Issues of teacher quality, competency and professionalism are dominant in teacher education discourse. Governments, employers, policy makers, higher education providers and researchers continually and fervently seek explanations about how to train, retain and improve students learning. In UK, USA, Australia and internationally, efforts are being made to answer critical questions like “why do some teachers leave the profession and others stay?” “What could be done to improve quality and effectiveness?” “To what extent does initial teacher education influence teacher effectiveness?” According to UN Global Education First ([GEF], 2012) report, it is estimated that 2 million teachers are needed globally in order to meet the universal primary education (UPE) by 2015 and 1.9 million more teachers need to be recruited and trained to teach in schools across Sub- Saharan Africa (SSA) by 2015. These projections go in support of the view that no education system is better than its teachers - the principal resource in the system (Wayne & Youngs, 2003). An appreciation of the crucial role of teachers has also been steadily increasing in the international post-2015 education agenda. As GEF (2013) asserts, “we need a strong cohort of both female and male teachers who are paid well and respected in their communities” (p. 16). In view of these, education quality has received a great deal of attention in recent years, and as a matter of achieving the goal 6 of education for all (EFA). To this end, UNESCO in 2011 advocated that policies that efficiently address teacher training and retention should be made the central focus of national and international education policies.
Within the education sphere there has been increasing recognition that gains in access have not matched with gains in teacher training and quality of education (UNESCO, 2012). In Addis Ababa in 2010 at the Ninth Meeting of the High-Level Group on Education for All (23-25 February), it was said that, globally, 18 million new primary teachers will be needed in the next seven years just to achieve universal primary education. The report cited in MacBeath (2012) concluded:
National governments must strike a balance between the short-term need to get teachers into classrooms and the longer-term goal of building up a high quality professional teaching force. Addressing the teacher gap requires country driven long-term strategies and firm commitments. Policies must encompass attention to professional development opportunities, adequate employment and teaching conditions and greater participation of teachers in decision-making via social dialogue (p. 10).
It is obvious from literature that teachers and teacher quality matter and indeed, the quality of teacher education has become a vital issue in recent years. Issues concerning teachers’ competencies, effectiveness, resilience and other dispositional abilities feature prominently in teacher education literature. Developing the professional aspects of initial teacher education is high on the teacher training plans of many countries and especially in developing countries (e.g., SSA) where teacher education programmes and teacher education institutes are being reviewed. Teacher quality and effectiveness has been seen as the most essential school-related factor impacting on student achievement (UNESCO, 2012; Ronfeldt, 2012; Harris & Sass, 2011; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Rice, 2003; Wayne & Youngs, 2003).
Researchers and policy makers agree that providing all students with a quality education depends very significantly upon a country’s capacity to provide schools with highly effective teachers. The demands placed on teachers today in terms of in-depth subject knowledge, advanced pedagogical skills, reflective practice and ability to adapt teaching to the needs of each individual child as well as to the needs of the group of learners as a whole, require that teachers are educated at a highly advanced level and equipped with the ability to integrate knowledge and handle the degree of complexity which characterizes the teaching profession (Harris & Sass, 2011; Yogev & Michaeli, 2011; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Hiebert, Morris, Berk, & Jansen, 2007; Rice, 2003). There is therefore a growing interest in how best to define the competences and qualifications that are required to be admitted as a qualified member of the teaching profession.
However, despite recent reforms in a number of countries, initial teacher education has been viewed as both the problem and the solution in achieving teacher effectiveness in schools. At present, there are diverse views about the quality of teacher education and the impact such training has on teacher effectiveness and student achievement gains and what to do about it (Hoban, 2004; Wayne & Youngs, 2003 ) and analysts have arrived at markedly different interpretations, perhaps because of the difficulty in defining what improved quality really means. Coupled with these different views about teacher education is the considerable disagreement surrounding what specific teacher attributes indicate quality and effectiveness and how to better devote resources to provide quality teachers for all schools to train students. The question is how strong do we need our teachers to be? What qualities do we judge as being critical in asserting their quality? What factors constitute quality or effectiveness? And what measures are used in ascertaining the strength of a teacher in terms of delivery of his professional duties in the school?
