In‐Service Training: Ways and Means*

Abstract

IN-SERVICE training for teachers, like most terms currently used in the modern language field, means different things to different people. Obviously it would include a teacher's study leading to a master's degree and eventual permanent certification. By the same token, the term also includes the NDEA Foreign Language Institutes, in that these are designed to provide further training for teachers who are already in the profession. It is not my intention to deal with these two aspects, but rather, with recommendations for in-service training at the local level, a program designed to meet the specific problems that a group of teachers may face in a given community. The necessity for improved and extended programs of in-service training is inferred by the inherent shortcomings of the master's degree programs as they now exist and the NDEA Institutes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of our teachers continue to take the master's degree in professional education. Of the estimated 40,000 teachers of modern foreign language-and this is an estimation, based on other estimations-some 14,000 have attended NDEA Institutes. For the past three years, and continuing this summer, there has been an effort to form homogeneous groups of participants by institutes. However, this grouping has been based solely on the applicant's estimation of his language proficiency. In theory, this method might have great merit; in practice, one wonders. It might occur to those who have attended or taught in an institute that participants selected on the basis of height, color of hair, or indeed, preferences in detergents, might easily produce an equally homogeneous group; it has to me. Yet, since the participants are considered to be homogeneous, the courses are primarily general in nature. This mention of the lack of attention to the specific problems that individual participants have is not meant to be a criticism of the institutes' curriculum planning