Benefit of school-based teacher counselling

by Vijaya Jayasuriya

I had suggested (Sunday Observer of 17.06.2007) that a programme of in-house counselling be established in schools in order to improve teaching standards which currently appear to be at a very low ebb as reflected in recent deplorable GCE O/L exam results.

Teacher counselling has been going on in a big way for the past three or so decades in this country, yet little discernible uplifting of teacher quality has been achieved in spite of formidable numbers of resource personnel employed in the task and more devastatingly, billions spent on these quality-improvement endeavours.

Counselling of the less-experienced by senior teachers at school level can therefore be an effective alternative which has not yet been tried out, yet has immense potential if implemented systematically.

The benefits of such a school-based paradigm of teacher-counselling are many and varied. The school can acquire a more professional ambience when teachers begin to engage in a dialogue on their craft which could have far-reaching effects on the whole profession.

Teachers who embark on professional courses will be able to operate with more confidence in such an atmosphere rather than being in an intellectual vacuum having nothing to do with what they are trying to get the hang of.

Time factor will also be favourable as a big slice of the school calendar is being spent currently on various seminars while there will be less tension on the part of the recipients of school-based counselling. There will be advantages both psychologically as well as financially in the proposed scheme which will also provide a sound base for prospective visiting instructors.

A discourse among teachers on their main activity will be a happy departure from the usual tittle-tattle that more often than not characterise school staff rooms. Teachers will have something substantial to talk about every day as every lesson taken every day is a different experience posing newer challenges to them.

When a lively dialogue develops between senior teachers and their subordinates it will always produce adequate grist for their interactional mill. This kind of dialogue is one which is not only intellectually rewarding but also leads to professional effectiveness of teachers as they help them to thrash out problems of classroom action whether they be strictly pedagogic or related to psychology of learners.

It is common knowledge among most teachers through their experience that problems consequently beget more problems consequently leading to irreversible dilemmas such as a mal-adjusted child developing a neurotic condition due to getting punished by teacher for misbehaviour in the classroom.

Such elusive problems call for counselling by experienced personnel in the profession, hence the necessity for consultation of one's seniors on the same staff rather than engage in 'peer type' chit-chat with them regardless of their age and maturity.

Teacher education, whether pre-service or in service more often than not happens to be alienated from reality, the school and the classroom. We wax voluble about our teaching and even take up classes for intellectual analysis as a follow-up, and all this happens within the course itself and not previously or subsequent to such courses of study.

Teachers are rarely used to analyse their lessons in terms of the theories they have mastered before they take up training courses or worse still, following such training, as if such courses have nothing really to do with their craft.

This is indeed deplorable in that the knowledge skills and even values they imbibe following these expensive courses rarely enlighten them in their classroom practice thus making both the trained and the untrained more or less on a par with each other in their performance. Isn't the phenomenon of examination flops an index of this sordid situation?

A system of collaboration with senior colleagues in problem-solving from the very beginning of a teacher's career rectifies this big fault in the teaching profession. The school should be a place where experienced practitioners are available any time to share their expertise with raw beginners trying to fathom pedagogic problems whenever they arise.

Seniors may be entrusted with the task of observing a given number of lessons each week without detriment to their own time tables and more importantly, at least one period should be allocated each week for discussions based on the lessons observed.

This kind of approach to classroom teaching has multiple advantages when new appointees to a staff begin their formal training at any time in such a set-up, they are invariably equipped with some amount of knowledge of what they are supposed to do and how they should go about it using the initial experience gained with their senior colleagues at school.

What is more important is that their response to training will be richer and readier than in the case currently obtained in our midst. Also in producing their assignments, projects or whatever demanded by the course of training they have an ample resource from which empirical data can be extracted without getting lost in whimsical illusions. Once back in the school, they will be better equipped to perform their task and thus turn out to be competent practitioners.

Another advantage of an in-house teacher counselling programme is that it is a classic answer to the tension and antipathy (and in certain cases even hostility) often generated in counselling by visiting resource personnel. In such a visit recently to a school in Panadura area the principal was so offended by the excessively fault-finding attitude displayed by the visitors in their commentary on teachers that he furiously protested against it in his responding address.

(The writer is a retired Deputy Director of Education English-and former lecturer in English at Pasdunrata College of Education, Kalutara.)