Education
Universities need to up teacher training: Experts
  • | VNS | December 23, 2011 11:29 PM

Teachers colleges need to improve their training methods since students graduating from them lack skills, according to experts at a workshop in HCM City on December 22.

Trinh Xuan Thu of Sai Gon University said instilling teaching skills was very important to help students become competent teachers after graduating.

He was referring to the fact that many pedagogy universities in the country fail to teach students skills like lesson planning, transforming curricular knowledge into forms comprehensible to learners, and other ways of content presentation.

Other skills they have to learn are managing classrooms and understanding learners and what facilitates and impedes their cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social development, motivating them and encouraging them to think for themselves.

The universities spent little time on teaching such skills, he said, pointing out that 2,025 hours was not sufficient for the purpose.

A report released at a conference last August said most pedagogy graduates had to be retrained for at least three years to make them competent teachers.

Thu said that he and his colleagues did a study in 2009 on the necessity to change training methods at pedagogy colleges and universities in the provinces of Dong Nai, Ba Ria-Vung Tau, Quang Ngai, and Thua Thien-Hue.

Most lecturers at these colleges and universities had opined that it was necessary to improve training in teaching skills, he said.

More effective

He said competency-based training, which is used in many developed countries like Australia, Britain, and the US, was suitable for Vietnam.

It emphasised what learners could do in the workplace as a result of completing a training programme, he said.

Its strength was to pay attention to learning outcomes and ensure each learner achieves all module outcomes, he said.

Its progress was not based on time, he said, but on completing the requirements of a module after which they can move to the next one, meaning they could complete a training programme quickly.

Unlike current training methods, competency-based training would help pedagogy students acquire the skills required to become a teacher, he said.

It had brought him success in teaching at his university and other training courses, he said.

Le Thanh Huy of the Da Nang Pedagogy University suggested another effective training system, one that had become popular in pedagogical training — the didactic method.

It too offered many possibilities to motivate students, he said, and promised the same results as competency-based training, he said.

The workshop was organised by Institute for Educational Research under HCM City University of Education.

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