Teachers in practice

The basis of any systematic scheme for college staff‐development is regular performance appraisal. Only from an analysis of shortcomings can staff‐development be planned. A senior administrator will be easily attracted to the logic of this for he will see his task as being the allocation of limited funds or resources to priorities that can be established by a rational comparison of needs. Two main problems of implementation exist: firstly, that teaching staff have tended to see their classroom performances as in some way secret and defended by some concept of professionalism and, secondly, the objectives against which performance is to be measured need to be established. Although some attention has been paid to this second difficulty it has to an extent been submerged under two old traditional approaches to FE teaching. It seems superficially obvious that the prime task of the teacher is to communicate well in the classroom (or workshop) and possibly to help ‘motivate’ his students. This tradition has been underpinned by and reflected in the attitudes of the colleges of education to the teaching‐practice of their students. Reports, where requested, have been dominated by classroom performance, and until very recently, the role of the staff of the host‐college in teacher‐development (rather than evaluation) has been ignored. The other traditional FE approach has been that the curriculum is ‘given’ by an external examining body which has in many cases been seen as specifying the number of teaching hours required. Thus, all the teacher has to do is to ‘present’ the curriculum.