Teacher Training and Its Use in the Classroom

Knowing a subject well and being able to teach it are two different things. Someone who is excellent at mathematics may still walk into a room of forty children and find that nobody has understood the lesson. Teaching asks for more than knowledge. A teacher has to hold the class's attention, arrange the lesson in a sensible order, choose materials that make an idea clear, and find out whether the children have really learnt. These are skills, and skills are learnt through training. A doctor does not start treating patients after only reading about medicine. In the same way, a teacher should not face a class after only studying the subject. This is why training is essential for anyone who wants to become a skilled teacher.

Not every training does this job, though. Only effective training makes a teacher complete. A course that teachers sit through without learning anything new changes nothing in their classrooms. Good training is training that leaves a teacher genuinely more capable than before.

Training is arranged at two different points in a teacher's working life. Some of it is given before a person starts teaching at all, and some is given to teachers who are already working in schools.

Picture a young woman who has finished her studies in education and is getting ready for her first job in a school. The course she takes before stepping into a classroom is pre-service training. Now picture a teacher who has taught for fifteen years. When a new curriculum arrives, he attends a course on how to teach it. That is in-service training. Even the skills of experienced teachers go out of date or slip away with time, so teachers in service are also given refresher training now and then. Refresher training renews what a trained teacher already knows and adds what has changed since.

Training supports a teacher fully in the everyday work of teaching. It helps most with five tasks:

• Making educational plans: deciding what to teach, when, and how, for the whole year, for each month and for each day's lesson.
• Choosing teaching methods: picking the method that suits the lesson and the class, whether that is explanation, discussion, demonstration or group work.
• Making and using teaching materials: preparing charts, models and pictures, often from cheap local things, and using them at the right moment in the lesson.
• Following a proper evaluation process: finding out fairly how much students have learnt, through questions, tests and observation.
• Giving feedback to students: telling each student what they did well and what to improve, so that the next attempt is better.

Training is not over when the certificate is handed out. After every training, a teacher must put the new skills to work, effectively, in their own classroom. Suppose a teacher learns how to run group work on a course and then goes back to copying notes on the board exactly as before. The training has been wasted. Every teacher therefore has a duty to be honest and make good use of what they learnt.

The state spends real money on training: trainers, buildings, materials and the teachers' time away from school. That investment pays back only when the skills reach the classroom and children learn better. A teacher cannot make this happen alone. Group work needs benches that can be moved, and making charts needs paper and colours. This is why the school management and administration must create an environment in which trained teachers can use their training effectively in the classroom.

Even good training often fails to reach the classroom. Several problems stand in its way:

• The problems teachers meet in the classroom and the nature of the training do not match. A course may teach one thing while the teacher's real difficulty is something else.
• Training is more theoretical than practical. Teachers listen to talks about methods but rarely practise them.
• The materials and equipment needed to use the new skills in the classroom are not available.
• There is no suitable policy for putting training into practice, so nobody checks whether the skills are being used.
• Using training well does not count towards promotion or career development, so a teacher gains nothing from the effort.
• The school management and administration know little about why training is needed and why it matters.
• Refresher training is not arranged effectively, so skills fade over the years.
• Trained teachers are given no special responsibility or facilities, and are treated no differently from untrained ones.

Every one of these problems can be tackled. Training becomes effective when everyone involved, from the people who design the courses to the people who run the schools, plays their part. The main measures are:

• Design training programmes around the problems that actually appear in classroom teaching.
• Put the weight of training on practical work rather than on theory.
• After training, give teachers enough of the materials and equipment they need.
• Prepare a suitable policy for putting training into practice.
• Offer promotion or other opportunities on the basis of a teacher's training and how skilfully they work.
• Make the school management and school administration aware of why training matters and why it is needed.
• Give trained teachers proper responsibility and treat them with respect.
• Run refresher training regularly, without long gaps.

Here is how it looks in one school. When its science teacher came back from a practical training course, the head teacher bought simple equipment for experiments. The teacher was put in charge of the school's science room, and her good work was counted in her yearly performance review. A few years later she was sent on refresher training. Materials, responsibility, respect, career growth and continuing training all came together, so the skills really did reach the classroom, and the pupils learnt science by doing experiments themselves.

Every problem has a matching remedy. Reading them in pairs makes both lists much easier to remember.