Distance Education for Teacher Training

Hilary Perraton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134868452
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Distance education, combining the use of correspondence texts, broadcasting and limited opportunities for face-to-face study, has been used in at least a hundred teacher training programmes over the last 25 years. Distance Education for Teacher Training is the first comparative review of the use of distance education and open learning for the training and upgrading of teachers. The book contains case studies using a broadly common format both to describe and analyse distance teacher training programmes in eleven countries across five continents. The case studies describe the methods used to examine how far the craft of teaching can be studied at a distance. Using a standardised microeconomic framework, they provide unique data on the comparative costs of training teachers by distance and conventional methods. The authors then draw general conclusions about the advantages and drawbacks of using distance education or open learning, about the conditions for success, and about comparative effects and costs. Distance Education for Teacher Training will be of value to all concerned with teacher education, whether in developing or industrialised countries, and to those working in and planning for distance education and open learning.

1 The context

Hilary Perraton

Good education demands good teachers. Over the course of the twentieth century, as the teaching profession has grown, so have its standards risen. Many teacher-training courses in rich countries now last for four years and follow after 12 years of schooling: teachers have now had four more years of full-time education than used to be the norm. Society has steadily expected more of teachers in the variety of tasks they have to perform, in the skills they need to master and in the imagination required for their work. Rising expectations have brought rising quality. But, in the last third of the century, near-impossible burdens have been placed on the teaching service of developing countries. The end of the colonial era brought new demands for education. Schools had to expand at an unprecedented rate and needed to be staffed. Demographic pressure and the practical difficulty of expanding teacher education in pace with the demand for schooling made for a chronic shortage of teachers in much of Africa and Asia.

A shortage of teachers will either reduce the chances of children getting an education at all, or reduce the quality of what they do get. In many cases ‘prospective primary teachers in developing countries typically have not completed secondary education’ (Lockheed and Verspoor 1989, para. 207). Where teachers’ own education is limited, they lack the confidence, knowledge and skills to teach much more than they were themselves taught, or to teach in a different way. The problems are at their most severe in the poorest countries: one estimate suggests that by the end of the century low-income countries will still lack 1.8 million teachers (ibid., para. 20). Public pressure to widen opportunities for schooling, and the very success of ministries in opening new schools in response to this pressure, mean that demands for schooling have run ahead of the supply of teachers. Teacher shortages have been compounded by attrition as teachers have left a profession whose relative status and income has declined in many countries over the last two decades.

Quality matters as well as quantity. To do their job well, teachers need to possess a mastery of the subject matter they are to teach and to be skilled in the process of teaching: a tall order for those who enter teaching with a minimal education, may receive little or no training in pedagogy and are quite likely to teach in a school with meagre resources. While, in many countries, it may be possible to see an end to the problems of scarcity, problems of quality are bound to linger. An undertrained teacher beginning work this year may teach the grandchildren of today’s class before retiring at the age of 60, well into the next century.

While this picture is common to many countries, it is neither homogeneous nor uniform. Some countries already have more teachers than they need or will soon do so. Many have been able to raise the entry level to the teaching profession. But, even where this is the case, some kinds of teachers are scarce: women teachers in many Muslim countries; technical and vocational teachers where industry pays them better; mathematicians and scientists almost everywhere.

These problems of quality and quantity have not been solved by the development and expansion of conventional methods of teacher training. Where birth rates are high, and where education expanded rapidly in the 1960s to 1980s, the development of teacher education has tended to lag behind demand, constrained by a shortage of human, physical and financial resources. Good teacher trainers have themselves been scarce. Buildings require capital. Once built, colleges need books and resources. Teacher training, even where it is doing little more than providing secondary education, may cost between one-and-a-half and ten times per student as much as the cost of secondary education (ibid., para. 215).

Thus, while teacher education has dramatically expanded, it has done so within an economic straitjacket, pulled tighter by the strings of demography. It is small wonder that it has barely kept pace with the demands for initial teacher training for new teachers, let alone dealing with the backlog of those already in service; teacher-training colleges have generally had too much to do in their main job of initial training to take on the extra job of continuing education for those who have already passed through their gates.

THE ROLE OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

Education has no panaceas. Governments have adopted a variety of strategies for expanding the supply of teachers, raising their morale, supporting their work and improving their skills. One of these strategies involves using distance education, ‘an educational process in which a significant proportion of the teaching is conducted by someone removed in space and/or time from the learner’ (Perraton, 1982, p. 4).

