Rethinking Quality through Components of Teaching Process in Teacher Education
This paper stresses that quality in education heavily rests with the quality of teachers and their quality of teaching. It emphasizes on re-strengthening the teacher factor and viewing it to be the catalyst in bringing quality in education; and reflects on teaching as a three- stage process, having a number of components marking each stage like: skills of effective teachers, motivation, needs and objectives, communication skills, interaction management etc. These components become the essential requirements to be met for any teaching enterprise to be of any consequence, and also there is a strong co-relation amongst them; any weakness or strength in any of these factors creates a chain reaction that ends the whole process in fiasco as happening in our context. The arguments raised will also establish the cyclical nature of the education process (also illustrated by the following figure).
Teaching is a process having distinct stages as well as several components that ensure effective completion of this process. This process is carried out in a context where the principal agents are the curriculum, the teacher and the students. Lately, efforts in bringing and improving quality in education have been revolving around two educational goals: (i) to provide a more challenging, rigorous, and thoughtful curriculum in all subject areas and (ii) to ensure that all students are supported in developing their full intellectual potential (Wasser,1998).
Though a meaningful interaction of students with the curriculum is only established through the teacher, and it is stressed that not teaching devices but teachers are the principal agents of instruction and, more importantly, learning. But whenever educational standards are declining or challenges arise we are apt to blame teachers for many of the problems we see in our schools. At the same time, we look to teachers as a solution to the very problems (Smylie et al., 2004). Quality of our nation's schools depends on the quality of our nation's teachers; what students learn is directly related to what and how teachers teach; what and how teachers teach depends on the knowledge, skills and commitments they bring to their teaching (Nemser, 2001). New courses, tests, curriculum reforms can be important starting points, but they are meaningless if teachers cannot use them productively. Policies can improve schools only if the people in them are armed with the knowledge, skills and supports they need. (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996). The quality of teacher and teaching are undoubtedly among the most important factors shaping the learning and growth of students (Ingersoll, 2004).
These assumptions about the teaching process were taken to develop a teacher education programme to fully manipulate the teacher factor for quality teaching -- learning by providing teachers a chance to overcome their deficiencies arising from any of these reasons: "Teachers' immaturity at entering the profession, the unevenness of their preparation, the complex nature of the work that must be entrusted to even the poorest teacher, the profound injury that results when the work is badly done and the constant change in methods and curriculum" (Smylie et al., 2004). The three staged process of teaching was translated into nine important components corresponding to the nine segments of the programme. During this programme, the teachers were made familiar with the distinct stages of the teaching-learning situation and the components of each stage. They were acquainted with the impact their (components) presence or absence creates on the overall process and were facilitated with the arts and strategies required to ensure that how these factors are given due consideration at the right point in time during the process of teaching learning. Streamlining these milestones consciously resulted in greater insight about the process and its functioning, and enhanced preparation and commitment in executing the process fully; consequently raising the quality of teaching.
The paper shares the results achieved through this programme like: teachers having improved understanding of the nature of teaching and its goals, needs and challenges; teachers transforming themselves into tactful and competent caretakers and mentors who can translate the curriculum's objectives into academic and life skills in their students; they were able to build the link between teaching and assessment and can use assessment as a tool for learning, evaluation and self reflection; and they were equipped with the knowledge of how to make their classes more interesting and conducive for learning and their students' more motivated because of the diversity of the teaching methods and the classroom management strategies.
The outcomes strongly establish the fact that all education reforms aimed at improving quality in education must strengthen. Teachers and all teacher education programmes must be well grounded in understanding the process and cyclical nature of teaching as well as the components of each stage.