of third world countries. In Pakistan, a large population needs universal primary education within the cultural heritage of basic skills and values. The effectiveness of teachers needs to be measured in the context of subject matter knowledge with their commitment to the profession which is only possible through the better training with better pre-service teacher education.

I am particularly interested in the responses by Muhammad about the complexity of teaching in Pakistan and with the comment by Adrian about the "rules and rituals" that dominate instead of a more flexible approach that could be undertaken by well-educated teachers. Muhammad's comments about the social injustice, gender inequality, and social/economic problems sounds remarkably familiar to me here in Alabama. In this state 25% of all children live in poverty; less than half the high school students graduate from high school; of those who do their average reading level is about eighth grade. The skill of teachers is questionable on so many levels that it is hard to explain to anyone how deficient their pre-teacher education has been. Many cannot pass the simplest exam for certification in their field; the older ones are more like the "walking dead" waiting for retirement rather than active, engaged people working with kids. Even the technological divide here is great with so many children unable to gain access to the innovative technology that is driving education right now. Here K-12 teaching is for the most part a joke; it is governed by Guideline Rule 1.3B, subset and so on. Teachers present materials; they work math problems on their smart boards, but they can't explain to a student why the problems "goes this way" and not "that way." Teachers can't seem to teach critical thinking or reading, so students come to university with no background to prepare them for the demands of post-secondary education. My university graduates only 38% of its students in six years, only 33% in four years. These figures are pretty much a norm for many public universities. It is ltitle wonder that the U.S. is losing its worldwide reputation for education, creative thinking and innovation.

Aysha Bey

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Thank you Gloria for the kind words and great suggestions! The bane of the K-12 teacher is TESTING. The U.S. has the greatest collection of "bubble fillers" on the planet; the kids know little but they can fill up a Scantron sheet. At the elementary schools here, actual education stops about the second week of March for preparation for the achievement tests in the latter part of April. They have now placed the Core Curriculum into all the schools in Alabama--but they did not train the teachers to present these more rigorous subjects of critical thinking and reasoning. And the books are terrible. In math, we now get to play games or apply math principles, but we don't get to teach calculation. Everything is piece-meal and the failure to "connect the dots" is going to be deadly later on when students will be expected to apply their learning.

I have taught just about every grade level from 4th through graduate school. The K-12 teachers who are innovative and passionate about their teaching don't last long because they burn out, surrounded by those who earn a paycheck and go home. The big part of the problem is that Schools of Education are deadly dull with outdated approaches and too much attention on classroom management, obedience, etc. Not the background topic knowledge desperately needed by anyone attempting to present a subject at any level. But instead of getting sharp, critical thinkers with strong GPA's, and academic success, most School of Education require the lowest GPA's for graduate study. I'd love to know how to get students in the top 3% like Finland or South Korea.

As for university instructors--I absolutely agree that they should have to present a tutorial to first year students. I deal with freshmen and sophomores chiefly and handle incoming graduate students from foreign countries (whose language is not English). But most of the tenured faculty are REQUIRED to teach one freshman class per year; the literature professors do teach the sophomore survey courses but I can attest that many have not altered one word on their syllabus for more than 15 years. Teaching is the one profession (at both K-12 and university) that requires a teacher who wants a promotion to LEAVE the classroom and be an administrator. There is no reward system for any classroom teachers in this country; those of us who focus on the classroom are often treated as "not quite as good" as those "scholars" who conduct research and publish.

United States test scores are terrible--in the bottom third of the top 20 developed nations in writing, English, and don't even mention math. The college entrance exam scores are down more than 400 points from the standards of the early 1980s. My Arabic-speaking students steadily score equal to or above my American students in the verbal and math parts of the Graduate Record Exam. And since Arabic has nothing in common with English, that verbal test is terribly difficult for Arabic-speakers--but they score close to the average for that test.

The United States still believes the old saying: "Those who can, DO. Those who can't, TEACH." It is incredibly difficult for anyone to grasp what a difficult task it is to present information in such a way that children can understand it, use it, and make it relevant. I prefer the newer teacher's version of the old saying: "Those who CAN, teach. Those who CAN'T, make rules and policies for teachers."

Aysha

Curriculum is dynamic because change is constant. Adequate preparation for teachers depends on responsiveness to change and willingness to change. Change calls for reviewing and redesigning the curriculum. Redesigning the curriculum involves reassessment of teaching competence to determine needs in the teaching learning process.

What amendments are required? Review the policy and standards of the institution. Review teachers’ profile. Develop teachers’ portfolio.

Evaluate the impact of training and development on teachers’ performance base on students’ performance and productivity of graduates.