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by Nihal Cooray Director General National Authority on Teacher Education

In the light of such evidence, Shulman (1987) has concluded that 'the only time a physician (doctor) could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity (to that of the teacher) would be in an emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster'. In such complex and uncertain situations informed decision-making ability is as critical, as difficult and as challenging in teaching as it is in any other professional area and training in decision-making is as important in teacher education as it is in any other forms of professional preparation.

It must be remembered that all professional areas of today are marked by complexity and the counterpart of that complexity is uncertainty. The true professional is one who is competent to operate in such a context, has learned to cope with the inherent uncertainties of the area, has the expertise and courage to take the critical decisions on the basis of the available evidence, and has the technical skills to implement effectively the decision taken or to retrieve the situation if initial solutions prove inappropriate, inadequate or unworkable.

Educational researchers have discovered that teachers make up to thirty non-trivial work related dicisions every hour and do so in a context of a class of between twenty five and forty pupils where 1,500 interactions can take place daily between teacher and pupils (Berliner, 1987). In the light of such evidence, Shulman (1987) has concluded that 'the only time a physician (doctor) could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity (to that of the teacher) would be in an emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster'. In such complex and uncertain situations informed decision-making ability is as critical, as difficult and as challenging in teaching as it is in any other professional area and training in decision-making is as important in teacher education as it is in any other forms of professional preparation.

Why is a professional person important in the context of teaching and teacher education? It is important both in the short-term and in the long-term for the following reasons:

(a) It recognizes the reality of daily life in classrooms, the fact that each teacher does make critical decisions.

(b)It allows the teachers and teacher education enterprise to go and set the scene for a gradual withdrawal of unduly tight official controls which tend to downgrade teachers, and in some instances, constrain schools and render them less flexible and effective in meeting pupil and local needs.

(c) It presents teaching as a complex area where the knowledge base is incomplete, subject to change and always open for improvement. It does this by clarifying and justifying the need for constant updating and still development on the part of all, including teachers. In this context, Lockheed and Verspoor (1992) say: 'Until teaching is seen to require professional growth and responsibility, the effect that in-service workshops have on the behaviour of teachers will be short-lived'. This has implications for the implementation of continuing teacher education programs.

(d) Teacher education as Dewey (1904) claimed, has to be seen as a form of lifelong professional development sharing critical common features with training in other professional areas. Student teachers and practising teachers should not be trained simply to perform certain skills in certain prescribed ways but, rather, must be given the mental tools needed to meet professional tasks in ways that are adaptive, questioning, critical, inventive, creative and self-reviewing. They must be given 'executive control' over those skills so that they can use them flexibly in multiple situations.

The teacher is not merely a master of procedure but of content and rationale and must be viewed as a lifelong 'student of teaching (Dewey, 1904) and as a 'decision maker who handles a complex set of interacting set of variables in a dynamic social environment'. Student teachers, as well as more experienced, practitioners, should be coached in reflective practice and given as much autonomy in decision-making as they can take in order to learn how to exercise this critical skill and to take responsibility for their decision, successes and failures (Dewey, 1904, Schon, 1987).

(e) Change, especially rapid change, can lead to anxiety and resentment on the part of teachers. Every change involves a choice: between a path to be taken and others to be passed by. Understanding the context, process and consequences of change helps us clarify and question these choices. Which choices we make will ultimately depend on the depth of that understanding but also on the creativity of our strategies, the courage of our connections and the direction of our values.

The changes in the conceptual basis of teaching and advances in the understanding of the professional nature of the teacher's role have not impacted substantially on policy or practice in most developing countries. Yet the potential for a different approach to teaching and teacher education is there. The benefits of pursuing this path have become more apparent in recent years in both developed and developing states. The following examples bear this out:

(a) research on in-service education for teachers (INSET) has confirmed that a top-down, provider-driven, trainer - trainee and cascade model of INSET determination and delivery is ineffective (Black burn and Moisan, 1987). If teacher - participants do not recognize a need as having sufficient priority for them, activities aimed at meeting that need will be judged irrelevant. Consequently, teacher involvement in the identification of INSET needs, in the planning of INSET provision and in the determination of INSET delivery would surely be the deciding factors of its success.

