Do teachers need training?

Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 04:44:21 +0000 From: Timothy Mason (tmason@timothyjpmason.com) To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum (FLTEACH@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU)

My own experience leads me to the following conclusions :

• FLES cannot be done without training. I tried, and it was a disaster.
• EFL for adults can be done without training, because adults have motivation and can keep you in line if you start doing anything that doesn't help them learn. But training still helps.
• EFL for secondary school pupils can be done without training if you follow the book. That means it won't be very well done.

Of course teachers need to know their subject - and to keep abreast of it. But this is not sufficient. Most people are not born teachers, any more than most people are born athletes. Being an athlete means learning how to use given skills under very peculiar conditions - there is nothing natural about athletics. Being a teacher means learning how to use given skills under very peculiar conditions. There is nothing natural about school.

Training is necessary. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that the training you get will do you much good. Just as there is little in the way of guarantee that your children will get good teaching in school. Just as there is no guarantee that you will be a good teacher. Every day. Some training is good. Some is depressingly average. Some is downright poor. What do you expect?

But by and large, the system works, over here in France. The young teachers hate the IUFM, and complain bitterly about the waste of their time. But if you go and see them in their classes, and you find them hanging on by their teeth, totally bereft of technique, totally cock-eyed about what you could or should expect from 14 year-olds, you know they need help. You know the children need those teachers to be helped. A lot of people resent being helped.

A lot of people resent being trained. Teachers often do. Children often do. A trainer has to know how to deal with hostility. So do teachers.

Also - and I have to say this - a lot of the resentment of teacher-training comes from the fact that we underline that teaching is difficult, that you can't just coast it, and that you need to constantly reinvent yourself. It comes from the fact that we ask teachers, when something isn't working, to look first at their own techniques and timing, rather than blaming the pupils. It comes from the fact that teacher trainers, by and large, believe that the great majority of children can and will learn, even in such shoddy institutions as our secondary schools are, if their teachers are professional.

By the way, the idea that people become teacher trainers because they are bad in the classroom is an old canard. It limps. In my institution, there are 10 teachers who train in FLES, apart from me. They were all very, very good at their jobs before they came here. They all enjoy teaching. The same can be said of the people who train the secondary-school teachers, who are all still in the classroom for most of the week, with their own classes. They do it well. They want the children to succeed.

Of course, an intelligent person - and teachers are intelligent people, by and large - can make him or herself, can pick up the techniques and the strategies, through reading, observation, trial and error. But it takes a long time, during which the children are the objects of her or his experiments. And you have to perceive the difficulties in the first place ; it's very easy not to do so, and to believe that poor learning is simply the consequence of having poor students.

Regards

Timothy Mason

iufm de versailles

tmason@timothyjpmason.com