Perspectives Education ■EE Part 1: International Trends In Teacher Education: Politics, Policy, Practice • Jonathan Jansen and Keith Lewin Teacher Education Politics, Policy, Practice • Keith Lewin Counting the Cost of Teacher Education: Cost and Quality Issues • Beatrice Avalos Linking the Global Teacher Education Community • John Gultig “There is nothing so practical as a good th eo ry ” Rethinking th e Role of Theory and Practice in South African Teacher Education • Lars Dahlstrom Critical Practioner Inquiry and Teacher Education in Namibia: The First A ttem pts to Build a Critical Knowledge Base for Education • Anita Ramsuran Teachers' Experiences of Continuous A ssessm ent: Betw een Policy and Practice • John Hedges Conflict and Control, A gency and Accountability: Teachers’ Experiences of Recent Change in English and Welsh Education • Betty Govinden Call for Papers: Higher Education, Globalisation and the Third World S tate Part 2: Conversations about Research • Juliet Perumal Foreword • Rubby Dhunpath Conversational Epistles • Michael Apple The Power of Common Sense: Reflections on the Primary M athem atics Education Conference and South Africa • Mafika Cele and Prema Asrie Book Review: G etting Published and G etting Read in South Africa by M ichael Cross and Karin Brodie 18 PERSPECTIVES IN EDUCATION Volume 18 No I September 1999 Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Jansen, Faculty of Education, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa Managing E ditor Rubby Dhunpath, Faculty of Education, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa Consulting Editor Juliet Perumal, Faculty of Education, University o f Durban-Westville, South Africa A ssociate E ditors Betty Govinden, Faculty of Education, University o f Durban-Westville, South Africa M ichael Samual, Faculty of Education, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa Renuka V ithal, Faculty of Education, University o f Durban-Westville, South Africa E ditorial Board Nahas Angula, Ministry of Education, Windhoek, Namibia M ichael Apple, School of Education, Department of Curriculum & Instruction, University of Wisconsin Beatrice Avalos, Ministry of Education, Chile, South America Nazir Carrim, Department of Education, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa M ichael Cross, Department o f Education, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa K en FIarley, Department of Education, University o f Natal, South Africa Keith Lewin, Institute of Education, University o f Sussex, United Kingdom Tembi Magi, University o f Zululand, South Africa Chandra M ohanty, Hamilton College, New York, United States of America Maguzeni Mwenesongole, University o f Venda, South Africa Magnate N tombela, University of South Africa, Durban, South Africa Cleaver Ota, Education Policy Unit, University of Fort Harare, South Africa W illiam Papo, Faculty of Education, University of the North, South Africa Maureen Robinson, Faculty of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa Akilagpa Sawyerr, Association of African Universities, Ghana Osman Seedat, M.L. Sultan Technikon, South Africa Crain Soudien, School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa Caroline Suransky, School of Education, Ichthus Hogeschool, Holland Editorial Assistants Prema A srie, Faculty of Education, University o f Durban-Westville, South Africa Mafika Cele, Faculty of Education, University of Durban-Westville, South Africa Panel of R eviewers Aki Sawyerr, Nomathemba Magi, Michael Apple, Renuka Vithal, Nazir Karim, Channdra Mohanty, Ken Harley, Crain Soudien, Nahas Angula, Maguzeni Mwenesongole, Magnate Ntombela, William Papo Typesetting, layout and design: Rubby Dhunpath (UDW) Cover design: Daisy Pillay (UDW) Production: Juta & Co Ltd Printing: Creda Communications, Eliot Avenue, Eppindust II CONTENTS Part 1: International Trends in Teacher Education: Politics, Policy, Practice Introduction: Teacher Education Politics, Policy, Practice 3 Jonathan Jansen and Keith Lewin Counting the Cost of Teacher Education: Cost and Quality Issues 7 Keith Lewin Linking the Global Teacher Education Community 35 Beatrice Avalos “There is nothing so practical as good theory.” Rethinking the Role of Theory and Practice in South African Teacher Education 55 John Gultig Critical Practitioner Inquiry and Teacher Education in Namibia: The First Attempts to Build a Critical Knowledge Base for Education 81 Lars Dahlstrom Teachers’ Experiences of Continuous Assessment: Between Policy and Practice 99 Anita Ramsuran Conflict and Control, Agency and Accountability: Teachers’ Experiences of Recent Change in English and Welsh Education 111 John Hedges Call for Papers: Higher Education, Globalisation and the Third World State 131 Betty Govinden Part 2: Conversations about Research Foreword 135 Juliet Perumal Conversational Epistles 137 Rubby Dhunpath The Power of Common Sense: Reflections on the Primary Mathematics Education Conference and South Africa 149 Michael Apple Book Review: Getting Published and Getting Read in South Africa Michael Cross and Karin Brodie 157 An e-mail interview conducted by Mafika Cele AND PREMA ASRIE Information for Contributors 161 PART ONE INTERNATIONAL TRENDS IN TEACHER EDUCATION: POLITICS, POLICY, PRACTICE Introduction: Teacher Education Politics, Policy, Practice Jonathan Jansen and Keith Lewin J onathan Jansen is currently Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University o f Durban Westville and Director o f the Centre for Educational Research, Evalu­ ation and Policy (CEREP). His research covers the areas o f effective schools, policy and analysis, impact evaluation and the politics o f transition. Keith Lewin is director o f the Centre for International Education, University o f Sussex. His research interests include educational planning and finance, science edu­ cation policy, curriculum, evaluation and assessment. He has worked in South/South-East Asia, China and Southern Africa. It is a special privilege to introduce the inaugural issue of Perspectives in Education from its base at the University of Durban Westville (UDW) after a long and distinguished tenure at the University of the Witwatersrand. This Special Issue represents a selection of refereed research and policy papers from a historic conference on International Trends in Teacher Education convened jointly by the Faculty of Education at UDW and the University of Sussex Institute of Education (USIE) from 20-22 July, 1998. The conference represented the culmination of a three-year international linkage between UDW, USIE and the National Teachers Training College (NTTC) in Lesotho in which approximately 30 students were trained through an inter­ disciplinary research and professional development programme called COMET (Co-ordinated Masters in Education and Training). The students, mainly senior professionals, were drawn from colleges of education, schools, government departments, universities and technikons to pursue an advanced research degree focused on the improvement of educational policy and professional practice. 3 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Three of the students were senior faculty at the NTTC in Lesotho. A specific target originally set for this linkage was the development of high-quality research dissertations which would be presented at an international conference in conjunction with commissioned papers by the participating staff from the partnership institutions. Immediately following this very successful conference, the planning team assembled to identify a range of different kinds of publications, centred around the conference theme, that would bring to a “policy and practice” forum the kinds of critical and cutting-edge issues percolating in teacher education in Southern Africa. Apart from the official conference proceedings and an edited book, this Special Issue of Perspectives in Education represents one further route through which we showcase exemplary academic papers drawn from the conference. The papers are presented in three clusters or couplets reflecting the conference themes and debates engaged in over the three day period. Professor Keith Lewin from USIE presented a timely analysis of the costs of teacher education and the implications for educational policy and planning. Lewin raises important methodological dilemmas in “counting the cost of teacher education” by sketching “the arenas in which data is needed to understand more about what the costs of training are, why they are configured in particular ways, and what constraints and opportunities they create for the future”. The issue of teacher education costs have never been more salient in South African education. In public schools, teachers are being redeployed and retrenched or, in the insensitive language of officialdom, “declared in excess”. In universities and colleges of education, student teacher numbers are dramatically down, leading to closure of whole institutions in some cases, and incorporation of Faculties of Education into larger and “more viable” administrative units. Clearly, financial reasoning within the climate created by macro-economic policy (notably the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy, or GEAR) lies behind the drastic cuts in teacher employment with ripple effects back into teacher education institutions. In this context, Keith Lewin raises critical, steering questions for educational policy and planning within and beyond South Africa. The partner paper to that of Keith Lewin is provided by Beatrice Avalos, a very distinguished academic now working in the Ministry of Education in Chile, Latin America. Avalos is concerned to review the state-of-play with respect to international teacher education and “to lay out possible courses of action in relation to the tasks of improving teacher education in different country contexts”. While Lewin draws attention to the economic basis for teacher education planning, Avalos outlines the organisational requirements for teacher 4 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 education programming. Drawing on recent literature, she argues that we need to strengthen the subject knowledge dimension of teacher education programmes, draw on “what student teachers bring to the training situation,” broaden the vision of teachers and teaching beyond competency models and behavioural modifications, and strengthen good institutions as centres of excellence for teacher education. The significance of the Avalos contribution is not only that it shifts the debate on teacher education reform from its narrowing and harrowing concentration on skills, performance and outcomes, but develops the broader landscape of teacher understanding, empowerment and affirmation as key ingredients in achieving more than change, i.e. genuine transformation of teachers and teaching. Moving from these two broad survey papers on international education, the next couplet of papers examines teacher education reform within two neighbouring country contexts, Namibia and South Africa. Lars Dahlstrom unravels the concept “critical practitioner enquiry” as a strategy mobilised through the Namibian curriculum in order “to support a new kind of knowledge and understanding which would empower Namibian practitioners ... to become sig­ nificant contributors to ... a broader reconstructive agenda in Namibian society”. The dissemination of this concept is traced through different media including the regionally acclaimed Basic Teacher Education Diploma (BETD) in Namibia. In a similar vein, John Gultig argues with those constraining discourses in South Africa which “view teaching as a craft which is best taught in practice” (that is, procedural knowledge) at the expense of what he calls “principle knowledge”. The colonial interconnectedness of Namibia and South Africa has, unsurpris­ ingly, led to similar ideologies of teaching and authority being stamped onto the teacher education curricula of these two countries. It is not unexpected, therefore, that in both countries new discourses compete with older, more entrenched ones. It is an open question whether new discourses of teacher education reform in these two post-apartheid states will in fact lead