TEACHERS' NEEDS: AN IMPORTANT FACTOR FOR LONGER- TERM SUSTAINABILITY OF CROSS-CULTURAL INSET PROGRAMMES

For three decades, in-service teacher training (INSET) or continuing professional development (CPD) has grown in importance and status and has developed as a global trend. It has been viewed by many countries as the key element in strategies to raise the quality of educational provision (Hayes 1997 1). There exist accounts of not only of successes, but also failures in CPD initiatives. Valuable experiences and insights have emerged which would contribute to the future practice of CPD. At the same time, a number of problems and issues have also arisen. From some observers’ perspectives (e.g. Tisher and Wideen 1990), the drawbacks have generated a pessimistic picture of teacher education. Fullan (1982) has concluded that much of the research in the late 1960s and 1970s on attempts to implement innovation indicated that the initiatives undertaken have sometimes failed to produce actual changes in practice. Cooley (1997) recently lamented that innovations ‘tend to be highly visible at the surface, but do not affect what’s going down in the lower depth’. Likewise, Guskey (2000) contends that educators themselves frequently regard professional development as having little impact on their day-to-day responsibilities, which in turn has caused, among some teachers, a sense of apathy towards CPD. Some teachers doubtless even consider it a waste of their professional time. They may participate in professional development primarily because of contractual obligations. It is little wonder that when faced with budgetary constraints, one of the first items considered for reduction typically is funding for professional development. Therefore, to ameliorate the practice of CPD initiatives it is vital to understand the general reasons for the disparity between the substantial resources invested and the much less tangible returns and outcomes. In addition to the drawbacks in the practice of CPD initiatives, there are also limitations in the literature, despite far-ranging research undertaken on teacher education. Guskey (2000: 32) found that for decades, researchers have tried unsuccessfully to determine the true impact of professional development in education. He observed that although in-service education and staff development endeavours in their various forms continue to be enormously popular and highly valuable, we still know relatively little about what difference they make. Some have surveyed the vast professional development literature to isolate salient factors (Massarella 1980; Sparks, 1983). Others have analysed studies and reports to identify elements related to successful programme implementation (McLaughlin and Marsh 1978). Still others have used research summaries to offer guidelines for more effective practice (Showers et al 1987; Wood and Thompson 1983). Sometimes, the solutions posed by different researchers are contradictory. And even those that are clear are sometimes so general and theoretical in nature that they offer little help for practically minded educators who want specific answers and workable solutions. Definitive answers continue to be elusive. The vacuum in the literature calls for in-depth studies of the initiatives for teachers’ CPD, instead of a snapshot of the situations. It demands scrutiny of the real-life contexts in a naturalistic manner. Ostensible features as well as less tangible characteristics merit investigation to obtain a realistic and full picture of the reality. This study intends to unravel and understand teacher trainees’ perspectives about major problems in cross-cultural CPD initiatives by examining a cross-cultural teacher training programme in China. It seeks to yield insights into factors influencing the longer-term sustainability of projects of this kind, which could, it is hoped, contribute to enhancing the effectiveness of such

Topic: EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences