Abstract
Though the professionalism of teaching is still a debatable issue, teaching provides an indispensible service to every society and civilization. The service provided by teaching seems to be more indispensible to any society than services provided by any other profession. To those that teach, the way they perceive themselves and the value of their services tend to make a lot of difference. The study looked at the influence that such perception by teacher trainees in UB has on their attitude towards their training programme (TTP) as well as towards teaching generally. A statistical analysis of data from a quantitative survey of 73 UB teacher trainees with a 54 closed-ended validated Likert-type items showed that in the perception of UB teacher trainees, teaching is a profession and this view is significantly stronger among female than male teacher trainees. Their level of perception of teaching as a profession has significant influence on their motivation to do well in their teacher training programme (TTP); attitude towards their teacher training programme (AtTTP), the value they attached to the programme (VaTTP); and their perception of the effectiveness of the programme (ETTP). Similarly, the level to which they perceived teaching as a profession has a significantly positive influence on their willingness to teach (WtT); attitude toward teaching (AtT) and the level to which they perceive teaching as a stereotypes career (STC). Generally, the higher their perception of teaching as a profession, the higher is their attitude towards their TTP as well as towards teaching in general. The findings were discussed, implications drawn and recommendations made. Key words: Professionalism of education, teacher training, teacher training, attitude towards teaching, University of Botswana (UB), Botswana.
Highlights
Teaching provides an indispensible service to every society and civilization
According to the white paper, teachers are the catalyst of the learning process and mainly on them rest the whole education system
Education holds the future of every nation, every society, none of which can rise above the quality of its education system
Summary
Teaching provides an indispensible service to every society and civilization. The service provided by teaching seems to be more indispensible to any society than services provided by any other profession. In many respect the teaching profession is a nation builder and sometimes it is referred as the mother of all professions. Professionals including teaching fraternity need to be equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to enhance learning in a fast changing environment. According to Desimone (2009), professionals in teaching should evolve over research which lead to a more thorough understanding of the factors that contribute to effective teacher professional development and effective education, like: (1) research on teachers' knowledge of, skills in, and attitudes towards formal and informal collaborative, inquiry based, and contextualized education; (2) development and evaluation of programs, interventions, and tools that foster collaborative, inquiry based, and contextualized learning, with a specific focus on teacher performance and the effects of this performance on students’ learning. Teachers are involved in creating the knowledge that drives their functioning as professionals
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