to Gultig’s quest for “a strong conception of lifelong learning and professional development as a primarily intellectual affair” (our emphasis). The concluding couplet expresses the spirit and substance of the international linkage through post-graduate student development. In this section, two students, one from UDW (Anitha Ramsuran) and the other from USIE (John Hedges) conduct case investigations of curriculum reform in two different settings. Ramsuran traces the policy of continuous assessment in South Africa, finding a considerable distance between official intentions and classroom practice. Her study represents one of the few attempts to understand innovation in the terms of teachers and on the terrain of teaching within post-apartheid classrooms. Using a similar methodological (and, I would argue, political) take on curriculum 5 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 innovation, John Hedges tracks “teachers’ experiences of recent change in English and Welsh education”. Hedges commits to finding, through con­ versations with teachers and teacher educators, what lessons emerge for the process of curriculum reform given “the difficult process of putting paper policies into practice”. In addition to this set of six papers, Perspectives in Education introduces a new segment called Conversations about Research. We are privileged to produce through the pages of this journal a powerful account by one of the world’s foremost scholars in education, Professor Michael Apple. This account is of his recent and first South African visit to an international mathematics education conference at the University of Stellenbosch. Weaving subtle theoretical insights into a set of conference reflections, Apple unthreads the conservative and constraining discourses which continue to govern our academic performance (sic) long after the termination of legal apartheid. We are further pleased that a Member of the Editorial Board could contribute in this way. Rubby Dhunpath (a graduate of the COMET linkage) and Cynthia Mpati (a distinguished and well-known South African educator) engage in dialogue about the researcher-researched relationship. The context for this dialogue is Dhunpath’s dissertation which developed an account of teacher development in KwaZulu-Natal as seen through the life-story of Cynthia Mpati. This highly innovative life-story account generates, as readers will see, refreshing insights into power, knowledge, authority, voice, ethics and relationships in the inter­ actional replay of this research project. In addition, two other students from this COMET programme present a novel methodology for a book review in which they interview two authors, Michael Cross and Karen Brodie, on their recent work, Getting Published and Getting Read in South Africa (1998). The interview, together with a close reading of the text, is offered as an evaluative account by two novice researchers on the value and significance of this latest contribution to academic writing in South Africa. As editors of this issue of Perspectives in Education, working with a remarkably talented management team, we trust that this special issue will stimulate new questions and address pressing concerns among researchers, policy makers, teachers and other educators as we press on in the task of enhancing critical scholarship and relevant publication in the field of education. 6 Counting the Cost of Teacher Education: Cost and Quality Issues Keith Lewin Abstract The costs o f teacher education in many developing countries arise from historically established patterns o f organisation and budgeting which have their origins in colonial history. Costs per qualified and employed teacher can be high, the quality o f teacher training is widely contested, and many o f the assumptions that underpin common models o f delivery are open to question. Uncertain proportions o f those trained obtain teaching jobs; in some cases the match between training and job placement is weak with teachers teaching at different levels or in different subject areas to those for which they were trained; in other situations the average length o f teachers ’ careers may be shortening with implications for the nature o f appropriate investment in training. Providing basic schooling universally in the wake o f the commitments made at the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) has resulted in rapidly expanding enrolments o f primary age children throughout sub-Saharan Africa. This conference resulted in most governments developing national plans to ensure at least six years, and often nine or more years o f schooling (Colclough with Lewin, 1993). Unlike previous attempts by the UN agencies to promote targets related to primary education, WCEFA included explicit concerns for quality and achievement alongside enrolment targets. Increased enrolment was to be accompanied by investment to improve learning outcomes (WCEFA, 1990:30). These developments have created unprecedented demands for the training o f teachers. Many o f the poorest countries with low enrolment rates have high proportions o f untrained teachers (UNESCO, 1997:26). This is particularly a problem in sub-Saharan Africa. In much o f Asia, demographic transition and other changes associated with development have reduced the demand for new teachers, though it remains the case that many teachers are untrained, especially in South Asia (Lewin, 1998). I f quality is to be improved, the needs o f untrained teachers for professional development must be met. In addition, in many African countries new teachers are needed to meet the demands o f enrolment growth to universal levels. Thus the capacity o f existing systems o f teacher education is challenged to meet high levels o f demand in the short term and new needs arising from an emphasis on effective learning which links the competencies o f teachers with the capabilities o f pupils. This has placed pressures on the financing o f 7 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 teacher education which invite reflection on cost-effectiveness, internal efficiency and the value for money provided by different methods o f delivery. The purpose o f this paper is to share some preliminary thoughts on cost and resource issues related to the training o f teachers. It anticipates a programme o f empirically based research which is being developed at Sussex as part o f the Multi-Site Teacher Education Project. It is therefore exploratory rather than designed to report findings which may emerge from the data that will be collected. This preliminary exploration charts a range o f possible research questions, many o f which could become the basis for analytical studies. This paper has a focus on patterns o f education and training which lead to initial qualification since this is where most investment is concentrated in most systems. The first section outlines some core issues and discusses a number o f concerns which contextualise the subsequent arguments. The second section provides an overview o f common features o f conventional patterns o f teacher education and draws attention to a range o f consequences relevant to resource utilisation. The third section raises some methodological issues. The fourth section explores the analysis o f costs and identifies major categories. Section five develops a framework o f questions before, during and after core training experiences. These are summarised in Appendix 1. Section six summarises some alternative organisational patterns and draws attention to the range o f options available, and is followed by some concluding remarks. Introduction There are many good reasons to be concerned about the costs of teacher training in developing countries. The most important appear to revolve around the following observations and issues. Firstly, teacher training can be surprisingly expensive. Orthodox, pre-career full time residential training in some countries has costs per student which can average several times the costs of conventional higher education. This may arise as a result of many factors including the length of training, the small size of training institutions, low pupil-teacher ratios, inefficient working practices, and historic budgeting largely unrelated to enrolments. If teacher training is comparatively expensive, and if demand for newly trained teachers is high (as a result of enrolment expansion), simple expansion of existing modes of training may be unrealistic. Even if this is not true, high costs per student need justification. The pressures created by austerity in those countries suffering from recession add to the needs to reconsider patterns of educational investment during economic downswings (Lewin, 1987). 8 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Secondly, in many developing countries there are concerns about the quality of new teachers and the need to qualify the untrained. Where criticisms are valid, and the content and pedagogy of training need to change to increase the probability of newly trained teachers possessing appropriate competencies, inno­ vations need to be planned which are costed against sustainable budgets which can claim to provide value for public funds. Thirdly, and closely related, where the quality of the intake to initial teacher training is low and expansion is anticipated, it may be necessary to re-profile not only content and pedagogy, but also the organisation and modes of delivery of training to cope with trainees who have different characteristics and weaker basic skills than those who entered training in the past. Fourthly, many training systems have their origins in colonial practice. What may once have been rational may no longer meet new needs and resource constraints. Systems based on conventional training colleges may have been unduly influenced by colonial administrations and exogenous influence and advice provided by those who have sponsored their development. In many countries the training college sector has received sustained support from private and public donors of one kind or another based on a variety of mixed motives. As needs are increasingly identified at a national level, qualified teachers become more mobile, and much of the costs of expansion are borne publicly, it is timely to review practice and resource allocation. Fifthly, studies of the comparative costs and benefits of different methods of training teachers are not readily available in most developing countries. Decisions on modes of training are therefore often made on grounds which are largely independent of these kinds of considerations. It is not that cost and cost effectiveness data should or could be the main basis for policy. It is simply that without considered judgement of what is known of costs and benefits it is unlikely that the best use will be made of public investment. To avoid the misunderstandings that are sometimes associated with economic analysis of educational development issues a number of observations are relevant. Firstly, it should be clear from the outset that the training of teachers is both desirable and necessary. It is obvious that an appropriate level of mastery of content and concepts is a prerequisite to the ability to share competencies with learners whether in language, mathematics, science or history. It is also self- evident that intuition and experience are not in themselves efficient ways of acquiring skills of effective teaching which are the common property of those who have trodden the pathway successfully before. It would be perverse to argue 9 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 that it is advantageous to be unaware of established theories of cognition, common errors of reasoning amongst children of different ages, or tried and tested methods of learning to read. Such things can be understood and translated into learning and teaching strategies through systematic learning and organised experience more efficiently than in other ways. Secondly, though training teachers is in principle attractive, this does not mean that all methods are equally effective. Nor does it mean that what may have been satisfactory in the past will be so in the future. Belief in the efficacy of a