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Teacher preparation in Malaysia: needed changes

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DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2015.1020780

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 Teaching in Higher Education

ISSN: 1356-2517 (Print) 1470-1294 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cthe20

Teacher preparation in Malaysia: needed changes

Pauline Swee Choo Goh & Damian Blake

To cite this article: Pauline Swee Choo Goh & Damian Blake (2015) Teacher preparation
in Malaysia: needed changes, Teaching in Higher Education, 20:5, 469-480, DOI:
10.1080/13562517.2015.1020780

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 Teaching in Higher Education, 2015
Vol. 20, No. 5, 469–480, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2015.1020780

Teacher preparation in Malaysia: needed changes

Pauline Swee Choo Goha* and Damian Blakeb
a
Department of Educational Studies, Sultan Idris Education University, Tanjong Malim, Perak,
Malaysia; bSchool of Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia
(Received 17 August 2014; final version received 13 February 2015)
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The article attempts to present personal views of some changes that are needed to be
made within teacher education in Malaysia. It uses one teacher education university as
a point of reference to forward concerns. The university remains anonymous as it is
not the intent of the article to critique the university but rather to highlight the more
general challenges in preparing preservice teachers and to explore some approaches to
improve teacher education within this university and its setting. The article starts by
drawing together a set of concerns that face the field, arguing that three changes are
needed to improve teacher preparation, namely (1) a curriculum that is grounded in the
Malaysian context, (2) an improved practicum experience, and (3) to develop and
situate practices in the schools. It concludes that the efforts to change within teacher
education will not be easy, but needful; else the ultimate losers are the future teachers
and their students.
Keywords: teacher education in Malaysia; teacher preparation; practices in teacher
training; change in teacher education

Introduction
The Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib, has reaffirmed that there will be concerted effort
toward making his manifesto, named ‘A Promise of Hope’ a success through alleviating
poverty, improving health care, and ensuring quality education to be on par with the new
realities of the global world (GE: Barisan Nasional Manifesto 2013). Consequently,
Malaysians have witnessed an enhanced concern to implement and reform its educational
and economic systems through quality education provision, resource and infrastructural
development, relevant national curricula, and greater access to higher education, in short,
the quest for quality education for its citizen. These movements have resulted in two
important policy documents: the Malaysian Economic Transformation Program (METP)
which was enacted in 2010 and the Malaysian Education Blueprint 2013–2025 unveiled
in 2013. Under the METP, teachers are under pressure to not only perform effectively in
classrooms but also innovatively (Economic Planning Unit 2008). In fact, ‘improving
teacher quality in the education system is a top priority’ within the METP blueprint
(Jala 2010).
Critiques have argued that the agenda to move Malaysia forward in its educational
endeavors is encouraging but fear it may be waylaid if there is a lack of political will and
if educational conditions for strengthening teaching and teacher education are missing

*Corresponding author. Emails: goh.sc@fppm.upsi.edu.my; goh.sweechoo@yahoo.com

© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 470 P.S.C. Goh and D. Blake

