Abstract:
Believing that the quality of education depends on the competence of teachers, the initial
training of Middle School teachers in Algeria has been since 1999 the responsibility of a
Higher Education institution to ensure providing teachers with high standards. In this context, our study aims at exploring the use of Competency Based Teacher Education at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Constantine focusing on significant indicators namely attitude and performance. Using a mixed research paradigm, we observed four classes concerned with the teaching methodology course intended for fourth-year students of English, and then we investigated both the students’ and the teachers’ attitudes about the course through an attitudes questionnaire. We have also gathered trainees’ rating of their teaching competencies after the course through a self-rating questionnaire and compared it with the ratings of their supervisors and Middle School training teachers. Finally, we analyzed the lesson plans of the fifty trainees involved in the study after collecting their training copy books and rated their teaching performance using the same scale in the rating questionnaire. The results obtained from analyzing the classroom observation checklists indicate a tendency towards an applied science model approach in teacher education in the four subjects observed where the focus is on the knowledge to be acquired rather than on the competencies to be developed by the preservice teachers. Likewise, the correlation test has shown a relative correlation between trainees’ self-rating of their teaching competencies and the ratings of their supervisors and training teachers. However, there was a weak association between these scores and the ones obtained from analyzing the lesson plans of the trainees who scored lower in performance than in their attitudes about their performance. The study describes findings about teacher education in Algeria and provides suggestions for the implementation of a competency-based model to prepare pre-service teachers for their future career.