method is probably a necessary condition for its successful realisation; it is not sufficient. Assertion and advocacy need to be buttressed by evidence that desired competencies are actually achieved by trainees who are able to deploy these in real learning and teaching environments. In a rational world it ought to be possible, at least at the level of judgement backed by systematic data, to separate out the more and the less costly and effective approaches to training given defined goals in order to assist choices that have to be made where resources are constrained. Thirdly, there are obvious pitfalls in believing that an initial qualification to teach represents an end point in the acquisition of competence and guarantees its manifestation in practice. Certifying all teachers so that none are formally untrained is a desirable goal but is insufficient to guarantee improved teaching quality in schools. Initial qualifications are literally what they present themselves as — confirmation of the minimum levels of competence which justify a public “licence to teach”. They can hardly be based on competencies possessed by average and above average members of the profession established in mid-career. This is why belief that initial training is sufficient to certify teachers for the whole of their working lifetimes have been over-taken by widespread recognition of the importance of continuing professional development spread over a career. The underlying point is that investment in the development of teachers’ competencies can and should be seen as a continuous process that follows initial qualification with support which consolidates newly acquired skills, encourages reflection and self-criticism, and provides opportunities to move to higher levels of competence. Models of investment in training which are heavily front loaded (i.e. all the investment is pre-career), as is the case with conventional pre-service training, begin to seem less and less attractive. Fourthly, making connections between costs and resources, and policy on training teachers, is uncomfortable and often unfamiliar to many of those involved in the training process. This may be because training institutions distance faculty from decisions on the allocation of resources, because trainers may be predisposed to think in terms of what is desirable rather more than what 10 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 is feasible and sustainable in terms of resources, and because cadres of trainers may well have sectional interests that value the self-interest of their profession over the interest of those who are trained. None of this detracts from the fact that training is resource constrained and, where it is a public activity, it should be accountable for the resources it consumes which might otherwise be allocated to different purposes which might have more effect on learning and teaching outcomes for school pupils. Some common approaches to initial teacher education There are many different modes of teacher education and several ways of developing typologies. For the purposes of this paper a simple ideal-typical schema has been developed that differentiates four main pathways to becoming a qualified teacher. These are encapsulated as: 1. Full time certificate/diploma/undergraduate college-based training in purpose built institutions usually lasting for 3 to 4 years 2. Full time post-graduate training in higher education institutions subsequent to the acquisition of a degree level award 3. Apprenticeship models based on service in school with in-service support leading to certification as a qualified teacher 4. Direct entry as teachers without training who are subsequently certified Table 1 offers some familiar distinguishing features of each approach in terms of duration, entry, curriculum, teaching practice, teaching methods, certification and probable costs per student. Table 1: An ideal typical typology of initial teacher education programmes Description Duration Entry Curriculum Teaching practice Teaching styles Certification Costs per student Type 1 College certificate diploma BEd 2-A years full time residential Junior or senior secondary school leavers Subject upgrading, subject methods, professional studies Block practice 4-12 weeks Lectures, small group work, use of specialist facilities Written exams, school practice reports, projects or special studies Relatively high 11 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Description Duration Entry Curriculum Teaching practice Teaching styles Certification Costs per student Type 2 University Post­ graduate Certificate of Education 1-2 years full time residential after first degree University degree Subject methods, professional studies Block practice 2-10 weeks Lectures, small group work, use of specialist facilities Written exams, school practice reports, projects or special studies Relatively high but for shorter duration Type 3 In-service and post­ service upgrading for initial qualification 1-5 years part time residential and/or non residential Post­ experience as temp­ orary or untrained teachers Subject upgrading, subject methods, professional studies Teaching in schools in normal employ­ ment Residential lectures/ workshops of varying duration, self study, distance learning Written exams, school or inspectors’ reports High or low depending on duration and intensity of contract with tutors Type 4 Direct entry 0-2 years probation Senior secondary, college or university None, or supervised induction Teaching in schools in normal employ­ ment Apprentice­ ship Inspection, school reports Low This simplified typology cannot reflect the many detailed variations on the characteristics identified for each type. Thus it is not uncommon for Type 1 programmes to have different characteristics depending on the level of entry. It is also the case that in some systems students graduate from certificate, through diploma to degree programmes over an extended period interspersed with teaching in schools. Degree level BEd programmes may or may not have additional Honours years dependent on completion of the basic qualification. University-based BEds may have different entry criteria and curricula to college- based programmes. Curricula may treat academic- and subject-based courses concurrently in each year or more sequentially with a shifting emphasis as the course proceeds. Type 2 courses probably have less variation. Nevertheless their duration is not standard, the mix of curricula requirements varies widely especially in relation to teaching practice, and they may be offered part-time and non-residentially. 12 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Type 3 arrangements can be found de facto or de jure in a substantial number of countries. It is not uncommon for large proportions of those accepted for initial training to have experience as untrained teachers. They may also have taken part in in-service programmes and will have received a more or less systematic induction into teaching from those with whom they work. This is important. It means that those who enter initial training may already be familiar with the classroom environment and schools as organisations. It is also likely to be true that they have acquired teaching styles, pedagogic dispositions, and beliefs about pupils’ learning and the nature of the subjects they teach which reflect those commonly held by their teacher colleagues. These may or may not resonate with the teacher education curriculum and its realisation. What has been learned may need to be (at least partially) unlearned or developed in different ways than might be the case with inexperienced school leavers. It certainly has implications for the nature, value and extent of periods of school practice in professional training. These issues are obviously relevant to Type 3 training and are also germane for Type 1 and 2 programmes where a significant proportion of the entry have prior school experience. Type 4 patterns are those closest to apprenticeship. Graduates, or those with sub­ degree qualifications are allowed to enter teaching by virtue of their final academic qualification. In some cases this is sufficient to teach indefinitely; in others a probationary period has to be completed successfully. The possibilities are very wide. Induction may be systematically supported and monitored or may depend on informal arrangements with minimal reporting. Prior experience may or may not be recognised. Higher levels of qualification may be accepted in lieu of training. Sufficiently long service may result in recognition as a qualified teacher. Another important feature of initial teacher qualification systems, which carries cost and resource implications which cannot be simply captured in the typology, concerns the rubrics which define different levels of qualification. These are usually linked to conditions of service and salary scales determined by public service commissions or similar bodies. This a complex area. Teacher’s salaries are often determined by the highest level of academic qualification and the level of training certificates. Entry onto one scale or another influences earnings over long periods independent of performance. Once on a scale, seniority is generally the basis for increments. This means that the point of entry is of great significance. It can and does create pressures for would be teachers to pursue the highest levels of academic qualification and training before career entry, or to focus on upgrading after experience. It can mean fully qualified and trained teachers have experienced between 5 and 10 years of formal education and training beyond the school leaving age. In countries where primary and 13 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 secondary school teachers are on different salary scales independent of academic qualification and training, may mean that disproportionate numbers of those who are primary trained rapidly gravitate to secondary school posts. A further observation is of interest. It has become fashionable in some countries with a long history of college-based teacher education to argue the merits of an increased emphasis on school-based training. In England this has resulted in mandatory guidelines that require partnerships between training institutions and schools and the allocation of substantial amounts of training resources to participating schools. In exchange for resources that may exceed those allocated to the training institution, schools play a central role in the initial training curriculum. In many developing countries school-based training is in reality the default method of training. As noted previously, trainees have often cut their teeth as untrained teachers. Their largely informal training takes place as an unstructured and unrecognised apprenticeship. Some countries (e.g. Trinidad) deliberately provide school experience through on-the-job training before admission to training programmes. These programmes can be used to filter and select trainees. Proponents of more school-based training strategies argue the advantages of initial training close to the chalk face and focus on basic skills and competencies modelled by practitioners close to the realities of effective learning and teaching. They contest the ability of conventional college-based training to provide relevant and contextualised professional learning. Depending on how school- based training is costed they may have some economic attractions. Trainee teachers contribute teaching time to schools at low cost, teacher mentors may be cheaper per unit of tutoring than college staff, and if trainee teachers are more competent at the point of initial qualification than would otherwise be the case, cost effectiveness will be increased. A brief historical digression which illustrates that recent fashions in education usually have their precursors in previous practice may be of interest to some readers. Various forms of school-based teacher training have a long history. In the 1930s a lively debate took place between the proponents of the system used at the Institute of Education, London and the one used at Oxford (Dixon, 1986:14). At the Institute of Education, teaching practice involved a preliminary 3-4 week period in schools. ... as a means of turning back, before it is too late, young people who seem plainly unfitted to the teaching profession and ought not to prepare for it at public expense. 