ABSTRACT
Planning an In-Service Course After working through this chapter you should be able to plan an in-service course for teachers.
In-service courses involve teacher development after initial teacher training and after the teachers have had some teaching experience. In-service courses may be long-term courses leading to Diplomas, Masters degrees or Doctoral degrees. They may be short term, lasting only a few hours or a day or two. In this chapter we look at short-term courses, and the planning that is needed for their success. The planning of short-term in-service courses is included in this book for two main reasons. First, short in-service courses represent a small-scale exercise in curriculum design. That is, planning a short in-service course involves very similar decisions to planning a language course, and the model of curriculum design used in this book is relevant. Second, in-service courses are a major way of bringing about innovative curriculum change. Curriculum change involves teachers, and teachers need to be informed and involved in the planning, development, implementation and evaluation of change. In-service courses are an important means for doing this. In this discussion, the term “workshop” will be used to refer to short-term inservice courses. The term “participants” will be used to refer to the teachers coming to the workshop for in-service development, plus the organiser and visiting speakers. Most attention will be given in this chapter to the inner circle in the curriculum design model – goals, content, presentation, and assessment and evaluation.
