Asian Research Thesis Index

Abstract

Teacher education has traversed a long distance from off-site courses to school-based courses. All these courses were designed to develop teachers professionally, however, the approaches were different. The current trend of teacher education supports school-based professional development to a great extent. The System-Based Visiting Teachers Programme (SBVTP) was introduced by AKU-IED, as a variation of school-based teacher education programmes, to help teachers, to improve upon their classroom teaching practice. The study sets out to understand the major processes of SBVTP in which the visiting teachers (VTs) were engaged in during the programme, and their outcomes in terms of a change in VTs' beliefs and attitudes about teaching and learning. In this study four visiting teachers participated and shared their views about the different aspects of teaching and learning. The study was conducted in the qualitative paradigm. The data collection methods were document analysis; observations, interviews, and stimulation recall interviews with some informal talk with the research participants. The key findings of the study indicate that SBVTP was successful in bringing about a change in VTs' thinking about teaching and learning. However, there is no significant change in their practices mainly due to time constraints caused by their routine teaching responsibilities. In addition to these key findings, the study has also discovered some important contextual concerns that seem to inhibit the teachers in changing their practices. The study could help in understanding the factors, which facilitate bringing about change in VTs' practices.

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