14 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Subsequently students spent two days a week in school and the remainder of their time at the Institute (thus they did not undertake block teaching practice). Tutors were paid to supervise students in school and also gave tutorials in the Institute for which they were paid about one third of a lecturer’s salary. This approach had many of the elements of school focused training intended to link college- and school-based experience in a continuous dialogue. It was contrasted with the orthodoxy of block practice which the University of Oxford used. At a meeting of the university’s Departments of Education and the Headmistresses Association the issues were debated in 1938. The Institute defended its system which required students to spend at least 60 days in school on teaching practice which extended over the school, not the university term. The advantages were said to be that theory and practice could be welded together and methods tutors were specifically invited to ensure that their lectures addressed problems of presentation, classroom management and teaching craft skills. In contrast, Oxford representatives argued that block practice gave students early responsibility for learning and integrated student teachers into school life where they could develop skills systematically. The conservatism that this implied — students would adopt existing practices rather than experiment with new ones — was criticised by the Institute’s tutors. Subsequently, Oxford adopted school-based internship models as did many other institutions in the UK, sometimes apparently reinventing practice with a long history (McIntyre, 1990). The historical record also reminds us that the major elements of the teacher education curriculum are long standing. The London Institute’s Teaching Diploma examination in the 1930s required successful performance in: Principles of Education, Methods of Teaching, Elementary Psychology and Hygiene, The English Education System. One of these: History of Education, Comparative Education, Further Educational Psychology. Successful practice teaching in a school was the final requirement. Term essays were included in the assessment along with the closed book written examination papers for the Diploma. Further Educational Psychology included a course in vocational testing and guidance for an extra fee. In this system students had personal tutors who conducted weekly seminars and arranged demonstration lessons. They also advised on personal matters. A “Colonial Course” was run as a variant on the Diploma for those preparing for teaching or educational administration in the colonies which included core courses from the Diploma and special inputs in comparative education and the teaching of English to non- Western peoples. 15 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Much could be said about the attractions, disadvantages and necessary antecedents for effective school-based training. Not least, it is plausible that the advantages are more than counter-balanced by possible problems. These include difficulties arising from locating a sufficient number of partnership schools where good practice is abundant, finding mentor teachers who are willing and available to train new teachers, and where the costs of adequate infrastructure support (e.g. advisory visits, training of mentors, monitoring of standards and assessment of competencies) are not excessive. It was implied earlier that many of the normative conventions of teacher training can trace their origins back to once rational practices elsewhere — the familiar curriculum of the London Institute in the 1930s is an admittedly fragile illustration of the extent to which this might be the case. In summary, this section has drawn attention to the range of common patterns of initial teacher qualification. It has highlighted some important features that may be significant in responding to new needs and the changing qualities of trainees in many of the training systems in developing countries. Specifically attention is drawn to the fact that many trainees have experience of learning and teaching on entry to training programmes. It is likely that these students will have established patterns of working and grounded (if possibly naive) theories of learning and teaching which may or may not match with the presumptions of training curricula. Issues which relate to the content and length of training are also flagged. Normative practices and bureaucratic regulation seem to have been at least as important as considerations of professional competence in making decisions on the teacher education curriculum and its length. Lastly it is suggested, using school-based training as an illustration, that many proposed innovations in initial education may have antecedents which invite further analysis, especially if the norms which currently exist in many countries derive directly or indirectly from them through processes of historical (colonial) transfer or through contemporary diffusion by the diaspora of teacher educators. Some methodological issues There are methodological reasons why exploring the allocation and utilisation of resources to teacher education is difficult. Establishing the costs of different teaching and material inputs to training appears to be the easiest part. In systems where initial teacher education and certification is undertaken in training colleges which have training as their main function, it should be relatively straightforward to establish the cost per student successfully trained. This may be more difficult where initial teacher education is provided alongside other activities, e.g. large scale in-service support or where several modes of training co-exist in the same institution (e.g. PGCE, BEd) and share staff and other 16 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 resources. It may also be complicated where distance education programmes exist if these share an infrastructure that delivers a range of courses. But it should still be possible to separate out costs attributable to initial training at least to the point where there is a good enough approximation sufficient to guide policy. More difficult is to decide how to treat costs that arise from contributions that student teachers may make to teaching. If they undertake a substantial amount of teaching during training they contribute to the cost of providing an adequate number of teachers. If they were not in the system more teachers would have to be provided for the same levels of pupil-teacher ratios. It is also problematic to include the costs of salaries which are paid in full to trainees in some systems during full time training. These teachers may or may not be replaced in the schools in which they are employed. In principle the teaching they are not doing has to be covered, but it may not be. Notwithstanding these problems it is realistic to attempt to discover what costs are associated with different modes of delivery, how they have been changing, and what will be the budgetary implications of an expansion or reduction in any particular mode. This is needed in any medium term planning which aspires to place qualified teachers in front of all classes within a defined time period. In some cases this may indicate that the ambition cannot be realised using existing modes of training designed for different circumstances. If so, alternative modes need to be considered which are cost sustainable and likely to be at least as effective. The analytical difficulties associated with measurements and judgements of the effectiveness of training are considerable. Most studies which attempt this either assess the extent to which training programmes change trainees in relation to subject competence and/or professional skills, or they focus on the degree to which trained teachers are more effective in the classroom than those who are not trained. Linking these two perspectives — to establish whether those who are trained acquire relevant competencies, subsequently transfer these to classroom teaching, and as a result their pupils learn more effectively — is very ambitious. What appears simple in principle is very complex to research in reality as others have noted (Tatto, Nielson, Cummings, Kularatna and Dharmadasa, 1991:7). School effectiveness research indicates how important school effects may be on achievement independent of individual staff attributes. Pupils’ achievements generally cannot be viewed as the outcome of individual teachers competencies since pupils may experience several teachers. Teachers’ effectiveness is unlikely to be independent of who is taught under which circumstances, and out-of-school factors may vary in importance between pupils, classes, schools and subjects. 17 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 There is no simple resolution to the complexities of unravelling the effectiveness of teacher training. Nor can there be without careful grounding in context. There is no a priori reason to suppose that the definition of effective teaching, and the methods of assessing whether or not it is occurring, have universal charac­ teristics. A variety of proxy measures are often employed — pass rates and other measures of learning gains amongst students on training courses, observation of pedagogic practice amongst those who are trained, performance of pupils taught by trained and untrained teachers. Analytic problems exist at many levels, for example: the operational definition of the dependent variable (effective teaching?) to be explained; the causal relationships between training, pedagogic performance and learning outcomes; the separation of the effects of prior experience from the effects of training per se; the difficulties of distinguishing between institution level effects on performance and those that arise from individual level competences amongst trained teachers working in many different school environments. No programme of research can easily explore all such complexities. It may be possible to make some progress by adopting a less comprehensive but more practical strategy to the analysis between costs and effectiveness. At a minimum it is possible to arrive at estimates of costs broadly defined which include most of the resources mobilised in different types of training activity: staff time, materials, physical facilities, supervisory support and so on. Proxy measures of performance can be useful, especially if approached from a null hypothesis perspective. Thus, a working assumption can be made that there is no difference in effectiveness between training methods unless or until there is evidence to the contrary. Costs almost certainly will vary. The issue then becomes a judgement as to whether any differences that are observed are sufficiently attractive to justify additional costs. Where there are large cost differences, and differences in performance appear small, the challenge is for advocates of particular training methods to demonstrate why the most parsimonious approaches should not be adopted since they offer the opportunity to train more teachers at less cost. This approach may not satisfy purists intent on demonstrating the value of an approach to which they are committed for non-economic reasons. It is attractive in the absence of realistic methods of capturing the full complexity of the antecedent condition-training-performance-in-practice relationships which confront researchers. To put it simply those who have been trained should perform in the classroom very differently to those who have not, those who have been expensively trained should be very different from those whose training has been much less resource intensive. In the first instance it should be possible to provide some answers to these kind of pressing questions. 