School-based teacher counselling needed

by Vijaya Jayasuriya

With the recent debacle in GCE O/L exam results what is called into question is our exalted edifice of education consultancy including the hierarchy of school supervision and particularly the National Institute of Education which is responsible for planning and implementation of our school education system.

Any attempt at hauling these eggheads over the coals is more or less justified when one views the school system from the perspective of our bygone era-i.e., is there any wee bit of qualitywise improvement of school education today when compared with how it was say forty or fifty years ago when very little formal supervision of teaching was done and no institutionalised consultation programme was available.

If we come to think of how our school system and the classroom teaching functioned half a century ago, there was as a matter of fact hardly any pompous personalities strutting into our classes to take our teachers to task. The only paradigm of teacher education available then was the system of very formalised training college which only served the teacher once and for all during her life time unless of course a very rare 'refresher course' for a couple of weeks was held during a school vacation. Teachers came to the class and went on 'teaching' most of the time in the classical 'one way' lecture type rarely laying off the harangue to question a student when he appeared to lose attention.

Principals only marked the registers, approved leave etc and carried out general supervision of the whole school without ever breaking into classes to judge 'teacher quality'. As for official supervision Education Officers (Circuit Education Officers or Subject EO) visited the schools once in a blue moon, the CEO for the ritualistic 'annual returns' and the subject officers not more than once a year. Even during this annual visit the officer had little scope for delving into deep theories of educational philosophy or child psychology, yet only advised the teacher on her little pedagogic foibles.

Valid subject

Unlike a degree-oriented research as often conducted by aspirants to higher echelons in our education hierarchy, the factors behind the sordid plummeting of GCE O/L results surely makes a valid subject for a comprehensive research encompassing the aforesaid less-professional paradigm of classroom teaching vis-a-via the highly sophisticated modern system what with very officious consultants egging the teachers on at every turn with expertise hitherto unknown in the field.

It is indeed worthwhile going likewise into what has really gone wrong in our whole system of teacher consultation conducted by an impressive galaxy of instructors and administrators and more importantly, planned and counselled by the holy of holies of education, National Institute of Education.

If you take up any course-book laid out for any post-graduate teacher education programme you will find that they are invariably informed by a formidable brigade of philosophers ranging from Plato through Aristotle to Mahathma Gandhi and leading educational psychologists such has Jean Piaget and L. S. Vygotsky whose hypotheses and theories are ad nauseam thrashed out so that teachers imbibe them to enrich their classroom teaching. A gaping hiatus in these intellectual treatments however is that the highly effective teaching methods adopted by the Great Teacher the Buddha is either given short shrift or totally neglected with the rare exception of an article written by Dr. Thilokasundari Kariyawasam to a very obscure magazine many years ago. ('The Teaching Methods of the Buddha': Denuma: 03)

A major fault I have noticed being in the field for more than three decades as teacher, teacher educator and administrator as well is that paper work has outstripped practical and effective classroom teaching so that often teachers have neither scope nor leisure to 'think' on their own over their specific situations.

Observation

What is actually needed is not just planning strategies to make sure that teachers abide by what is pontificated by the so-called experts, but innovatively and systematically observe their classroom action and guide them to achieve the stated goals.

It is really a pity that no one in Sri Lanka has so far woken up to a potential of expertise that can be harnessed within the school itself - the competent professionals on the same staff with years of experience and maturity in the craft. This is a resource that is sadly left untapped in our country which even novice teachers nor even principals of schools do not appear to appreciate while what we call 'resource personnel', on the contrary, often happens to be a travesty of the reality - selecting 'instructors' from among teachers who have merely by the passing of an examination and an interview.

Benefits of encouraging senior teachers to advise the less-experienced and also getting the latter to consult their seniors are many. It is available close at hand, it is budget friendly and also has long-term advantages.

In-house consultation being more informed among colleagues, psychologically it causes little tension or apathy and also generates motivation as it is self-induced on the part of teachers. (Senior teachers can be proffered the role of observing a couple of lessons each week and their advice may be sought by juniors any time during the day.)

Professional counsellors

Even from the Russian psychologist Vygotsky's theory of 'Zone of Proximal Development' where he postulates students' ability to enhance. Their learning by consultation with their peers, (L. S. Vygotsky: 1978: Passim) we may assume an extrapolation of it by applying it to adult form of learning. Secondly, learning from mature colleagues involves little expenditure unlike in other types of training incurring a lot of spending. Last but not least a process of in-house consultation automatically prepares a veritable pool of professional counsellors who can be made future teacher instructors which will be a more effective way of recruiting to this cadre, rather than absorbing tyroes to be trained subsequently.

One other problem that militates against student attainment by the way is the adopting of Western models of teaching rather gratuitously than meaningfully. Merely employing techniques like small group work for example just for the sake of it serves little useful purpose and may even result in adverse situations as discouraging of the poor learner through the domination of the gifted as propounded by researchers like Long. (Long M. H.: 1976 and Long M. H. K. Porter P. A.: 1985). Adopting such alien tactics without exploring their suitability to our culture or just to make a mere show of it with little success would only result in irreparable flops as has been witnessed in recent exam results.

(The writer is a retired Deputy Director of Education and former Lecturer in English at Pasdunrata College of Education.)