What makes a good teacher? - Part II

What we are talking about here is two things. The first is continuous professional development.

For example, in Malaysia, a lot of primary schoolteachers are just high-school graduates who went through training and became teachers. But quite a lot them, if given the opportunity, would like to improve themselves academically.

The government is therefore enabling primary schoolteachers to get a degree. They go about this by using the open-system method of learning, with the Education Ministry having contracted the Open University of Malaysia to upgrade 3,000 primary teachers per year to graduate teachers.

Second, it is often the case in a country that the Education Ministry changes the curriculum, introducing new subjects and ways of teaching, or updates the content for certain subjects, such as science. It is essential, therefore, for teachers to receive the necessary training on the new method of teaching their subjects. That is what we call 'in-service training', which is very important and should be part of any school's curriculum.

For instance, in Singapore, they have a policy that every teacher is given 120 hours of professional development via in-service training. The government lets the teachers choose what kind of courses they want to attend, instead of being directed to courses in which they are not interested.

Moreover, the 120-hour training doesn't mean that everybody has to attend only one course for many hours. It's more like a cash-equivalent system, whereby teachers get a voucher and can separate out their training hours based on their interests - 20 hours on course A and the rest for courses B and C, for example.

These kinds of courses are offered by the private sector in Singapore, which charges according to the content, length and demand of the courses. Teachers can shop for the types of course that they wish to attend and pay for them with the vouchers provided by the government. This is a very democratic way of providing professional support to teachers.

It is very true in many countries that the teaching profession does not attract talented, high-achieving young people, since they tend to choose other careers instead. This is a very common problem due to low salary, low status and/or poor working conditions.

If a country's economy is booming and jobs are easy to find in other sectors, then you will find more young people looking for jobs outside teaching. But if the economy is slow and it is hard to get job, then you find a long line of youngsters trying to get into the teaching profession. It's the same everywhere.

How do we attract these bright people? There are different ways to do it.

First, if the starting pay of the teaching profession is sufficiently high - but it might not have to be as high as, say, in the engineering field - there is more chance of attracting young people who are smart but are from a poor family.

Second, and this is very important, if the government offers teaching scholarships in subjects like science and maths where they are shortages, bright people - especially those from low-income families - who want to take a degree course will take up a scholarship.

Third, the practice in Malaysia, which wants to excel in maths, science and English, is for the government to offer overseas scholarships. This is very good for bright, young people who want overseas experience and it attracts more of them into the teaching profession.

However, while we may be able to attract youngsters to become teachers, how to keep them in the profession is another difficult question. It is often the case that people are trained for a job in teaching for a number of years, but they then turn down the opportunity to enter the profession and look for something else.

Watchara Saengsrisin

The Nation

Dr Lee is coordinator of the AsiaPacific Programme of Educational Programme for Development (APEID) and programme specialist in higher education at Unesco Asia and the Pacific Regional Bureau for Education in Bangkok.

Prior to joining Unesco Bangkok, she was a Professor of Education at the University of Science in Penang, Malaysia. As coordinator of APEID, she runs programmes on higher education, technical and vocational education, education for sustainable development and ICT in education.