Perceptions of Botswana primary teacher educators on selected teaching skills

This study investigates the levels of confidence of several categories of educators in some selected teaching skills. The educator categories comprise of primary school teachers, tutors at the Primary Colleges of Education, education officers and unqualified teachers in the colleges' catchment areas. The results are based on a questionnaire survey involving 504 educators. The educators are seen to influence to some extent the outcomes of the preservice training of teachers at the Primary Colleges in Botswana. The findings firstly suggest that about one-third of the respondents are not at all satisfied with teaching. The majority of education officers and principals of schools are the ones satisfied with their jobs. These differences among educator categories are statistically significant. Secondly, the analysis by location, rank and experience of the educators shows several trends. The analysis by location shows that educators in the urban setting are more confident in the selected skills than those from the rural areas. However, these differences are constant but not significant. The results by rank suggest the education officer respondents as being the most confident group. The college tutors and primary school teachers are more confident than the last category of unqualified teachers. The Pearson chi-square values for the analysis by rank suggest that these differences are significant. The results consistently show that longer experience in years does not lead to higher levels of confidence. The findings are also consistent in showing that there is a drop in levels of confidence with experience of twenty-six years and more. The paper discusses the implications of these results for professional skills training within the primary college catchment areas. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd, All rights reserved.