Whither In-Service Training? [Archives:2000/47/Focus]

Dr P.N.Ramani,
Associate Professor of English, Faculty of Education, Sanaa University

After an In-Service Training Program is over, the organizers, very often the Ministry of Education, judges the impact of the program by trying to find out whether the teacher participants are willing and able to use the materials and methods recommended to them on the program. Some teachers may adopt the new methods and materials for a while after they have had the training, but most of them, sooner or later, slide back into their normal, pre-training practices.
The purpose of this article is to examine the possible effects of the in-service training programs that are generally offered on the practicing teachers and to suggest the need to look for an alternative approach to in-service training. The observations I make here are based on my experience of interacting with teachers of English, but they may well equally apply to the teachers of other subjects.
Many of the participants of such courses have returned without support to their schools only to develop feelings of inadequacy, confusion, insecurity, and often guilt. I would like to describe three stereotypical kinds of in-service course participants and to consider the influence of the training on their attitudes and behaviors.

The Untouched
A majority of the participants attend such in-service courses for the break these courses offer them from their teaching routines, for the certificate, and perhaps for the company of other teachers (i.e., a kind of social get-together). These teachers are quite happy with their own teaching practices and have no intention of risking their self-esteem and security by listening to new information and ideas. They sit passively through the course and then return to their schools untouched by the course, hence unchanged, and carry on exactly as before.
These untouched teachers are not willing to accept the theories of visiting academics or the recipes of visiting super teachers. They find the new ideas threatening and perhaps the best defense against this imposition of ideas is to hear but not to listen.

The Guilty
Some of the participant teachers are, however, eager to learn new ways. They listen with keen attention and express genuine appreciation, and even gratitude, for what they have received. They return to their schools determined to improve their ways but fail to match the new ideas with the old realities, such as large classes, poor resources, lack of time, the demands of the set syllabus and exams. They quickly fall back upon their old ways but now feel guilty and insecure; they also lack the confidence and conviction they had earlier in their teaching.
These teachers are told that what they have been doing is out of date and ineffective, and they are persuaded to try the new ideas. However, when they get back to their schools, they find that they cannot make those new ideas work and they put them away guiltily for use, hopefully, in the future.

The Radicals
Some of the eager, attentive, and enthusiastic teachers are so convinced of the value of their new wisdom that they rush back to their schools with revolutionary zeal. They want to change their approach overnight and flood their students with the new materials and activities they had received at the in-service course.
A few of these radicals succeed because they have clearly understood the principles underlying the new approach and are able to adapt the new materials and activities to their own situations; they are even able to develop their own supplementary materials and activities. But many of these radicals who have not clearly understood the new approach may often damage the learning process by imposing on their students inappropriate materials and activities for a short time; they revert to the old approach when the received supply of materials runs out.
What are the constraints on teacher development? First, many teachers refuse to change any of their practices so long as the examination results are good. Second, they feel insecure if they have to give up practices they are used to. Third, they have no motivation to change because they often complain about problems such as large classes, syllabus to cover, indifferent or uninterested students, too easy or difficult materials, lack of administrative support, student indiscipline, fixed or no seating arrangement, and so on. Fourth, a shift from safe routines to the insecurity of finding new ways of teaching involves effort, extra work, and emotional energy.
The major problem, therefore, with the in-service training programs that are being offered now lies in assuming that the input provided to the teachers in these programs influences and changes the teachers perception and practice. We need to carry out studies of the impact of these programs on the teachers and make the necessary changes based on the actual needs of teachers. We need to encourage institution-based and individual-based professional development.
Each Faculty of Education should develop a network of schools in its area and prepare common programs each year for working together. This would make the schools not feel isolated from teacher education institutions. It would also solve, to some extent, the problem of finding schools for practice teaching for the students of the Faculty. Schools and teacher education institutions should co-ordinate their efforts in this direction.
I often hear the teachers say: Tell me and I will listen; teach me and I will remember; involve me and I will learn; share my concern and I will change. We have been telling teachers that they should change and teaching them how to teach better. Can we now involve them and share their concerns so that they may learn and change themselves?

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