Improving teacher education is the basis of quality education

要約

A recent survey found that more than half of Japan’s graduate schools in education are short of students for the 2012 academic year. More than 40 percent of schools had failed to meet their quotas for the past five years.

Since 2003 when the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) started to expand graduate programs in education throughout the country, nearly 3,800 people have enrolled in graduate teaching schools — far from enough.

The push to better educate teachers is a worthy goal with many potential benefits for teachers and their students, but improving teacher education in Japan will require effort, encouragement and a shift in thinking. After all, those are the basics of education.

Japan’s teachers are generally less educated than those in other developed countries. In the United States, 49 percent of elementary school teachers and 54 percent of secondary school teachers held a postgraduate degree in 2007.

When MEXT began its push to expand teacher education, only 3 percent of teachers had master’s degrees or above, though that number has been increasing steadily.

Considering teachers as professionals who require specialized, long-term study is an important shift in consciousness. Teaching should be considered a profession like any other.

That is not to say a degree will automatically make someone a great teacher or that teachers without degrees are in any way worse. Good teachers have many other qualities such as compassion, patience and creativity that can be developed without formal study. But teachers can develop those qualities and give them greater applicability by studying theories of education and their subject area in systematic and coherent ways.

At present, the majority of elementary and secondary teachers in Japan have only four years of study at the undergraduate level. As the world becomes more complicated, that no longer seems enough to meet the challenges of students.

Graduate schools are no simple or easy fix for the nation’s educational problems, but they do provide teachers with a professional learning community in which to develop higher skills and greater know-how for an increasingly complex classroom.

For too long, prefectural education boards have relied on passing a paper exam as evidence of being fit for teaching. Pass it and you are deemed a teacher, regardless of what you actually studied, practiced or developed, or for how long.

As with many other exams in Japan, teachers spend time and energy cramming for the exam at the expense of expanding their knowledge base and developing teaching skills. Developing a nationwide program to educate teachers is a complex undertaking compared with setting a once-a-year exam.

MEXT has started to increase in-service training, which is a step in the right direction.

Most elementary and secondary teachers are now required to attend workshops, seminars and training sessions as part of their continuing education. That training is frequently helpful but sometimes amounts to just another hoop to jump through. Short-term training is different from extensive, consistent and challenging programs in education that require two years of commitment.

Graduate programs in education should be developed in a practical direction, too.

Most education students or those seeking a teaching license now spend only a few weeks of practice teaching during their third or fourth year of college.

As with any professional work, a few weeks of practice is only a beginning. Combining practical experience in the classroom with learning theory, teaching methods and other studies strikes the right balance.

Graduate study has limitations and experience may be the best teacher. Further study can enhance the best qualities of teachers and deepen the understanding of their experience.

The quality of an educational system depends on the quality of the teachers, and on what they have learned and are ready to teach to others.

日本語の抄訳はウィークリ9月29日号のP18に掲載されています。