Research Information System
23. Comperative Education Society in Europe, Athens, Greece, 7 - 10 July 2008, pp.1-9
Recently, new primary and secondary school curricula including changes in the contents and teaching and assessment methods have been introduced in Turkey. To inform teachers about these changes the Ministry of Education have arranged many in-service training (inset) courses. However, there is not enough study on the effectiveness of these courses or whether the changes introduced with the curriculum programs have entered the classrooms. Therefore, this study aims to reveal teachers’ views on the effectiveness of the INSET courses they attended.
For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers working in schools from different parts of Trabzon, Turkey, during 2006-2007 academic year.
According to the findings, the teachers found inset courses ineffective for their needs. Most of them did not find course instructors effective or competent in their field. In addition, duration of the courses were found too short and, as a result, direct instruction was reported to be the main method used to deliver courses. Therefore, the courses were found to be too theoretical and the teachers complained that they had not been given opportunities to practice what had been taught.
Suggestions to improve inset effectiveness were included at the end of the paper.