Довженко О.А., Пашкова Т.С.

Сумський національний аграрний університет

Some issues in teacher’s education for innovation

Pedagogy has been defined as the study of methods and styles of teaching and the principles, practice or profession of teaching. Much discussion of the last decade has focused on how teachers can build an understanding of pedagogic principles and how they respond to them in terms of personal style and professional setting. Those responsible for training teachers have had a particular interest in how teachers make such principles their own and translate them effectively into classroom practice. The three interlocking phases of a teacher's career are pre-service training, in-service training, and continuing professional development within institutional life. They are to do with the promotion of principles and development of procedures for these phases of teacher development.

A substantial number of writers have contributed to clarifying the distinction between 'teacher training', a term which implies training in the skills and techniques of teaching, and 'teacher education', which implies a lifelong process of professional development. Current definitions of the latter would highlight the process whereby teachers refine and develop knowledge of their subject, enhance their skills in teaching it, and evolve a positive teaching style which is able to adapt as they judge changing circumstances and situations throughout their teaching career. The significance of process as a concept in teacher education is that it holds the implication of development, that is, of the personal evolution of the teacher. Such development in this way has been described as a process of continual intellectual, experiential and attitudinal growth, some of which is generated in preprofessional and professional in-service programs.

Much recent discussion has centered on how to facilitate teacher development, particularly on in-service courses, and what principles might inform the design and methodology of such courses. One frequently quoted principle, for example, is to begin an in-service session at a point of access which is meaningful for teachers in terms of their previous experience, ask them to think about the way in which they approach some aspect of teaching, for instance, the development of reading ability in a second language and then build on their existing perceptions of what is valid and useful. Underlying this principle is the assumption that all teachers operate according to a set of beliefs about what constitutes good classroom practice, but some may never have made those beliefs explicit to themselves. Thus an essential part of in-service education is to encourage teachers to reflect on their own professional practice, to make explicit to themselves the assumptions that underlie what they do and then to review those assumptions in the light of new perspectives and practices. The process of reflection can be initiated in a teachers workshop by asking the participants, several weeks in advance, to provide a description of a classroom task with which they had experienced success. In the workshop they discussed possible criteria for judging a good language learning task and applied these to their previously selected material. This procedure demonstrates several contemporary principles in action. The content of the workshop discussion developed in part from the teachers own experience and enabled them to reflect on and review that experience. The theory of the workshop, that is, the building of a critical framework for evaluating learning tasks, derived from the teachers own professional practice as much as from the tutor's expert knowledge. The approach engaged teachers in a discussion of their work and could therefore be described as bottom-up compared with the more traditional top-down lecture presentation by a specialist.

A primary concern in in-service teacher education has been to find procedures which will facilitate reflective practice. A set of articles exemplifies a popular procedure of recent years. A group of teachers was asked to keep diaries for each week of their course and to record their learning as teachers. Teachers developed a heightened sense of their own responsibility for changing their teaching and more confidence in their own ability to act suggest that this procedure, if culturally appropriate, might be of the kind to help solve a lot of problems.

As the field of teacher education has developed a new conceptual base for the design of in-service courses, one which places importance on critical self-awareness and self-evaluation, the question naturally arises as to whether current perspectives and practices in pre-service teacher training have gone through the same review and restructuring. Does process have an equally significant role with initial trainees? There is a view that initial training should begin the process of helping teachers to work towards being reflective practitioners, the process which was once described as moving from 'tentative formulation, to formulation to reformulation.

Thus, at the same time as they learn a variety of teaching techniques, they build understanding of the principles underlying those techniques and develop critical frameworks for evaluating them and their relevance and usefulness for different teaching situations.

It is often commented that trainers rarely receive training for their task of educating teachers but seem rather to be appointed on the basis of strong treachery qualities, a reputation for effective classroom practice or simply seniority.

Other contributors have taken up discussion of principles for observation. Classroom observation is described as a mutual problem-solving experience in which observation schedules took the form of questions to guide teachers’ self-evaluation, trainers taking a supportive role as the teachers developed judgments about what was happening in their own classrooms.

Teaching practice is a time of intense reflection, and often of rapid and radical change in attitudes among trainees. They need to develop perceptions of the classroom and their own roles in it so that they can work successfully with learners. They also need to appreciate institutional ethos and find ways of working productively within it and with colleagues. The development of mentorship schemes pays testament to the current concern in teacher education to support novice teachers’ transfer of skills from the training classroom to the real classroom and their development of self-reliance.