What is the difference, if any, between teacher development and teacher training? In general, I would suggest that the core difference between the concept of training and development is that training leads to a known end, whereas development leads to the unpredictable.

Just as pigeons have been trained to play table tennis, people can also be trained to produce machines, for example, faster.

Teachers undergo an initial training which lays down a set of proscribed procedures that enable them to function in the classroom. However, in this case 'training' may be a misnomer.

People can be trained to operate a cash till, because a cash till always behaves in the same way. Obviously people do not, so teacher training has to imagine that people behave in similar ways. In other words, we operate a weak form of training wherein we learn how to behave in a classroom, where people are average and predictable. So far, training people to teach is similar to the way we train people to drive. Dealing with 'road rage' is not covered on the syllabus.

When 30 teachers can all sit in a meeting and agree and build on each other's ideas, is this a good thing? If we set a group a problem, and all the solutions are almost indistinguishable, does this mean that we have achieved a professional mindset, or simply that we have been brainwashed into accepting a subtly-imposed norm?

At the risk of being labelled a conspiracy-theorist, is it possible that the agents of this new conformity are the members of the ELT industry? This industry, comprising a small number of language professionals based in universities and ministries, large teaching institutions, publishers, and examination boards, holds enormous power in our profession. This power ranges from day-to- day classroom methodology to final assessment. Let me give some examples. Through their introduction in commonly-used coursebooks, teachers become informed of new activities and activity-types. The frequent use of these activity-types fills their classes and other activities fall dormant or out of their repertoire. For example, there are lots of for-and-against writing tasks in books, but very drills or few wall-crawls. Why is this'? Drills are now 'out', you will say. But why? Because they are associated with behaviourism, which has been superseded? Or because you can't fill a book with a drill? You can't put a wall-crawl in a book either. Neither can you put a discussion about a tricky bit of grammar. All you can put in a book is a selection of texts, puzzles and explanations of grammar that are so over-simplified that they confuse rather than help. The drills and wall-crawls and pedagogic grammar (if any) is stuck in a teacher's book, but they don't sell as many of those, so why go to all the effort of making them useful and effective?

What all the members of this industry want is standardisation. Large teaching institutions have large staffs with differing abilities and interests; they need a standardised student to make the system work. The State, too, needs standardisation so it can compare and rate individuals who are entering the larger society. Examinations serve specifically to allow institutions and the State to deny individuality and put names into groups.

If millions have been invested in a superproduct (or, indeed, a 'super-test'), it will, like today's texts, have to cover the widest market and will be aimed at the highest common denominator. It is, as Skehan (1998) has pointed out, "extremely convenient" for educational administrators to regard students as similar; and teacher training rarely addresses the issue. He concludes: "We have the paradoxical position that those with most power lack interest in learner differences, whereas those with least power, teachers, have to confront mixed-ability classes on a daily basis." (P, 261)

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One of the reasons for this may be a confusion resulting from an institutional view which can occasionally confuse teacher development and appraisal. In the UK, the department responsible for education is the Department of Education and Science, or DES. Winter (1989) points out the dichotomy in the (then) Government's position by referring to the DES's own reports. They noted that teacher performance is best assessed by pupil attainment and pupil ratings, while self- and peer-appraisal are most effective for professional improvement. "And yet," Winter says, "they place all their emphasis on superordinate appraisal."

The answer, he suspects is that: "The DES is part of a bureaucracy. The ancient function of a bureaucracy is to render effective over a wide territory the demands of a central political power. Its effective structure is hierarchical, and its fundamental instrument is information travelling 'up' the system so that 'informed' decisions can then travel 'down'. . . . [Its] overriding effort must be to convert the activities over which it has jurisdiction into information which can be filed and thus used (later, and by any official) to justify administrative decisions . . . because [bureaucracies] spend public money for which they are accountable." (p. 49)

Winter compares this with 'professions'. Professions are unlike bureaucracies, who get authority for decisions from above. Instead, "professional workers possess a personal licence to practice, having demonstrated their mastery of a body of knowledge... Their allegiance is therefore not upwards but downwards - to their clients - and inwards,- to the specialism which they practise. Clients' cases are complex and unique; they cannot be decided upon by the application of general rules (given from above), but only by the discretionary interpretation of specialist knowledge in the individual instance. This means that professional workers are continually learning (increasing their knowledge and enhancing their skills) through the actual practice of their profession." (p. 50) The two don't mix. A bureaucratic view wants to check its product. The process of development emphasises learning by the teacher. "It would not generate information about teachers' work, but insight for those teachers themselves to use in improving their work."

