A Study On The Teacher Education Of Botswana

Teachers are central to the education system and are crucial in any strategy aimed at achieving a more effective and responsive education system such as the one envisaged in Vision2016."Building an educated and informed nation’is a core goal of the government’s Vision2016strategy. Central to this effort is the creation of a world class teaching profession. This paper begins with the background of teacher education development through its two historical periods, namely the hard period before1966and the flourished period after1966. And it also analyzes the reasons behind its highly development and corresponding measures. The paper elaborates the teacher training institutions, pre-service and in-service teacher education. It systematically introduces the objectives of teacher education, teaching programs, system of teaching practice and admission requirements, which focuses on the pre-service teacher education in the college of Botswana University and Serowe college of Education, pointing their differences and their same points. The in-service teacher education takes the teacher upgrading via the distance mode, which includes its development periods, the diploma in primary education and mode of delivery. At last, the paper summarizes the achievements the problems of teacher education in Botswana, and points out relevant experiences from China.This paper consists of seven parts:Part one:introduction. It makes a brief analysis of relevant literature at home and abroad; introduces the intention, content, methods and significance of this study.Part two:it broadly analyzes the teacher education development of Botswana through three aspects individually, namely the urgent needs of quality teachers in sub-Saharan Africa, the important role of teacher education in sub-Saharan Africa, and the demand from Botswana VISION2016. Part three:it introduces the history development of teacher education in Botswana, which developed from the hard period before1966to the flourished period.Then it analyzes the concrete backgrounds of teacher education after its independence and corresponding measures.Part four:it introduces the status quo of teacher education in Botswana; Teacher education institution consists of the University of Botswana, six colleges of Education, Botswana Teachers Union, Teacher training and development Committee and Overseas institutions. Then it elaborates the relationship among the University of Botswana and other teacher training institutes..Part five:it introduces the pre-service training of teacher education, which takes the education college of Botswana University and Serowe college of Education as the example,. It compares the two institutes on the contents of its Mission and Values, course structure and teaching practice, pointing their differences and their same points.Part six:it introduces the in-service education training by distance mode, which presents in two levels in its expanding course:one is the Botswana In-service and Pre-service Project (BIPP) in collaboration with the Northern College, Aberdeen and Dundee, Britain, to upgrade Junior Secondary school teachers of English, maths, science and design and technology.; the other is the Diploma in Primary Education programme to upgrade the academic and professional qualifications of primary teacher certificate holders to the diploma level.Part seven:the achievements, existing problems and relevant experiences from China.It makes significant progress in the aspects of teacher education institutes level, the scale of these institutes and its system. The overall teacher’s quality has been greatly improved and the sound system of teaching practice ensures high quality of teachers from the source. But there are still some problems in the management and contents of the teacher education, such as the problems of effectiveness and quality, time allocation, bureaucratic phenomenon in the management and administration of college of Education, degree and articulation problems, problems in the training process and so on. In order to deal with the aboved problems, some relevant experiences from China should be referenced by the following contents, talented people should be attracted by some preferential policies, in-service teachers’ awareness of lifelong learning should be encouraged, the structure and contents of teacher education curriculum should be optimized,teachers’certificition system should be developed flexibility and outstanding teachers’ project should be strengthened.