(Lim 2012; Zachariah 2013). After its independence from the British Empire in 1957,
Malaysia made great strides in its educational progress toward initial teacher education,
providing equal access to schools and achieving educational prominence in the region.
However, some educationists have lamented that the nation’s educational prowess, once
to be proud of, has shown a marked gradient downward, and have advanced very little in
achievement, as evidenced in the recent low ranking at the Programme for International
Student Assessment, when compared to the advances made in neighboring countries and
globally (Mahavera 2014; World Bank: Worsening Obstacle to Malaysia’s high income
hopes 2013; Zachariah 2013). Australia, Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore have made
difficult but defining political strategies to create powerful and effective education
systems in their countries. These countries made extensive improvement in education and
sustained progress in teaching to push their economic objectives forward (Mok 2007). In
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contrast, Malaysia appears to have lost some grounds on teacher quality and graduate
employability (High-performing education 2013). Questions have been raised whether
teacher education in Malaysia is able to prepare teachers, and therefore their students, to
be ready for the demands and challenges of the evolving global landscape (Zachar-
iah 2013).
Teacher quality is the most recognized measure that can influence student achieve-
ment and success in schools. Teacher actions, effective teaching, and knowledge a teacher
possesses to the creativity of the teacher are knowledge bases of teaching which are
widely accepted and will continually expand and change (Blanton, Sindelar, and Correa
2006). However, Darling-Hammond (2010) cautions that when there is a disparity
between how teachers transform knowledge into effective instruction, then it may be time
to reanalyze the reasons this gap exist. Teacher education provides the required
certification, but if the curriculum lacks the prospect for preservice teachers to develop
their knowledge, skills, and dispositions required to meet the complex demands of the
classrooms, then the teacher education would be deemed ineffective (Darling-Hammond
2010; Ingersoll and Kralik 2004).
This paper concurs with Jefferson (2009) that ‘the strength of a high-quality education
system rests with high-quality teachers’ (281), but Jefferson also laments that quality
teachers come from the preparedness of the teaching profession that is getting more
complicated, and that teacher education is faced with both the responsibility and
challenges to prepare teachers with all the skills needed to work effectively in the
classrooms and with their students.
Preservice teachers on practical teaching in Malaysian schools have reported that they
lack the skills needed to work effectively with their students and were somewhat
unprepared to help students learn (Goh and Matthews 2011). Beginning teachers in
Malaysia too have voiced their dissatisfactions that teacher preparation involves too much
emphasis on theory and highlights a concerning lack of practical interaction between
theory and practice. They are not able to move beyond superficial teaching toward using
more sophisticated skills to promote effective learning within the learning environment
(Goh and Wong 2014). This reflects Ingersoll and Kralik’s (2004) criticism that teacher
preparation today prepares beginning teachers to merely ‘sink or swim.’ Darling-
Hammond and Sykes (2004) contend that teacher education programs are appropriately
providing survival skills to the preservice teachers but lack training with the necessary
knowledge and expertise for a profession that is increasingly complex. What is sometimes
forgotten is that teacher education plays the vital role in bringing about the effectiveness
of preparing teachers to perform the expected duties related to student achievement, and
 Teaching in Higher Education 471

any deficiency in this preparation puts the learning environment in jeopardy. It is for this
reason that this article takes the reader through some of the concerns in teacher education
and suggests three changes that are needed. This article discusses the concerns and some
changes that need to take place in one teacher education university in Malaysia to enable
teachers to cope with the demands of today’s classroom. The university will remain
anonymous for this article as it is not the intent of the article to critique the university but
rather to highlight the more general challenges in preparing preservice teachers and to
explore some approaches to improve teacher education within this university and its
setting. Although some of the issues and changes may have been rehearsed elsewhere, but
by bringing together the observations that are happening now will further establish the
conditions that affect teacher education, especially as it pertains to Malaysia, and
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specifically to the university of reference.

Needed changes
The pattern of teacher education in a multiethnic Malaysia is a British legacy and has
generally followed the British education system. The first teacher education program can
be traced back to 1922 which is one of the earliest recorded teacher ‘training’ colleges in
support of the training needs of school teachers. There are two main pathways of teacher
preparation. The first is controlled by the Ministry of Education through its Teacher
Education Division (TED) to prepare teachers for the primary and lower secondary
schools. The TED currently oversees 27 teacher training institutes interspersed through-
out the different states in Malaysia. These institutes offer certificate, diploma, and
bachelor’s degree. The second pathway is the four-year bachelor of education conducted
by various public and private universities through their faculties and departments.
Qualified teachers with a teacher education degree from the universities teach in the
secondary schools and preuniversity programs. The universities have autonomy in
structuring their teacher education curriculum unlike the teaching institutes which have a
common curriculum controlled by TED. The universities also conduct the postgraduate
diploma of education for those candidates who wish to pursue teaching after obtaining a
noneducational first degree. Although the arrangement of providing preparation to
teachers through various teacher education structures has remained relatively the same, it
has undergone reforms and innovations through various policies and committees based on
the needs of the country (Lee 2004). However, a report by the World Bank in 2013 find
that teacher education has not been quick enough to keep pace with the country’s needs
and situations, nor has it kept pace with the changing pace of demand of learning and
expectations of various educational stakeholders (High-performing education 2013).
Teacher education has been criticized as ineffective to prepare teachers who can
impart quality education in schools (World Bank: Worsening Obstacle to Malaysia’s high
income hopes 2013). Parents have lamented that the performances of a trained or
untrained teacher showed no differences. Stakeholders suggested that the culprit could lie
in outdated and highly theoretical teacher curricula. Efforts toward improving teacher
education have also been rather silent although the Malaysian Education Blueprint clearly
states the need to advance teacher quality in schools. Such assessments of the perceived
failure of teacher education appear exaggerated and lamented out of frustration at the
apparent decline of education in Malaysia; however, it does compel teacher educators to
rethink the problems and relook at the teacher preparation being offered right now
 472 P.S.C. Goh and D. Blake