18 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Given this mosaic of problems the question is how to proceed. With the luxury of offering possibilities for discussion rather than conclusions to a process, I offer some ideas to create the beginnings of a framework for empirical enquiry in the next sections. Analysing costs There are two obvious ways to begin to explore costs and subsequently effectiveness. The first focuses on different types of costs (or more generally resource issues). The second seeks to unpack the training pathway to minimum competence for a publicly licensed teacher into three domains: before, during and after the core training experience. This section addresses the first focus. Firstly, some general observations. At a macro level the main cost drivers related to teacher training systems are self evident and can be separated into recurrent salary and non-salary costs and into fixed and variable costs. Recurrent salary costs arise from teaching faculty and support staff (which include non-teaching administrators and service personnel). The costs of training in full time institutions will normally be most heavily influenced by salary costs which will typically account for between 50% and 90% of all recurrent costs per trainee in post-school training institutions. The distribution between teaching and non-teaching salary costs can vary over a wide range — it is possible to find institutions where non-teaching salary costs may exceed those of teaching salaries per trainee, especially where training is residential. In principle it is easy to identify factors that will tend to increase salary costs and those which will reduce them. Low student-staff ratios (10:1 or less) will inflate costs, as will a high proportion of non-teaching staff salaries (more than 25%). Relatively high and growing lecturers’ salaries (in relation to GDP/capita and other comparable groups of professionals) will increase costs unless coupled with higher levels of student-staff ratios. Younger average ages of college staff will reduce costs, high and increasing average seniority will inflate costs. School-based training, if it substitutes teachers’ time for that of lecturers, may reduce average costs per trainee. The main determinant of recurrent salary costs per student is the student-teacher ratio (STR). This can be expressed formally as follows. Student teacher ratio = STR = Ns Nt Where Ns = number o f students and Nt = number o f teachers (lecturers) Rearranging we have Ns = STR X Nt 19 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 The salary cost per student for teaching staff (Cs) is represented as follows. Cost per student Cs = Sum o f the salary cost o f teachers = ETs Ns Ns where IT s = the sum o f all teachers’ (lecturers’) salaries By substitution Cs = ZTs STR X Nt If ZTs is approximately equal to the average o f all teachers’ salaries (AvTs) x Nt then Cs = AvTs X Nt = AvTs STR X Nt STR This mathematical representation leads to the fairly obvious point that recurrent teaching costs per student rise with average teachers salaries and fall as the STR increases. However, the more precise relationships over time will depend on whether average and total salary bills change at rates different to the STR as a result of pay awards, incremental drift and differential retirement and recruitment rates at the top and the bottom end of the salary scales. On the margin the relationship between AvTs, and ITs/Ns, may not remain constant if the mean and the median salaries do not coincide with the arithmetic average. It might seem as simple as arguing that if AvTs is minimised and STR maximised in ways consistent with maintaining quality, the economic concern with cost efficiency would be satisfied. It is not quite that simple. What is delivered to students in the training curriculum will not only depend on salary costs per student. These have to be translated into staff contact hours with students and the work which surrounds these contact hours. Higher salary costs per student and lower student-staff ratios, can co-exist with low student contact hours depending on how work is organised. Lower salary costs per student and higher student-staff ratios can be achieved without necessarily diminishing student contact time. The key point here is that the STR is a function of the number of teaching staff thought to be needed (Ts). This of course ultimately determines ZTs. Formally the relationships can be represented as follows. Number o f = Number o f students (Ns) x Av. taught hours/week/student (Th) teaching staff Average teaching group Av. teaching load in hours per week (Tl) needed size (Gs) Nt = Ns X Th Gs Tl Th = Gs X Tl STR 20 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 It is now clear that what is delivered in terms of taught time (taught hours per week) for a particular cost, is a function of the number of students per teacher (STR), the amount of teaching associated with teaching posts and the average teaching group size. Table 2a is suggestive of some possible relationships between variables. It shows that for colleges with the same number of students and staff and which therefore have similar costs per student, different mixes of group size, student learning time and teaching loads are possible. Table 2a: Four different patterns with similar costs College Number of students Number of staff Student- teacher ratio Cost per student (av. salary per teacher 15 000) Average teaching group size Number of student teaching periods per week Teaching load in periods per week 1 1 000 67 15 1 000 30 10 5 2 1 000 67 15 1 000 15 20 20 3 1 000 67 15 1 000 45 30 10 4 1 000 67 15 1 000 30 30 15 Thus College 1 has low teaching loads and students experience relatively few periods a week in middle size groups. In College 2 teaching loads are high, students have more contact time and group sizes are small. In College 3 group sizes are large, students receive a lot of teaching but teaching loads are not high. In College 4 students receive a lot of teaching in middle sized groups with middle level teaching loads for lecturers. Table 2b shows possible effects of varying the college intake whilst maintaining the same number of staff. Table 2b: Four different patterns with different enrolments and similar staffing College Number of students Number of staff Student- teacher ratio Cost per student (av. salary per teacher 15 000) Average teaching group size Number of student teaching periods per week Teaching load in periods per week 1 500 67 8 2 000 15 10 5 2 1 000 67 15 1 000 15 20 20 3 1 500 67 23 667 15 20 30 4 2 000 67 30 500 15 15 30 21 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 In this case the costs per student vary as the student-teacher ratio varies. College 1 has high costs and low teaching loads and taught time. Colleges 2 and 3 deliver the same number of taught hours to similar size groups of students but College 3 does so at a lower cost as a result of higher teaching loads. College 4 has the lowest costs but the highest teaching loads. These two tables and further variations on them illustrate how the key parameters interact. Most importantly they highlight the fact that though costs per student are determined by average salaries and student-teacher ratios, what is delivered to students is also a function of teaching group sizes and teaching loads. High costs can co-exist with low levels of contact time for students. The discussion above focuses on teaching salary recurrent costs per student and has general applicability. Total salary costs must include non-teaching salaries which arise from a variety of widely differing practices and expectations about staffing related to teacher education institutions. These are more difficult to generalise about. The number of non-teaching staff may or may not be related to enrolments. Some categories, for example director, vice principals, finance officer, hostel warden and so on may exist in every training institution independent of enrolment. Other posts may be related to enrolment, such as the number of laboratory assistants, caretakers and security guards. If historic budgeting is used employees may continue to be employed whether or not there is a continuing need for their services. The most that can be said about this category of expenditure is that it almost certainly is desirable to establish norms related to enrolment based on what is thought to be necessary in effectively run institutions. If this generates costs which are a small proportion of the cost per student, then analysis is of secondary importance, assuming adequate checks and balances exist to ensure what is allocated is spent as intended. If non-teaching salaries are a large proportion of the cost per student this invites scrutiny of whether such expenditure is essential to the main training mission. Non-salary recurrent costs per student are also difficult to generalise about. Most costs, will arise from expenditure on maintenance, equipment, consumable materials, travel and subsistence, food subsidies, hostel costs and student stipends. All of these can be examined with a view to establishing whether what is spent needs to be spent to maintain the quality of the training programme. It is of interest to compare non-salary with salary costs, to establish the extent to which non-salary costs vary per student between institutions and to establish whether non-salary costs are or could be shared in an appropriate way which is not damaging to quality or equity. This applies both to the costs of physical assets (which may be shared with other institutions or used as community resources) and to the direct costs of training (which may be partly supported through contributions from those who would benefit). 22 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 As with non-teaching salary costs, if non-salary costs are a high proportion of per student expenditure they need careful examination. If they are a very small proportion this may also suggest that there is a problem in supporting basic infrastructure and providing conditions under which effective professional development may take place. A complementary way of analysing costs is to separate the component parts into fixed and variable elements. The latter will be sensitive to the number of students trained and will normally not be subject to marked economies of scale. Fixed costs, as a component of costs per student, should fall with increased volume. The distinction between fixed and variable costs is clear in principle but can be blurred in practice. In brief, fixed costs usually include central administration and other common support costs, national programme development costs, monitoring, quality assurance and accreditation systems. These cost are likely to be fixed within a range of student numbers, but may increase stepwise when thresholds are crossed. Thus within a wide band of enrolments a fixed size teacher education secretariat may be able to administer the services needed from the centre. In some cases, some of these central costs will behave more like variable costs, for example where the costs associated with periodic inspection multiply as the number of sites that need to be inspected increases. Variable costs include staff costs associated with teaching, tutoring and men­ toring, materials for students, the direct costs of assessment, school supervision visits, and student support costs for food, accommodation and clothing. Most of these will increase linearly with the number of students. There may areas where there are economies of scale, for example in textbook production where the cost of a book is reduced as the volume of production increases. A framework for exploring costs before, during and after training The second focus identified above for exploring costs concentrates on questions that may be asked of training systems before, during and after the core period of training. These questions can be framed in relation to relate to antecedent circumstances, the transactions associated with the process of training including its organisational features, and those aspects of outcomes from training that might indicate the value or otherwise of the investments that have been made. The latter include not only evidence of competence as a result of training but also any indications that may exist of the translation of competencies into practice. 