Reconceptulizing the Design and Delivery of Teacher Preparatory Programmes: Insights from Zimbabwe

This study evaluated the design and delivery of an innovative teacher education programme that was intended to produce a prototype primary school teacher. The study was prompted by unprecedented resistance to the programme by the intended beneficiaries of the programme namely post-sixth form student teachers. The primary purpose of the study was to assess the adequacy and efficacy of the faculty based teacher education programme in transforming post-sixth form students into prototype primary school teachers. The Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) was utilized as a conceptual and interpretive framework for conducting the study whereas Wang (1983) concept of critical programme dimensions provided a framework for identifying aspects of the programme to be evaluated. The participants in the study consisted of 54 post-sixth form student teachers who were the first group to pioneer a pre-service primary teacher education degree programme for post-sixth form students, 15 teacher educators and 12 school based mentors participating in the implementation of the programme. The results of the study indicate that design and operational flaws of the programme subvert the impacts of the programme. More precisely, the design weaknesses of the programme which include among other things, an inadequate needs assessment system, rationalist top-down curriculum development strategies, ambiguous goals, skewed content and a costly format in terms of resources undermines the impacts of the innovative teacher education programme. Operationally, the programme was found to lack an adequate emotional support infrastructure, informed and motivated implementers and an adequate budget. More significantly, the programme lacked social and moral props to sustain student teachers’ interests and concerns in primary teaching. In light of the above this study proposes a major overhaul in the conceptualisation, design and delivery of post sixth form pre-service primary teacher education programmes. First, the socio-moral concerns of post-sixth form should be regarded as problematic and should be accorded space in both the design and delivery of primary teacher education programmes. Secondly, successful implementation of pre-service primary teacher education programmes require more than the mastery of teacher education technologies. It requires among other things effective emotional support systems, quality pre-implementation planning, faculty wide cohesion among university departments and motivated teams of implementers seeking to attain shared goals. For such a landscape to emerge in primary teacher education, systemic and concerns- based approaches should be incorporated in the design and delivery of teacher education programmes.