through needed changes. This article proposes that the changes needed in teacher
education require at least three changes as follows:
(1) Curriculum that is grounded in the Malaysian context
(2) Improved practicum experience
(3) Developing and situating practices

Change 1: curriculum that is grounded in the Malaysian context

The author now turns to a teacher education university within a Malaysian university
system. This university follows an ‘old world’ structure of preparing teachers. The
curriculum objectives are that preservice teachers are prepared for competencies in their
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area of specialization, understanding assessments, and understanding the resolutions

outlined in the Malaysian National Philosophy of Education. They are taught to
understand that the education system is an organization, and within the organization,
they are responsible to educate their learners. There is little attention given toward
ensuring understanding of the learners within the education system. Pedagogy, modeled
on Western systems, remains the signature of teaching and is given importance. There
appears to be insufficient interrogation of the appropriateness of a ‘Western mind-set’ into
a teacher preparation curriculum. The recognition of the need for a culture-sensitive
pedagogy in teacher education programs is important.
Since Malaysia’s teacher education experience is one which has been modeled on a
Western system, this university, therefore, perpetuate a cycle of ‘mimicking’ what
happens in Western countries. There is an unquestioned adoption of pedagogical
approaches and assessment methods of teaching and learning, together with educational
psychology, which are derived from Western theories (Creating the future of higher
education in Malaysia 2007). In contrast, the need for a more ‘localized-pedagogy,’
defined as ‘valuing of culturally appropriate knowledge, of ways of knowing and
understanding’ (Gopinathan 2006, 262) that is appropriate to the Malaysian contexts, in
teacher education, is necessary. New frameworks of teacher preparation must try to reflect
the unique culture of the nations in Malaysia. Pedagogy that includes the knowledge of
local cultures should coexist over Western models of teaching and learning to ensure that
the unique ways of learning and knowing are not lost (Gopinathan 2006). It is not wrong
to embrace the theories of Vygotsky, Piaget, Bruner, or Gardner or to mimic some of the
patterns of teacher education to resemble what is happening in the USA, the UK, or
Australia, but there is a need to ensure that the teacher education curriculum is grounded
in the country’s context and to localize the contents and desired outcomes. Karubi, Goy,
and Wong (2013) argue that there exists a gap between a teacher education curriculum
that is rooted in local or indigenous practices and epistemologies and one that is
organized by the offerings of the West and the global world. They suggest that perhaps,
rather than ‘this … or that,’ teacher education needs to attempt for some kind of blending
of the best of the two and produce a teacher education framework that is distinctly
developed to Malaysia’s multicultural needs and circumstances. This has been echoed by
Gopinathan (2006) that, for a teacher education to be effective, it must ‘become more
culturally authentic’ (262), recognizing the importance of language and storytelling. It
also means accepting different methods of representations of student work to encourage
the diversity of learners in the classrooms (Northedge 2003).
 Teaching in Higher Education 473