23 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Before training issues It is fundamental to judgements of the efficiency of training systems that those who are selected for training are individuals who are likely to successfully acquire the competencies identified as the subject of the training. The predictive validity of selection methods should be high. If it is not, wastage will be excessive and many who start programmes will fail to acquire competencies and become certified. Thus, whatever the costs of training per student, these have to be adjusted to take into account wastage arising from non-completion and questions must be put related to whether better selection might improve the quality and quantity of those trained. There may also be significant costs (and benefits) associated with different patterns of selection independent of their predictive validity. In particular, where selection takes place from amongst those who are already teaching or who have substantial periods of school experience, several considerations come into play. Selection may be more reliable since it can be based partly on judgements of performance in schools. Those applying for training may also be self-selected in the sense that some will decide that teaching is not their preferred career on the basis of their experience in schools. The work pre-training students undertake in schools may also be a net benefit to the costs of the school system. Lastly, the attributes of those trainees selected constitute a starting point for training. If the assumptions made about trainees’ characteristics are false, and subsequent training curricula and pedagogy are based on these, it is unlikely that appropriate competencies will be acquired efficiently. To be more specific, it may be assumed that students are fluent in the medium of instruction of colleges and schools. In some developing countries entry scores on language tests indicate that this is at best an optimistic assumption. It is also not unusual in some countries to find substantial proportions of new students minimally academically qualified in subjects for which they are being trained. If these students are confronted with subject based curricula which proceed from an assumption of, for example, mastery of basic mathematics at school level they may well find the content and expectations of courses very difficult. Training organisation and process issues Several general questions can be identified which relate to the costs and resource needs of the training process. As noted above these depend on the allocation and utilisation of salary and non-salary expenditure. Thus it is of interest to compare costs per student and patterns of expenditure (teaching and non-teaching salary recurrent) in teacher education institutions and between teacher education institutions and other types of education and training organisations. Are the 24 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 variations the result of different patterns of staff utilisation, economies of scale, or variations in one or other type of salary or non-salary costs? If so, is this the result of historic budgeting or can it be justified by current conditions? Would norm-based funding encourage a convergence in costs that might promote equity and efficiency within the same mode of provision? Pre-career training is becoming more popular and in many countries it represents a preferred mode of training. It may or may not have higher costs than in-career upgrading. This will depend on how it is organised. Full time residential pre­ career training is expensive especially where it is prolonged, residential costs are substantial, and attrition rates during and after training are significant. However, the simplest alternatives which depend on various types of in-career training can also be costly if there are significant periods of residential tuition, trainees are paid full salaries as opposed to student stipends, and supervision and support systems during training are extensive. Increasing the extent to which training is school-based has attracted many advocates who advance convincing pedagogic rationales. In principle, it shifts some of the costs from the teacher education budget to schools depending on how it is financed and what model is adopted. This may or may not represent a net cost saving and could actually be more expensive, though of course it might be more effective. The critical question to answer before stepping in this direction is whether sufficient infrastructure and good practice exists in schools where trainees can be located for them to benefit from systematic and well informed training and support. If it does not, the costs become irrelevant. Conventional college-based training systems generally operate block practice teaching systems where students are placed in schools for a teaching practice period and are visited by college tutors. The major cost of this is usually in tutors’ time and travel expenses, assuming that schools do not charge for hosting student teachers (as they now do in some countries). Given that the workload imposed by school visits is often a focus of tutor dissatisfaction, and that students typically report variable experiences and learning benefits, the following questions should be asked. How many resources does teaching practice consume? Could some or most of the benefits be achieved in different ways or at lower costs? These questions have a sharp focus if students already have substantial school-based experience on which to draw as a result of periods spent in school prior to acceptance on training courses. Lastly, distance learning systems are established widely. Teacher education is delivered using distance methods usually in combination with some face to face contact. This method of delivery can dramatically reduce costs though due 25 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 attention must be paid to completion rates. Where completion is linked to promotion and salary increments, attrition may be low. The criticism that some desired outcomes are more difficult to achieve through these methods and some cannot be achieved at all, can be countered by the observation that mixed mode methods (some distance some full time) can be developed that retain some of the advantages of both conventional and distance organisational patterns. Outcome and deployment issues A series of cost related questions effect the output side of initial training. Firstly, many training systems couple subject upgrading concurrently with the development of method and professional skills. This may be cost inefficient. If entrants to training systems have low academic competence, further schooling or targeted and intensive study programmes may be both more effective and less costly than post-school college-based subject work. This might also reduce the proportion of students who take education courses as a means of entering higher education to pursue non-teaching careers. It may also be true that where subject teaching co-exists with teaching methods and professional studies the latter are regarded as relatively low status and are neglected as a result. Secondly, training may provide opportunities to acquire competencies that are unlikely to be acquired through other routes. Conversely, at least some of the competencies that training is directed towards are likely to be achievable through experience and purposeful induction. If the latter is true, the key questions to be asked are the following. How much does training accelerate the acquisition of competencies and at what cost? How long do training effects persist once teachers have entered the profession? (If this time is short then training is relatively cost ineffective.) Thirdly, and closely related, is the question of what can be learned from studying the performance of trained and untrained teachers working in similar school environments. If schools as organisations are more powerful determinants of teachers’ practice than training, where should investment in the improvement of learning and teaching and in the development of teachers competencies be located? This is not to deny the possible efficacy of training. It does open up questions of when and where in a teacher’s life cycle training should be provided and whether it needs close coupling with the organisational realities, working preferences and incentives to improve practice found in school systems. Fourthly, success rates on most teacher education programmes are high. This sometimes rests uneasily with observations of the competence of newly trained teachers and their working practices. There are both benevolent and malevolent 26 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 explanations. It may be that the predictive validity of selection is high and that competencies are well specified and reliably assessed. If there are dissatis­ factions with performance, they arise from factors beyond the training process. Alternatively, selection for training carries with it the normative expectation of certification at levels of competence that do not reflect the reasonable expectations of schools which employ new teachers. Which of these possible explanations (or others that may be plausible) stand up to analysis? The last element of an analysis of costs is concerned with three issues which relate to the deployment, induction and professional longevity of those trained. Firstly, in some countries a free labour market operates and newly qualified teachers are expected to identify opportunities for employment and apply competitively for appointment. This has the attractions and disadvantages associated more generally with labour markets. It may not result in a rational deployment of new teachers in supportive schools which can cultivate good practice based on competencies acquired during training. Other countries post new teachers according to a wide range of criteria which are rarely based on the needs of newly qualified teachers for professional nurture. Yet, it would seem desirable that whatever is achieved in initial training was seen as the beginning of a process of professional development which would greatly benefit from some systematic support related to the consolidation of competencies. It should also encourage reflection on the conditions under which newly qualified teachers might have a real impact on the diffusion of innovations in learning and teaching, and consequently lead to effective teaching methods. Newly trained teachers with untried skills entering established departments in junior positions would not seem to have a high probability of convincing colleagues of the need to adopt new pedagogy. Secondly, and as a follow on from the first point, it is largely unknown what support newly qualified teachers receive after training in their first jobs. Few education systems allocate substantial resources to induct new teachers. Guidelines may or may not exist relating to probationary periods but these frequently stress the administrative and procedural over the professional and developmental. Training institutions may have few or no active linkages with the schools in which newly trained teachers find themselves, and no contact with most of their alumni. In these circumstances it may not be surprising that competencies acquired in training are not recognised or consolidated, and that the relevance of what is acquired in training is questioned by those who receive its products. Lying behind these issues is the open question of how the resources invested in training should be distributed over the professional lifetime of teachers. As has been suggested, perhaps investment should not be as front loaded as has traditionally been the case in many training systems. 