Distance-education programmes have used a variety of methods to overcome the separation between learner and teacher. Many, from as far back as the invention of cheap post, have used correspondence lessons as a staple. More recently, radio and television have been brought into play and some of the most imaginative programmes have linked broadcasting with correspondence. In the last few years distance-teaching institutions in the industrialised world have set up telephone conferences to link students and have taught them through computer networks. In the developing world the Universities of the South Pacific and of the West Indies have used satellite communication in order to reach students across their scattered territories.

The term ‘distance education’, however, is a misnomer: the most effective programmes include an element of face-to-face teaching as well as using correspondence and mass media. Open universities, for example, encourage or require students to attend occasional evening sessions or short residential courses. Colleges of education teaching students at a distance sometimes include a one-term residential course as part of a programme of distance education.

Distance education has grown in numbers of students and institutions and in academic respectability in the last 30 years. It was embraced in the first years after colonial rule by many countries seeking to expand their teaching force in response to public demands for more schools and more teachers. It was then given a new status and public recognition by the establishment of open universities, starting in Britain in 1969 but then extending to over 25 other countries. These universities, offering their own degrees and using a combination of media to teach their students, raised the quality of what had previously been education’s poor relation, producing courses and using teaching methods of a new quality.

Distance-teaching methods have proved attractive to ministries of education for three main reasons: they make it possible to reach students who cannot get to a college; they lend themselves to part-time education so that students are not taken out of the work force in order to study; they appear to allow economies, in part by avoiding the need for new buildings, including housing for students. As a result they have been used in rich and poor countries, for experienced and inexperienced teachers, at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, to provide a general education and to improve pedagogical skills, to overcome what was seen as a short-term crisis and to serve as part of a regular system of continuing education. The purpose of this book is to review that experience, asking what has been done and how it has been done, to evaluate it, asking about both effects and costs, and to ask about its relevance to the future of teacher education.

In order to compare and generalise from distance-education programmes we can analyse them along four dimensions—in terms of their audiences, of their content and purpose, of their methods and of their organisational structure.

AUDIENCES

Distance-education programmes have been used to train teachers with differing backgrounds and at a variety of different levels. In comparing the audiences for such programmes we inevitably also examine the purpose for which they were established. Distance education has been used most often to train primary-school teachers, but there is some experience of its use for secondary and tertiary teachers. Some courses have been aimed at the initial training of teachers who are entering the teaching force, some for initial training of those who have already worked as teachers for some years, while others are for the continuing education of those who are experienced and qualified but want to use distance education as a way of upgrading their qualifications and increasing their skills. The categories are set out in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Examples of some distance-education programmes

Where countries face the most severe shortages of teachers, they have sometimes developed distance-education programmes for new recruits to the teaching force, providing initial training, often to recent school leavers. In both Tanzania and Zimbabwe, new recruits to teaching were enrolled on large-scale programmes of teacher training run at a distance and were put straight into the schools. In Guyana, the Ministry of Education ran a small programme to train science teachers, some of whom were recruited straight on to the course and posted to schools at that time.

More often, programmes have been run for the initial training of teachers who are already in service, and therefore experienced. Soon after independence, for example, Francistown Teacher Training College ran such a programme in Botswana while the Logos II programme in Brazil addressed a comparable audience. At secondary level, the Open University in Sri Lanka teaches experienced teachers who lack a teaching qualification.

Continuing education programmes for experienced and qualified teachers have been developed at all three levels of education: Deakin University, for example, offers a BEd programme which is mainly followed by primary-school teachers seeking a further qualification; the British Open University runs a variety of courses for serving teachers, many of whom are teaching at secondary level. These programmes have been more prominent in industrialised than in developing countries: as the level of qualification needed to enter the teaching profession has risen, so those already in service have demanded opportunities for continuing education in order to upgrade their own qualifications. While, in many countries, teachers in higher education have not generally been trained, there is now some demand for such training. In response to this, the University of Surrey developed a Diploma in the Practice of Higher Education which was made available at a distance for serving teachers in higher education; its students have experience as teachers but vary as to their previous training in education.

CONTENT AND PURPOSE

Good teachers need to be made: we cannot assume that enough are born to allow reasonable staffing ratios. But there are formidable barriers to the process of making them. Some of those barriers are arithmetical: as schools expand so they demand more teachers from their own previous cohort of students. Others are educational: primary schools recruit as their teachers those who have performed less well at their examinations than those aiming for university. Meanwhile pressures to recruit more teachers almost inevitably hold down any move to raise the entry requirements for the profession. At the same time teachers whose education was itself restricted will have difficulty with a curriculum, or with an approach to education, that is beyond those restrictions. And there are financial barriers. In many countries teachers are members of the largest but least well-paid profession. This has a double effect: the ablest teachers are attracted away to better-paid jobs while governments are understandably reluctant to raise teachers’ salaries. Increasing the pay of primary teachers, or of those among them who attain a higher qualification, can have a significant effect on government budgets.