There are shared commonalities across the 13 states in Malaysia, but some states face
more pressing concerns than others. For example, the two East Malaysian states of Sabah
and Sarawak have the largest number of children from the indigenous tribes. This also
means that there is a need to value the indigenous epistemologies and the culture of these
people. Karubi, Goy and Wong (2013) together with Shaari et al. (2011) have shown that
the pedagogies of teaching are different for these children. Syllabus and learning have to
be interspersed with the indigenous language, ritual, dance, and folklore. If the
conventional practice of the university were to persist, and if preservice teachers are
continually taught to teach in pedagogies that are not aligned to the value system of these
children, then the perception of these children of schools will be one that is unfriendly
and one that employs teaching practices that marginalize and lead them to under-
performance in local or national examinations. The recognition for the need for pedagogy
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in teacher education programs that include the knowledge of local values should take
precedence over Western representations of teaching and learning.
Goals for teacher education must be in sync with the development process of the
country, and any reviews of the old curriculum must be both holistic and systematic.
Teacher education must reflect the reality of the educational context and respond to the
needs of learners. The curriculum must include a clearer bridge between theoretical
frameworks being learned and the reality that are presented in Malaysian schools today.
Goh and Wong (2014) argue that, although Malaysian teacher educators may need to
reshape the curriculum’s structure and content, it is not about tweaking the current
teaching curriculum by adding a course or two, changing some components, inserting
some new experiences, and installing it as a new repackaged curriculum. Despite the need
of ‘revamping’ the teacher training curriculum to establish new components within the
teacher education curriculum and to conceptualize new ways to help student teachers
teach, caution must be advised. The university may want to analyze what aspects of the
teaching practice that can still be learned by preservice teachers with those that need to
change. Through the decades, much about learning to teach has improved, and although
assumptions that teaching and learning need to change, many characteristics of good
teaching do remain. It would be quite unreasonable to expect preservice teachers to be
able to immediately embrace the new ways of teaching; therefore, they would need to
spend more time in the classrooms to practice their ‘trade’ and application of what is
learned in the classroom (Feiman-Nemser 2001). The practicum would then be a valuable
component for preservice teachers to apply theoretical knowledge previously gained in
university-based education. However, a study by Goh and Matthews (2011) has raised
several concerns about Malaysian preservice teachers’ practicum experiences. Their study
shows a lack of success among trainees in providing appropriate learning experiences for
learners, mismatched teacher mentor and trainee, and the absence of a structured attempt
by the schools to ensure that trainees exit with an understanding of teaching for learning.
In essence, an enhanced practicum is needed to raise the field experiences of preservice
teachers.

Change 2: improved practicum experience

Teachers, in today’s economy, must not only be competent in their content area but also
have the capability to think, judge, and perform in changing situations, yet they cater to
the educational needs of their students with all its diversity (Hargreaves 2003). Learning
to teach is a long-term development that needs complex approaches to meet the demands
 474 P.S.C. Goh and D. Blake

of a diverse and multiracial classroom (Darling-Hammond and Sykes 2004). The

practicum provides preservice teachers that opportunity to apply their practical and
theoretical knowledge of teaching and learning to a real-life classroom. Their theoretical
knowledge should be applied in their teaching approaches, strategies, and assessment.
During their practicum, preservice teachers are taught to present content and ideas in
ways that are pedagogically efficient and that will engage learners.
Continuing with our teacher education university in reference, in responding to the
need to enroll students as this will ensure its funding through the school fees, the number
of students enrolled in the university has increased substantially. This does not only put
extra demand on the university but also the number of preservice teachers going out for
their practicum. Quality of the content of the program and the supervision of preservice
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teachers on practicum get little attention. These two aspects of quantity versus quality
need to be balanced. If the need with quantity rather than the quality of teachers being
prepared continues, then the educational aspirations of the Malaysia Educational
Blueprint, its values and standards, will be weakened. Soon, if such occurrence were to
persist, then the university will soon be churning our teachers who are unprepared. Such a
situation needs urgent attention, and that decision must be made, absent of bureaucratic
minds obsessed with showing its ‘key performance index’ to the people higher up in the
Ministry, about emphasis on quality and not quantity.
The unpreparedness of preservice teachers undergoing their practicum has been
highlighted by a study by Goh and Matthews (2011). Teacher educators must recognize
that there are issues preservice teachers undergoing their practicum go through and have
them addressed as they go out to learn the ‘how’ and ‘what’ to teach. Concerns that are
prominent among practicum students are managing students’ behavior and discipline, and
aspects of classroom management (Goh and Matthews 2011). Faizah (2008) in her study of
preservice teachers on practical training in Malaysian schools finds the same scenario
repeated. Her preservice teachers have been unable to control their classes and the
disruptive behaviors of their students. Most of them resorted to punishments and constantly
raising their voices to get attention which made teaching exhausting and unenjoyable. Page
(2008) cautions that issues of discipline and class control are serious problems encountered
by most new teachers, and it impedes upon their ability to perform effectively in the
classrooms. With student population in Malaysian classrooms becoming more diverse in
both abilities and needs, preservice teachers should be assisted to understand better the
concept of discipline as overcoming student problem versus classroom management as
order within a class enabling a conducive learning environment (Faizah 2008). Encounters
such as difficulty in choosing and using teaching strategies and techniques are also
important concerns and are perceived as important for successful teaching in order to
achieve positive learning outcomes (Goh and Matthews 2011). Although Millrood (2002)
cautions that there is no one clear strategy in the teacher’s professional paradigm for the act
of teaching, greater exposure to various teaching methodology and how different strategies
and techniques can be used and implemented effectively in the classroom should be given
greater attention. As such, greater emphasis should be placed on such unpreparedness of the
trainees. However, there needs to be greater consideration into what constitutes an
‘adequate’ preparation for the practicum; how the practicum experiences can be sequenced
to reflect progressive development of specific knowledge and skills required of teachers;
and what constitutes adequate evidence (or assurance) that these skills have been
developed.
 Teaching in Higher Education 475

