Every accreditation system is
designed with certain goals and assumptions in mind.
The goal of the Turkish teacher education accreditation is to ensure that
every child in Turkey is taught by a well-qualified teacher.
The
development of the accreditation system in Turkey builds on considerable change
and development in teacher education in recent years.
In
1992 the two-year classroom teacher training programs became four-year programs,
and teaching became a graduate profession.
Over the last five years the number of education faculties has increased
by 50%. In 1994 there were 34
faculties of education. By 1999
there were 51. The number of
students on teacher education courses has also increased greatly.
This is due not only to the opening of new faculties, but to the
allocation of more students to education faculties, to help meet the need for
teachers.
In
1997 the Basic Education Law was implemented, increasing the length of
compulsory primary schooling from 5 to 8 years in basic education schools.
There was thus a large need of teachers for the additional school
students. At the same time, a close
and realistic look was taken at the need for teachers in each subject area, at
both primary and secondary levels. Some
areas such as secondary biology were greatly over-subscribed.
In other areas, such as pre-school and languages there was a shortage of
teachers. The Council of Higher
Education (YÖK) and the Ministry of National Education co-operated in
establishing the need for teachers in each subject area.
The
need for more, and different types of, teachers coupled with a dissatisfaction
with the existing programs, caused YÖK to restructure the teacher education
programs. The revised programs
began in the 1998-99 academic year. They
moved the emphasis within teacher education programs, and laid more stress on
the study of education, especially subject teaching courses and work in schools.
A
system of faculty-school partnerships was set up in 1998 by YÖK and the
Ministry to assist these developments. School
teachers began to be more involved with student teachers’ school experience
and teaching practice activities.
The
current efforts and work on standards and accreditation, both to assure quality,
and to lead to improvement, builds on all these changes.
The implementation of national standards and the setting up of a system
of accreditation for faculties of education help to ensure that national
standards are met by all teachers, all programs, and students.
The
Turkish system of accreditation was designed with these points in
mind:
1
The goal of accreditation in teacher education is to
help ensure that every child in Turkey is taught by a fully qualified teacher.
2
To achieve this goal, accreditation must balance the
functions of assuring that faculties and students meet standards with the
establishment of an accreditation system which supports improvement.
3
To support improvement, the system must apply a
single set of standards in a way which is sensitive to differences in
institutional aims, resource levels, and histories.
4
To achieve the goal of accreditation, higher
education and primary/secondary education must work closely together at the
university/school level and at the YÖK/Ministry level.
5
The assurance of satisfactory levels of inputs and
satisfactory processes are necessary for the assurance of satisfactory
performance or outputs.
6
The agencies responsible for teacher education
policies deal with the inputs, the faculty staff are responsible for the
processes, and staff and students are responsible for the outputs.
7
The standards for accreditation in teacher education
in Turkey will be based on the required curriculum and teaching competencies for
beginning teachers.
8
Faculty staff and students should be given at the
start of the program details of the standards which will be used to assess
performance.
This
book is written to make available to all members of faculties of education
details of the Turkish system of accreditation.
It gives the standards which will be used in accreditation (Ch 2), plus the national teaching competencies expected of
beginning teachers (Appendix 3).
It explains the details of the self-evaluation which faculties will write
(Ch 4).
It gives full details of the assessors’ visit to a faculty, including
activities necessary before the visit (Ch
5 and Ch 3). The assessors’
report is discussed in Chapter 6, and
a sample report with a sample self-evaluation are given in Appendix
2. Details of the courses given by the National Education
Development Project: Pre-service Teacher Education in May and June 1999 for
faculty staff, and to train assessors, are given in Chapter 7. The
appendices give further material.
It
should be clearly stated that the contents of the book represent the present
situation. The book gives details
of standards and the accreditation process after the pilot visits of February
1999, and the discussions at the Edirne Conference in April 1999. As the system begins to be implemented, details may change.
We have included all relevant material in the book for the sake of completeness. We wished to have everything easily available for reference by everyone involved in accreditation. It follows that different people will find different sections useful. The book is therefore not intended to be read from beginning to end, but to be used as a resource and for reference. For completeness, any particular section includes all aspects related to that section, so that different groups who refer to the book do not have to search for missing material. Essential pieces of information may therefore be repeated in different sections.
Acknowledgements
We
wish to acknowledge the great contribution to the development of this work by
the Accreditation Working Party, listed elsewhere in the book, and by our
consultants Dr Barbara Brittingham, Dean of the Faculty of Education at the
university of Rhode Island US, and Dr Margaret Sands, Team Leader of the
National Education Development Project at YÖK.
We acknowledge also the considerable work done by Arman Ersev,
administrative officer with the project, and our two translators, Nalan Uysal
and Çağlar Öpzayranci. We thank
Yeşim Gürsoy and Hilal Balta for their word-processing skills in the
production of the manuscript.
We
are indebted to the Deans and staff of the six faculties of education at the
following universities who kindly agreed to our accreditation visits to their
faculties in order to pilot the studies: Anadolu
University, Çukorova University, Dokuz Eylül University, Gazi University,
Karadeniz Technical University at Trabzon, Orta Doğu Technical University.
We
also wish to thank the participants at the Edirne National Conference in April
1999 for their great help in the process of evaluating and finalising the
standards and self-evaluation forms, and of Aydin Özyar, Director of the
Teacher Training and Education Directorate Ministry of National Education, for
his support and assistance.
The
work, contributions, ideas, and suggestions of all these people are to be found
in the book.
Prof
Dr Barbaros Günçer
Project
Director
YÖK
May 1999