Effective programmes of pre-service teacher education need to overcome these barriers. Where significant numbers of teachers are untrained then there is one further barrier: if you take the experienced but untrained teachers out of the schools for training, their replacements are likely to be less experienced and less competent. In-service training is likely to be needed alongside preservice.

Pre-service and in-service training alike pose complex demands. Trainees need to acquire both the skills of teaching and an adequate knowledge of the subject matter they are to teach. These two facets of teacher education present different logistical demands: you can study academic subjects in a college of education, or at a distance, but some of the skills of teaching probably need to be acquired in the classroom. Trainees need to get to the classroom and their tutors need to visit them while they are there. In planning teacher education it is also necessary to balance its different elements, recognising that:

the distinction between general education and training is not as obvious as might appear… There is a continuous spectrum stretching from what everyone would agree upon as general education to instruction that is quite clearly professional training. Exactly where the line will be drawn between them depends not only upon the individual making the judgment but also upon the stage of development of the school system and upon the grades at which the trainees in question are going to teach. Knowledge that is quite essential stock-in-trade for the teacher at one level may be thought of rather as part of a teacher’s cultural and intellectual background at a different level or in a different setting.

(Beeby, 1966, p. 83)

Reflecting these differences, programmes have varied in their content and in the relative weight they give to general education, to teaching about the subjects which the trainees will themselves teach, to educational theory and to practical classroom training.

Programmes providing a general education, which is not directed either to the subjects they will teach in the classroom or to pedagogy, may be most significant in industrialised countries. Many adult students of open universities in industrialised countries are themselves teachers and are following academic degree courses in preference to pedagogical qualifications. The British Open University found that 40 per cent of its initial cohort of students on degree courses were teachers.

In practice, programmes have often tried both to provide a general education to students and to increase their knowledge of the subjects they are to teach. Many of the early distance-education programmes for teachers offered an equivalent form of secondary education to teachers who had themselves only completed primary, or at most the first couple of years of secondary, education. In Kenya, the Correspondence Course Unit (as it then was) of the University of Nairobi ran courses for serving teachers in the late 1960s and early 1970s which enabled them to complete a secondary education and pass the Kenya Junior Secondary examination.

The main emphasis of the unit’s work was to be in-service teacher training in the light of the urgent need for teacher upgrading. The plan was not for training teachers in classroom methodology. It was aimed principally at upgrading their basic knowledge and general education although there was always the possibility that teachers’ methods would improve as a result of the examples placed before them in the unit’s courses.

(Hawkridge et al., 1982, p. 181)

Where such programmes have been directed specifically at teachers, they have most often been addressed to primary-school teachers and, therefore, have provided teaching across a range of subjects. There are, however, exceptions: the Guyana programme already referred to concentrated on science in response to a particular shortage of science teachers.

Other programmes have combined education about the subject matter of the school curriculum with both theoretical and practical work on pedagogy. Courses which go beyond teaching an academic curriculum have included material on education itself. In Indonesia, for example, open-university students on a teaching diploma course spent 80 per cent of their time on academic subjects and 20 per cent on educational theory and methods. At tertiary level, the University of Surrey’s Diploma in the Practice of Higher Education consisted entirely of modules about education without any more general subjects or supervision of teaching practice.

But learning how to teach is of the essence in teacher training. Trainees need practice in the classroom, and need to have that practice guided by a supervisor or tutor. Close links between college and classroom are needed if practice and theory are to inform each other, and if teachers are to avoid dismissing anything taught at their college as irrelevantly theoretical. The organisation of teaching practice presents severe problems to conventional colleges of education and these are magnified where students are learning at a distance, often a long way from their tutors. Distance-education programmes have tried to solve the problems in various ways. In Tanzania, head teachers and adult tutors from the country’s extensive adult-education service were asked to supervise trainees. Microteaching has been used during students’ residential courses. Where communications make this possible, tutors from the students’ college or university can visit them in the field. Tutors in Swaziland could do this in a day, and return home the same day from any part of the country; Kenyan tutors had to stay in the field for some weeks.

METHODS

The methods used in teacher education at a distance have varied according to the purpose of the programme concerned and to practical circumstances. Most programmes have used correspondence lessons as a staple, seizing the advantages of a medium which could reach students anywhere—though some students more quickly than others—and could give them a text on which to rely. From the Botswana programme set up in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The context
• Part 1: Pre-service initial training of teachers
• Part 2: In-service initial training of teachers
• Part 3: Continuing education
• Part 4: Quality, effectiveness and costs
• Bibliography