Assessing Adequacy of Teacher-Training

-As part of a program evaluation, you want to assess the adequacy of teacher-training provision for teachers in the program. Discuss how you would approach this issue and procedures you would use.

Providing teachers with sufficient training is a must to keep pace with modern approaches and methodologies of teaching. This training can either be on-the-job-training by, for instance, getting benefit of senior colleagues or off-the-job-training by attending workshops or seminars. The provision of teacher-training should be assessed as part of the program evaluation to ensure its adequacy and efficiency. But how can we assess it? And what are the procedures that can be used? The answers of the aforementioned questions are interlinked somehow. i.e. we can assess teacher-training adequacy, for example, by taking in consideration teachers' point of view, as an answer of the how question; on the other hand, procedures of conducting this "survey" is the answer of, the what question.

 We can assess the adequacy of teacher-training in different ways. For example, observing teaching procedures in real teaching situations. This helps us to determine the efficiency of teacher-training in authentic settings. However, teacher may have more to present other than what he did while being observed. So we need to follow other procedure such as involving teachers in a workshop with a predetermine topics that help to measure their provision of training. For more reliable assessment we can expose teacher to a standardized test which is designed to find out their knowledge about specific aspects, in our case their training provision adequacy. Peer assessment conclusion should be taken in consideration as they know their peers much better. Designing the program in a way that takes teacher-training in consideration provides helpful information about the quality of given training. Evaluators can discover teachers' training needs by interviewing and/or making questionnaires and then analyze their needs.

Using technologies to assess teacher-training provision adequacy will facilitate the process as evaluators can take an enough sample of teachers with less effort and short time. Designing a web site that includes questionnaires, a space for teachers to write their needs and suggestions about the training programs, a video stream to help teachers upload their teaching and the possibility to build their own profile to list their training program; will help in saving both time and effort and reducing the budget of the assessment program.

As seen in the current training programs that are given by the general directory of educational training the teacher is given a certificate for each program that admits his presence. In my opinion, assessing teachers after each training program helps in making sure that they benefited and helps to determine what the next training program they need is.