In the view of Musset (2010), initial teacher training programmes are in several respects not preparing teachers adequately for the complexity of the teaching career today. For example, some teachers brand teacher education as ‘irrelevant’ and some pre-service teachers call their teacher education experiences ‘inadequate’ and the approach to teacher training as mechanistic (Moon, 2007; Hoban, 2004). Researchers (e.g., Hanushek, 1997; Goldhaber & Brewer, 2000) have concluded in their analyses that initial teacher qualification has no significant effect on teachers’ ability to improve students’ academic achievement, whereas researchers (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Rice, 2003; Scannell, 2002) praise the use of initial teacher training institutions in preparing teachers. In opposition to those who propose the elimination of initial teacher training, a thorough review of literature has shown that most of the researches do not seek to capture interactions among the multiple dimensions of teacher quality and effectiveness, and as result, there are major gaps in the research that need to be explored. This research aims to contribute a better understanding of some of these inter-relationships.
These contributions have been made with the backdrop of flawed measures and inexplicit assessment of what constitute a teacher’s education in many researches. Assessments vary according to the interpretation and use of the results that ensue from such researches. As some use measures of gain in achievement scores, others focus on the use of subjective assessments, and all of these seem to produce different and conflicting accounts of the actual effect of teacher education on teacher effectiveness, throwing the debate of the effect of pre-service teacher training education and teacher effectiveness into a quandary. Differences in the measurement tools, in fact, have exacerbated the problem further in deciding on the effectiveness of teacher training in colleges. Many of the measures are not clear as to what variables define the concepts they do assess and the inferences they make. For example, for those studies that focused on teachers’ certification, only the qualification grade such as pass or fail; professional or non- professional was used in modelling the effect on students’ achievement gains. It therefore makes sense to turn to the existing evidence on “which teacher attributes are related to teacher effectiveness in order to guide policy decisions about hiring, compensation, and distribution with respect to teachers” (Rice, 2003, p. 4).
In a study conducted by Brian and Lefgren (2008) on school principals’ subjective assessment of teachers in comparison to traditional determinants of teacher compensation-education and experience - and another potential compensation mechanism - value-added measures of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement gains, it was evident that subjective principals’ assessments of teachers predicted future student achievement significantly better than teacher experience and education. In the study, the subjective assessment measure was made up of variables such as dedication and work ethic, organization, role model for students and positive relationships with colleagues. The irony in the literature of the effect of teachers’ education on teacher effectiveness is that as critics of the system seems to suggest, pre-service teacher education has no significant effect on students’ achievement gains although it appears some content on pedagogy and content knowledge influence teacher effectiveness in subjects like mathematics (Wayne & Youngs, 2003; Goldhaber & Brewer, 2000). Furthermore, there seem to be no reliable research that reveals any systematic advantage to students of having teachers without initial teacher training and that investing in teachers can make a
difference in student achievement (The National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Educations [NCATE], 2002; Rice, 2003). However, this situation seems to be true in educational environments where employing non-professional teachers appear to be the cheaper alternative to training professionals to teach and manage schools.
In summarizing what we know about pre-service field experience, Wilson and Floden (2003) state that:
The sample sizes in all of these studies are limited, the results thin and inconclusive. Since little research is grounded in information about student achievement or documented increases in teacher knowledge and skill, it is difficult to make claims about the qualities of good field experience…. We lack reliable and valid measures of impact as well as insights into what specific features of field experiences are more or less effective (pp. 20- 21).
Recognizing that teacher education can play an important role in improving teacher quality, a growing number of studies are focusing on the effects of teacher preparation policies and practices (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005) and recent empirical studies on the effects of teacher quality and effectiveness seem to have demonstrated student achievement gains (Ronfeldt, 2012; Rockoff, 2004). Yet, we still lack a strong research base that identifies specific dimensions of teacher education related to the preparation and retention of high quality teachers (Ronfeldt, 2012; Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2009; Wilson, Floden, & Ferrini-Mundy, 2001). As evident in MacBeath’s (2012) report to Education International, school effectiveness studies seem to have offered an unprecedented opportunity to compare schools with a toolbox of criteria. The seven, 11 or 12 indicators emerging from studies, most prolifically in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand helped in school improvement and effectiveness; appropriated a less common-sense construction of ‘improvement’ and applying effectiveness measures to determine ‘residual value-added’ or achievement above expectation.
To try to improve low-performing schools by encouraging them to adopt the characteristics detected in effective schools is problematic, argues Sandoval-Hernandez (2008) because:
Schools differ so much in relevant aspects, such as the causes underlying their specific performance, capacity for change, contextual characteristics, etc. These differences are stressed when considering the practice of importing school effectiveness models from one country to another. That is to say that, one-size-fits all solution cannot be used to improve school performance; instead school improvement efforts should carefully consider the power of site or place (p. 32).