Resumen de Cascade training and teachers' professional development
In their concern with ‘improved’ curricula and ‘more effective’ teaching-learning methods, education ministries often use the ‘cascade’ model to attempt to effect large-scale change at the classroom level. Experience of cascades in in-service development has tended to show, however, that the cascade is more often reduced to a trickle by the time it reaches the class-room teacher, on whom the success of curricular change depends. This paper examines the experience of a nationwide in-service teacher development project in Sri Lanka which aims to remedy the potential deficiencies of cascade models of teacher development It shows how project training and development strategies which are context sensitive, collaborative, and reflexive seek to involve teachers in managing their own professional growth, while at the same time taking account of frameworks agreed at the national level. In this way a cascade model of training may promote genuine development rather than surface adherence to official mandates.
