Teacher training. Theoretical basis for the development of pre-service training programs

From a research summary developed in the last thirty years, the theoretical basis for the design of pre-service training programs are presented. For this purpose, methodological aspects, as well as the main objectives and the most important difficulties to be faced, are discussed in order to help teachers to develop their own professional identity, master social interaction in the classroom, organize pupils as a social group capable to work effectively and interpret educational contents to help them achieving a meaningful learning. Achieving an effective pre-service teacher training means the exclusion of idealistic approaches and the facing of the main sources of tension, personal, social, political and ideological which should be stood in the teaching environment every day. Opposite to the teaching approaches based on the useless search of the ideal teacher and whose aim is that of stating how the teacher should be, do and think, the author's proposal is that of focusing teacher training on the analysis of what the teacher does. Firstly, it means teaching him/her to study the complex network of interactions which determine classroom environment aimed at the devise of intervention strategies to face real teaching problems, pupils' level of knowledge and the ways through which teachers can effectively communicate with them using the language. For this purpose, teachers should start defining an adequate professional identity, since it makes possible the design of quite different relationship strategies with pupils, all of them influenced by their previous ideas on the teaching profession, which are sometimes in turn influenced by traditional and irrational assumptions. Starting from a realistic analysis of the difficulties teachers should confront seems to be a good grounding for the devise of any approach on the training of Secondary School teachers.