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Teacher development presumably involves change, and we find a similar product/process tension also affects the field of evaluation of educational innovations in schools. Parlett and Hamilton challenge the traditional concept of evaluation, which they label the "agricultural-botanical paradigm". This refers to the introduction of a change, which is then measured by treating students like plants: they are measured, treated, and then measured again. They recognise the motivation behind such an approach: a search for "objectivity". However, they also list a number of objections. Among these are the objections that:

• such schemes ignore the deviant -however, by ignoring atypical results, they may be missing out on some important discussion of such data;
• such studies tend to be design-led rather than responsive to the different interests of the parties concerned.

One effect of such a model of the evaluation of change, they claim, "is that it diverts attention away from questions of educational practice towards more centralised bureaucratic concerns." (p. 9) As an alternative model, they suggest "illuminative evaluation" instead.

This cannot be a "standard methodological package, but a general research strategy." They define three stages: "observe, enquire further, and then seek to explain". That is, become knowledgeable about the innovation, through visits, reading, talking, finding frequently-asked questions and comments. The second stage becomes more focused, and enquiry becomes more directed. The third stage involves "seeking general principles underlying the organisation of the programme; spotting patterns of cause and effect; and placing individual findings within a broader explanatory context", through looking at alternative interpretations of/and findings through different lines of enquiry.

They end up by saying that there is, by definition, a radical shift in the evaluator's role once the traditional paradigm is dropped: "The illuminative evaluator thus joins a diverse group of specialists (e.g. psychiatrists, social anthropologists and historians), by whom this is taken for granted. In each of these fields the research worker has to weigh and sift a complex array of human evidence and draw conclusions from it." (p. 18)

If this is true for studying educational innovations, consistency would suggest that it also applies to individual and internal innovation: teacher development.

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Stenhouse (1975) shares this worry about standardisation. My favourite quote from his book is that "Education as induction into knowledge is successful to the extent that it makes the behaviour outcomes of the students unpredictable". To illustrate this, he imagines a history teacher with a pile of essays to mark.

"As he reads them, he often becomes aware that there is a depressing similarity about them. This is because the majority of the teachers have been working to a behavioural objective - to produce just such an essay. They don't talk about behavioural objectives because they feel they are rather disreputable, but they are using them. From the pile of essays a few leap out at the marker as original, surprising, showing evidence of original thinking. These, the unpredictable, are the successes."

He notes that the student is testing their powers, therefore "they must be criticised, cannot be ignored, and the criticism of them is a much more important evaluation than that derived from an objective test."

"An essay," he continues, "is not right or wrong. It is to be judged qualitatively in the light of criteria appropriate in its field . . . Now, of course, this implies that the evaluation of an essay is not objective, and indeed it is an index of the quality of a teacher that he is capable of thoughtful and productive evaluation which helps the student improve his work. This sets a problem in public examining, but there is no escape from them. The quality of a teacher is inseparable from the quality of his judgement of students' work."

(Actually, Stenhouse had a low regard of language teaching as education, but was writing when Behaviourism had teaching in its vice and before the days when sociolinguistics had proved how important communication was.) . And in criticising the (then) obsession with behavioural objectives, wrote: 'I... the use of objectives laid down from the centre is a kind of teacher proofing. The curriculum is to bend in the same direction whatever the knowledge and talents of the individual teacher and indeed of the individual student. But there can be no educational development without teacher development; and the best means of development is not by clarifying ends but by criticizing practice."

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What do we want, then? We have to be careful not to make the same mistake that many of our students make: that we can learn for them. They think that by attending a class, we can somehow make the stuff stick inside their heads. They think they are buying a product, but in fact they are participating in a process. We can't give them the product they want. All we can do is provide opportunities for them to have a insight, make a connection, notice something. That, I would suggest, is the difference between the verbs "teach" and "learn".

There is all too little consistency in TEFL, but I would suggest that if that is what we believe about teaching, it should also apply to teacher development. A teacher trainer may have tricks and tips to sell us; they may be able to make us practise certain routines. But a teacher developer cannot stick stuff inside our heads, either. Teacher development also is a process in which we are engaged. It is not a product we can buy, although it increasingly packaged as if it were. It is not the content of a teacher development session which is important, but the thought process that goes on inside our heads while listening to it. Development is represented by the insights we have, the connections we make, what we notice.

Brecht always said that people watching a play should be smoking cigars, leaning forward, and be prepared to shout "But that's not right!" if they disagreed with the script. All in all, then, there is a simple message for teachers being developed: keep your mind open, but be doubtful.

Bibliography
Simons, H & Elliott, J (eds.), 1989, Rethinking Appraisal and Assessment. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Skehan, P.; 1998, A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning. Oxford, Oxford University Press