Concept, Need and Importance of Teacher Training

Knowing a subject well does not by itself make someone a good teacher. A teacher also has to know how to explain that subject to children, how to run a class, and how to check what the children have learnt. The arrangement that builds these professional skills in teachers is called teacher education.

Training makes a teacher expert and efficient in the profession. That is why every teacher needs training for as long as they remain in the profession. It is not something taken once and then finished. A trained person is given a teaching licence before being appointed as a teacher, and only after that can the person become a qualified teacher. A skill learnt in training must not stay on a certificate. The teacher has to use it properly in the classroom, or the training has served no purpose.

Teacher training is not new in Nepal. Training programmes under various names have been run from 2004 BS (Bikram Sambat) up to the present day. Their names and formats have changed, but their aim has stayed the same: to make teachers more capable in the classroom.

Someone who has read a whole book about swimming may still sink the first time they get into the water, because knowing and being able to do are different things. Every profession works like this. A certificate shows what a person has studied, but the skill to do the work comes from guided practice. Giving that skill is the job of training.

Teaching is a profession. Like a doctor, an engineer or a lawyer, a teacher needs special skills for the job. The teaching profession is both a science and an art. It is a science because it has definite principles, methods and rules that can be studied and learnt. It is an art because using those principles with the many different children sitting in a real classroom is something that only improves with practice.

So a person's academic qualification, or the theoretical and subject knowledge they carry, is not enough to make them a good teacher. Someone with a master's degree in mathematics knows every rule about fractions. Explaining fractions to class 4 children by sharing out a roti, keeping thirty children paying attention, and helping the one child who still has not understood are skills that person learns through training. Effective teaching in a classroom needs training.

Teaching can also be seen from another angle. Teaching is the effective carrying out of a successful plan. However carefully a curriculum, a textbook or a lesson plan is prepared, the person who puts it to work in the classroom is the teacher. To carry out a skilfully prepared educational plan effectively, the teacher needs training. A good house plan does not build a house by itself; it needs a skilled builder. For an educational plan, that skilled builder is the trained teacher.

A minimum qualification is fixed for entering the teaching profession. Meeting it is only the start, and training is needed in addition to it. Teachers who are already in the profession must also take part in training from time to time, as the rules require. Teaching methods, teaching materials and children's needs keep changing over the years, so skills learnt long ago cannot on their own run today's classroom well. The more training opportunities a teacher gets, the more that teacher's ability grows.

No class is made of identical children. Some learn quickly and some slowly. Some understand best from a picture, others by doing the thing themselves. These differences between learners are called individual differences. So that teachers can run educational plans effectively while taking these differences into account, they are given several kinds of training:

• Short-term training: training that runs for a short period.
• Long-term training: training that runs over a long period.
• Refresher training: training that renews skills learnt earlier and adds new ones.
• Pre-service training: training taken before entering teaching service.
• In-service training: training taken while already working as a teacher.

Training gives more than skill. It also raises a teacher's self-confidence and helps the teacher become honest and committed towards the profession. A teacher who knows the work well stands in front of a class with confidence, is not afraid of the children's questions, and takes the responsibility seriously.

Training matters a great deal for a teacher's professional development. It is treated as an important basis for entering the teaching profession, for being promoted, and for being given the responsibility of a headteacher or a similar post. So training shapes not only a teacher's work in the classroom but the whole path of the teacher's career.

Inside the classroom, training changes a great deal. A trained teacher can find out the individual differences among the children in the school and shape learning activities to suit them, which makes those activities effective. Training helps the teacher meet the objectives the curriculum sets and develop the children's abilities. A trained teacher makes the classroom student-friendly, a place where children ask questions without fear, and this makes the relationship between teacher and students warm and friendly.

Through training, a teacher learns the different theories of how children learn and can apply them in the classroom. This brings innovation into teaching and learning: instead of teaching the same way every day, the teacher can try new approaches. Training helps the teacher use teaching methods, techniques and materials properly. It also builds the ability to adjust teaching and facilitation to what each situation needs. Carrying on with a lesson using a chart and objects from around the room on a day the electricity fails and the projector will not work is exactly this ability. Training also helps make the assessment of children's learning achievement effective.

Set out point by point, the main benefits of teacher training are these:

• (a) The teacher develops the skill of running teaching and facilitation activities in a planned way.
• (b) It becomes easier to use suitable teaching materials successfully in the classroom.
• (c) The school's administration can be run in an orderly way and school management can be made effective.
• (d) The teacher can give proper counselling to students and parents.
• (e) Teaching and assessment methods based on the curriculum can be developed. A trained teacher can run teaching and learning activities easily even when textbooks and other learning materials are not available.
• (f) Different methods and tools of assessment can be used to evaluate students' learning achievement effectively.
• (g) It helps the teacher involve students in various extracurricular activities.
• (h) The teacher can give students proper feedback and counselling.
• (i) Teachers learn about the knowledge and skills coming from new discoveries and research in the teaching profession. This helps develop their creative skills and their habit and ability of seeking out new ideas and putting them to use.
• (j) Teachers develop the ability to use information and communication technology to make learning facilitation, communication with one another and working together effective, and to keep actively looking for opportunities for professional growth.

These benefits can all be seen in a single school day. A trained teacher plans her lesson in the morning and walks into class with it, uses a chart made for that lesson, checks what the children learnt with a short round of questions at the end, writes on each homework what was done well and what needs fixing, prepares the sports team in the afternoon, and in the evening uses a phone app to tell parents how their children are getting on. In one ordinary day she has used most of the benefits on the list.

Ten points are hard to hold in your head at once. Grouping them by where the benefit shows up makes them easier to recall. Point (e) speaks about both teaching and assessment, so it appears in two groups.