27 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Finally, with a few exceptions, not much is known about the professional lifetimes and career trajectories of trained teachers in many systems. If certifi­ cation does not guarantee employment, there may be wastage as a result of a proportion of those certified choosing to follow careers other than teaching. (Or these teachers may choose to teach in another national system of education, thereby representing a net loss for the national investment in training — though probably a high rate of private return to the individual.) Those who do enter the teaching force may not remain. This needs to be factored into costs especially where attrition rates are high — the proportion of those trained still working in areas they were trained for can drop dramatically after 5 to 10 years. The shorter the professional lifetime of teachers in the system, the higher are the real costs of providing an adequate number of trained teachers. The issues raised in this section collectively begin to identify the arenas in which data is needed to understand more about what the costs of training are, why they are configured in particular ways, and what constraints and opportunities they create for the future. If expansion in enrolments is needed it must be achieved within realistic costs that can be sustained. Similarly, if qualitative improvements are desirable, these must be costed and justified in terms of at least some of the benefits that they are likely to bring. Appendix 1 collects together a summary of the questions that have been identified. A note on organisational patterns and costs It may be helpful before concluding to provide a schematic reminder of some of the options that exist in patterns of training that carry with them cost and quality implications. This is attempted in a descriptive summary of Table 3 below. It draws attention to alternative patterns of provision before, during and after core training periods. Table 3 identifies seven possible modes and these can be descriptively summarised as follows. Mode 1: Conventional full time college-based training preceded by no experience. Mode 2: Conventional full time college-based training preceded by pre-course experience and followed by mentored induction into schools. Mode 3: Untrained teaching experience followed by conventional full time college-based training. 28 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Mode 4: Mentored pre-training experience followed by conventional full time college-based training and mentored induction into schools. Mode 5: Mentored pre-training experience followed by a short period of conventional college-based training followed by school placement with INSET support. Mode 6: Mentored pre-training experience followed by alternating short periods of conventional full time college-based training followed by mentored induction into schools. Mode 7: Mentored pre-training experience followed by wholly school-based training on the job leading to mentored distance support. Clearly these modes only illustrate possibilities and there are many other possible mixes which carry different resource and cost implications. This summary draws attention to four key observations. Firstly, extended full time institutional training is only one of many options. Secondly, what comes before and what comes after core periods of training may be just as important as what occurs in the core. Thirdly, there is no necessity for core periods of training to be continuous or front loaded in terms of costs or training inputs. Fourthly, mixed mode methods which make use of distance education and learning while working are clearly options which have potential cost advantages. The need to establish the resource implications of different approaches is a central theme of this paper. More difficult, but also very important, is insight into their probable effectiveness. The analytical questions related to future policy and practice now focus on which of these (and other possible modes) are feasible, relevant to short to medium term needs, and are likely to be cost effective. Is a new and different balance of factor inputs, in the economist’s language, attractive to meet new needs and disquiet over both costs and effectiveness of existing patterns of delivery? There are opportunities to reconsider how investment in teacher education and training is best organised and delivered given the shortfalls in teacher supply generated by enrolment expansion, the new emphasis in many countries on changing curricula to improve pupils’ achievement, the consequences of austerity and the importance of improving quality and effectiveness. 29 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Table 3: Seven possible training modes Mode Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6 Pre-training College training Post training 1 No experience Full time training Full time training Full time training Pre-course programme Full time training Full time training Full time training Post course mentor support Unsupported Teaching Full time training Full time training Full time training Mentored Teaching Full time training Full time training Full time training Post course mentor support Mentored Teaching Full time training In school + INSET In school + INSET In school + INSET Mentored Teaching Full time + in school Full time + in school Full time + in school Post course mentor support Mentored Teaching School based INSET School based INSET Conclusion This paper has explored resource and cost issues in the provision of teacher education. It implies that there is a window of opportunity for some radical reconsideration of how teachers are trained which may be long overdue. Tried and tested approaches can be expensive and may not be not self-evidently effective. Despite the existence of many enthusiastic teacher educators, what evidence there is often suggests a surprising homogeneity of practice and assumptions about how best to train teachers at the curriculum level, and a disappointing record of sustained innovations which might lead to new practice which meets new needs. 30 There are attractive images of teacher education institutions at the cutting edge of professional practice and the development of learning and teaching methods in schools and for teacher education students. There are many opportunities to contribute to and lead curriculum development, develop close relations with clusters of schools, support teachers over the early years of their careers, improve school-based assessment, and explore and evaluate pupils’ learning at all levels. Teacher education institutions and teacher educators could be the critical mass at the centre of a web of partnerships designed to improve the quality and range of competencies that schools engender in their pupils. Can colleges become develop­ mental institutions which are closely linked to practice? Can they provide theoretical insights and research-based rationales for experiment directed towards innovations that can “go to scale” and become generally adopted? Can they inspire and motivate new generations of teachers who might move more freely between schools and college environments? How can initial training and certification become more of a stop-over on a railway line to an interesting destination rather than an arrival at a terminus beyond which maps are scarce? All these things and many others are possible in revitalising teacher education systems. All the options are resource constrained. The implication of this paper is that the constraints are not a starting point — imagination, enthusiasm, commitment, and insight into the training process take precedence. But costs and resources are a central issue which must be coupled with judgements of effectiveness to chart the room to manoeuvre in generating alternative and preferable strategies to train teachers in a vibrant and purposeful professional environment. Teacher education is at risk where austerity in public financial resources leads to the asking of hard questions about how to re-profile educational investment. Unless the sceptical can be convinced that what exists, and what can be developed, does represent value for money, unless proposed and actual costs and resource needs identified are realistic, and unless there is robust evidence that training methods of whatever kind lead to tangible benefits, the pressure will be to find the cheapest methods of certifying teachers. These will not necessarily be the most effective. This paper makes a start at mapping key questions concerning costs and resource utilisation that can be explored empirically. Appendix 1 provides a summary of these. Deeper understanding of these questions, and the reasons for whatever answers can be given, would provide a more secure basis to develop policy on teacher education in particular countries. Such policy will never be solely the result of analysis focused on resource utilisation. However, it can hardly ignore the questions raised in this paper if the best use possible is to be made of public funds. Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 31 Question Entry Conditions Sub-questions How are trainee teachers selected? What criteria are weighted in the selection process? Academic achievement? Personal qualities? Age and experience? What evidence is there o f the predictive validity of the selection process? What are the selection ratios o f applicants to places and what issues does this raise? Is there “queuing” for selection in the training market? Are trainees direct entrants from school or have they been teaching as unqualified teaching assistants? If there is queuing for training places, does it increase or decrease costs and selection efficiency? What are the characteristics o f those selected? What do the academic and professional experience characteristics o f those selected indicate about their needs in relation to the desired competencies? Are the (changing) characteristics of entrants into training reflected in the curriculum they follow and the pedagogic methods used? Training Process What are the costs per successful student for different modes o f training? How do costs vary between institutions and modes o f training? How do costs compare with those in other forms of post-school education and training? Are variations in cost per student within a mode o f training the result o f different patterns of staff utilisation, economies of scale, or variations in non-salary costs? Should pre-career training models be preferred to in-career models? Does pre-career training have higher costs than in-career training? What evidence is there that pre-career training is more effective and efficient than in-career training? Is more school-based training an attractive option? Are actual costs likely to be higher or lower? Is the cost o f practice teaching Do schools have the infrastructure to support training and induction? How much does teaching practice cost? consistent with the benefits? Is distance education cheaper per Could the benefits be achieved in different ways? Does distance education offer a viable alternative to college-based training? qualified teacher? Does it result in similar outcomes? How feasible are mixed mode systems? A ppendix 1: R esearchable questions related to entry, training process, outcom es and deploym ent of new teachers Outcomes Does teacher training increase mastery o f subject disciplines? If it does, how much are the gains and how do they compare with the costs of achieving similar gains in further schooling or higher education? Is it cost effective to mix subject upgrading with method and professional development courses? Does teacher training speed up the acquisition o f professional skills? Does training impart competencies which are different to those arising from experience? By how much does training accelerate the acquisition o f which competencies? Do newly trained teachers perform differently to untrained teachers? To what extent do newly trained teachers act differently in organising learning and teaching to untrained teachers working in the same schools? Do institutional effects overshadow training effects in teachers performance in the classroom? What are the success rates on teacher training programmes? Are the criteria for success set at appropriate levels? Which competencies are the most common cause o f lack o f success? To what extent are newly trained teachers regarded as competent by schools and other stakeholders? Deployment How and where are newly trained teachers employed? Are newly trained teachers directed to posts or does a free market operate? Would a managed market in placement o f newly trained teachers be beneficial? What support do newly trained teachers receive? How much is invested in supporting the induction o f newly trained teachers? Should some o f the costs o f initial training be redirected to continuing professional development of newly trained teachers? What is the attrition rate for newly trained teachers? What is the average length of time newly qualified teachers teach after completing training? Is the ratio o f investment in training to the average length o f service a balanced investment? Perspectives in E ducation, V olum e 18 N o 1 S eptem ber 1999 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 References C. Colclough with K. Lewin, Educating All the Children: Strategies for Primary Schooling (Oxford: South Clarendon Press, 1993). C. W. Dixon, The Institute: A History of the University of London Institute of Education, (London: Institute of Education, 1932-1972). A. Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teacher’s Work and Culture in the Post-Modern Age, (Cassell, 1994). K.M. Lewin, Education in Austerity: Options for Planners. Fundamentals o f Educational Planning, (Paris: International Institute of Educational Planning, 1987). K.M. Lewin, “Education in Emerging Asia: Patterns Policies and Futures into the 21st Century”, International Journal o f Educational Development, 18, 2, (1998): 81-119 D. Mclntrye, The Oxford Internship Scheme and the Cambridge Analytical Framework: Models of Partnership in Initial Education in Booth, M Furlong, J and Wilkin, M Patnership in Initial Training (London: Cassell, 1990). M. Tatto, D. Nielson, W. Cummings, N. Kularatna and K. Dharmadasa, Cost Effectiveness and Teacher Education in Sri Lanka. BRIDGES Report. Harvard School of Education/ USAID Washington. Report Number 10. 1991. WCEFA 1990 Meeting Basic Learning Needs: A New Vision for the 1990s. Background Document, World Conference on Education for All. Inter Agency Commission on Education for All.UNESCO/UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank. UNESCO 1998 World Education Report: Teachers and Teaching in a Changing World UNESCO, Paris. 34 Linking the Global Teacher Education Community Beatrice Avalos Beatrice A valos is currently Co-ordinator o f the Project for Improving Initial Teacher Training in Universities, in Santiago, Chile — a project o f the Ministry o f Education. Recently, she has been working as a teacher training con­ sultant for secondary education in Bangladesh. Abstract The article addresses issues that are potential themes for discussion and interchange o f experiences among teacher educators. These include the search for a theory o f teacher education from the perspective o f issues relating to its purpose, students and teacher educators and the teaching programmes themselves. The paper refers then to change in teacher education and ends with some indications regarding what changes might be desirable to consider. Literature and experience in different country contexts serves to feed the discussions. Introduction Six hundred experienced teachers surveyed in 1995 were brutal about the education they had received, describing it as “mind numbing”, the “shabbiest psychobabble” and “an abject waste of time”. They complained that fragmented, superficial course work had little relevance to classroom realities. And judging by the weak skills of student teachers entering their schools, they observed, the preparation was still woefully inadequate (Time, 26 May 1997). This statement can be heard the world over. Its content served to justify the need for teacher education improvement in Chile; it is found in diagnostic analyses of teacher education in Bangladesh; it served to justify (rightly or wrongly) the introduction of changes in the British teacher education system and it is a quotation of USA teachers in respect of their own system. Also increasingly stated around the world is the assumption that despite its problems teacher education, both initial and continuous, is a key element in the quality of 35 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 schooling processes (Delors 1996, 1998). Thus, if many agree on what the problems are in teacher education, while at the same time recognising the importance of teacher education, then we can at least think of it as a topic for global conversation. Further, we can think in terms of linkages that bind the interested parties, not only to highlight the problems of teacher education, but also to discuss and interchange experiences with a view to improving its processes. This paper attempts- to bring out themes that are or could form part of global discussions among teacher educators in different regions of the world. For this purpose, three areas are selected that, while being global, are also related to policy and to practical conditions needed for the renewal of teacher education. They refer to: (1) the search for a theory of teacher education; (2) issues relating to its organisational structures; and (3) change or renewal in teacher education. The paper concludes with suggested pointers for change in teacher education. In search of a theory for teacher education Until some twenty years ago, the topics that were of concern in thinking about teacher education had to do with the nature and content of courses offered in institutions; the timeframe allowed for these; the techniques for enabling trainees to adopt teaching skills and possible comparisons of teacher organisational structures or the role of school practice. These issues tended to be examined in a piecemeal fashion, with input from different theoretical perspectives depending on the nature of the issue. Discussions about the education of teachers were related to whatever was thought to be the status of educational theory: • an applied synthesis of other disciplines such as sociology, psychology or philosophy, or • a set of practical matters related to curriculum, assessment practices, guidance for students, techniques of getting the curriculum across to students, etc. Teacher education was, and still is, referred to as “training” and derived its theory and practice from one or the other of the above assumptions. In the synthesis of behavioural disciplines assumption, teacher education viewed the content of its programmes as inferred from such theories. Such an approach is still found in university teacher education programmes in Latin America. On the other hand, behaviourism as a learning theory influenced what came to be known as competency-based teacher education. This meant seeing the preparation of teachers as development of specific teaching and classroom management skills. The key theoretical concern in this case was to describe what effective teachers do in order to decide what should form part of an appropriate training programme. Tom (1997) refers to both these approaches as teacher education by implication. 36 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 Seen from another angle, conceptions of teacher education also have been affected by two other traditionally divergent positions regarding teaching. On the one hand is the belief that teaching is a skill — that any content can be taught by any teacher as long as that teacher has acquired the skills proved to facilitate learning. Within this skills theory of teaching, understanding content matters less than learning how to teach. On the other hand, there stood and stands the crafts theory, holding that effective teachers are naturally endowed with the capacity to teach. According to this theory, the procedural knowledge teachers need is best learnt in the workplace, while substantive content knowledge can be learnt elsewhere. These positions have led to long discussions on the role of teacher training institutions. Gradually, however, the tenor of the discussions on teacher education is changing. This is partly due to different issues being posed for teacher education to consider that are derived from studies about what goes on in schools, how teachers think out their practices, and how people who come from different backgrounds and hold different conceptions about the world actually learn. Increased attention to theory is also resulting in reaction to voiced complaints about teacher education’s ability to produce competent teachers and in response to broader social and political concerns for quality and equity in education. These factors are converging into the search for a comprehensive theory of teacher education which looks at teacher education in the broader context of social concerns and not as if it were some self-contained hard structure that can be exhaustively described. This comprehensive theory should also be sufficiently fluid as to feed from research and experience and leave space for appropriate modifications as these become necessary. This trend suggests that the purpose of those concerned is not to provide a hard­ core theory but rather to keep open the possibility of continuously engaging in theory building. If that is the case, then it is appropriate to highlight focal points of current attention that enrich this process. Out of these, the following four are noted in the next paragraphs: the purpose and orientation of teacher education, what teacher educators and student teachers bring to the teacher education process, the nature of teaching programmes, and the specificity and organisation of teacher educational programmes. The purpose and orientation of teacher education There are indications that serious thinking is going into re-conceptualising the meaning and orientation of teacher education partly because national educational reforms are demanding changes that in turn require rethinking and restructuring and partly because new societal demands on teachers make these processes 37 Perspectives in Education, Volume 18 No 1 September 1999 inevitable. Starting from society, we face everywhere a revision of teacher traditional functions. Hargreaves (1997) speaks of a post-modern condition in which teachers, in different ways, are asked to perform a wide variety of functions where dominant elements are uncertainty about results and prompt response to constant and diverse challenges. Even more radically, as poorer societies push for change and require effective results from education, they demand more and better prepared teachers without being able to offer them the incentives that could make their work worthwhile and satisfactory. Messages are sent across the world indicating that schools should become learning organ­ isations as opposed to teaching organisations (Delors 1996, 1998). Teachers are asked to be supporters of learning, activators of learning, facilitators or whatever word one may wish to use to denote the action of producing learning (OCED, 1994; Avalos, 1994) . Yet teachers must also engage in a myriad of activities that are not just classroom-based or responsive to classroom-needs, but related to the broader social, cultural or economic conditions that affect learning. Teachers must respond to the diverse needs of children and young people, work with parents, implement social policies such as drug prevention actions, and in a number of reform contexts they must engage in designing and implementing the change of their schools. Also, and this is part of the newer demands of the market economy sweeping across the globe and of national systems of measurement of school effectiveness, teachers are increasingly challenged to produce results and be accountable for them. Gone are the days of a teacher in the isolation of his or her classroom, faced with the sole task of teaching pupils up to where that class was able to respond. This context poses critical theoretical questions regarding the purpose and orientation of teacher education processes. From a broad perspective, the distinction between initial teacher training and in-service training weakens training and is replaced with the concept of continuous teacher education. The purpose of initial teacher education is to open horizons, provide exposure and encourage the development of learning strategies that facilitate knowing and understanding of the knowledge-generating procedures of the disciplines that form part of the school curriculum.