(b)There is a very strong request from Teacher Unions and teacher education institutions for decentralization of control, administration and funding. In their extensive review of research as factors affecting school outcomes, Wang, Haertel and Walberg (1993) conclude that 'the actions of students, teachers, and parents matter most to student learning; programe policies, school, district, state and federal levels have limited effect compared to the day-to-day efforts of the people who are most involved in students' lives'.

This proves the point than resources that are allocated to the actual teacher-learning situation are likely to be more beneficial in terms of students' achievements that resources that are allocated to activities that are remote from that situation. This is supportive of a decentralized approach to education. However, all precautions must be taken to ensure that schools and teachers are fully empowered and that local centralism does not replace national centralism. All this evidence lends support to the establishment of funding mechanisms for INSET provision which channel finance directly to schools to enable them to 'buy' the in-service education which best meets teachers' need.

It should be made clear that while a long-term vision for the professionalization of teachers is vitally important, mainly because of the shortcomings of both pre-service and in-service education, the focus in the short-term must, of necessity, be on meeting the immediate pedagogical needs of practising teachers compensating for the deficiencies of their earlier training, and reforming current pre-service teacher preparation practices. It would be wrong to assume that the meeting of short-term pedagogical objectives and the long-term goal of the professionalization of teaching as incompatible. On the contrary they are interdependent and they complement each other.

By the case method

It has only been in the last few years that the issue of teaching with cases has begun to receive wide forum as an instructional methodology in teacher education. An investigation into the literature, however reveals a small surge in case method advocacy in the early 1950s, but for some reason, the methodology did not gain ground and teacher education programmes remained largely entrenched in the showing-and-telling format that has given the training of teachers such as a bad reputation.

Recent studies of teacher education programmes in some countries have proved to be a clarion call to educators to clean up their own houses, citing the low prestige of education departments in colleges and universities, the low regard of education courses among those students enrolled, and the limited effects of teacher training courses on graduates who emerge as unprepared to teach as before they entered the training programs. This sad state of affairs explains the current interest in case-method teaching in education. Perhaps it is because colleges of education and faculties of education are ready to put good teaching first in their priority list for teacher education in the twenty first century.

The power of case method teaching is also realized in other graduate schools, where it has been systematically used in the preparation of professionals in other fields such as medicine and business. The following gives expressed by the staff and students of a training institution who had followed the case methods as the main instructional strategy. Our institution does one thing better than those in any other: it changes students.... From dealing with data in an amateurish way, missing significant points, pontificating, applying glib solutions to complex problems, making every other mistake that a group of bright people might be expected to make, and being so sure of themselves that it was frightening, students change profoundly in their ability to undertake critical analysis and discuss issues intelligently, coming to greater understanding of the complexity of doing their jobs.

When there is room for variation in case-method teaching, certain basic components must be operative if what is happening in the classroom may go in the pretext of the case-method teaching. It the essential features of case method are ignored, there is no reason to expect that the pedagogy will be successful in delivering the promised goals.

Cases

One obvious feature of teaching by the case method, is the use of an instructional tool called a case. A case is a complex educational instrument that appears in the form of a narrative. The contents of a case include information and data, psychological, sociological and political observations and technical materials. Cases are specially drawn from curriculum areas, such as history, economics, education, human relations, administration etc, but, by their nature, are interdisciplinary. Cases are essentially enmeshed in serious ideas and concepts the significant issues of the content that call for serious and in-depth examination.

The narratives are so constructed that they appear as real-life problems confronting all of us.

A good case is the vehicle by which a chunk of reality is brought into the classroom to be worked over by the class and the instructor. A good case keeps the class discussion grounded upon some of stubborn facts that must be faced in real-life situations. It is the anchor on academic flights of speculation. It is the record of complex situation that must be literally pulled apart and put together again for the expression of attitudes or ways of thinking brought into the classroom (Lawrence, 1993).

There are hundreds of cases that already exist for use in different disciplines and professional institutions and upon which teachers may draw for their classroom work. Teacher educators have also been known to write their own case narratives that are more appropriate to singular issues related to their own courses.

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