Reassessing teacher needs

As your training program commences, you have will have a better opportunity to collect first-hand information about your participants as individuals, and take a more in-depth look at their training needs. With everyone present at the training site you will be better able to explore the subtleties of each individual personality and the perceptions that will influence how they react in both the training and classroom environments. As a starting point, try to determine the answers to these questions:

° What are their perceptions of what makes a good teacher in their society?
° When and why did they decide to go into teaching?
° What do they see as the advantages and disadvantages of teaching as a career?
° How do they feel about: - a teacher's status in the community? - their pay? - their workload?

You may not be able to change their situations, but attitudes and motivations are an important feature of teacher performance. If you are to help teachers develop and sustain positive and constructive attitudes, you must know what their attitudes are and what has influenced them.

The next chapter of this manual is meant to be a resource to you, as a teacher trainer. It will provide an overview of topics critical to the performance of any teacher. You should re-familiarize yourself with these topics, adapt them to your host country context, and use them in the training programs you design for teachers.