Teacher mentors are seen as an important element in the preparation of preservice

teachers and are in large part responsible for their training for the duration of their
practicum and toward preparing them to participate as teachers in the schools (Coll,
Taylor, and Grainger 2002). The transition from being a student being taught to being a
teacher teaching is not easy and adjustments are to be expected. The emotional welfare of
teacher trainees should not be overlooked as it could have an impact on their success and
failure as future teachers (Hayes 2003). However, it is not untrue to state that teaching
institutions in Malaysia do not have much control over who become the teacher mentors
in schools. Allocation of teacher mentors is done by the school principals with little
consultation with the teaching institutions (Ligadu, Narotam, and Herrington 2005).
Therefore, as Hargreaves and Fullan (2000, 3) succinctly observe that for most of
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the time:

the reality in many schools today is that while assigned mentors know more about certain
areas such as school procedure or classroom management, the new teacher many sometimes
know more than the mentor about new teaching strategies. If the schools assume that the
mentor always knows best, even about teaching strategies, innovative teachers might quickly
experience the mentor relationship as an oppressive one.

Tensions may escalate if mentor teachers do not share in the new ideals of training
programs promulgated by the university. Preservice teachers on practicum have reported
that there is conflict between ideals and the reality that happens in schools. They often
complain that mentors expect them to simply ‘learn by observing’ and ‘doing what I do,’
and lack the sophisticated language to describe their professional practice in a way that is
required to mentor preservice teachers effectively (Goh and Matthews 2011). Teacher
educators should take heed toward Mule’s (2006) proposal which is to use ‘an inquiry-
based practicum with the goal of encouraging reflection by intern can lead to the
development of lifelong, self-directed learners’ (215). Allowing preservice teachers an
avenue to explore reflectively in a meaningful way their own experiences would help
promote independence and critical thinking necessary for the challenges both during the
practicum and as future in-service teachers. Self-reflection is also preservice teachers’
own assessment of the quality of their own teaching and can be considered a form of
feedback and evaluation to the supervising mentors of the preservice teachers’ strategies
and suggestions that are linked to pedagogy (Mule 2006). Preservice teachers will also be
better aware that although they will learn many useful things during their practicum, there
is still much that is to learn throughout their teaching profession.
Teacher educators have constantly been reminded that teaching is primarily learned on
the job and in school settings. For this particular teacher education university used as a point
of reference in the article, the amount of time preservice teachers undergo their practicum is
rather short, a one-off 14 weeks at the penultimate semester of their studies. Therefore, much
of the preservice teacher’s initial learning relies heavily upon their years in the teaching
institutions and outside the environment of actual work setting. They have very little contact,
if at all, with in-service teachers. Such conventional training is guilty of being detached from
the specific issues that schools now faces, and are unable to bridge preparation and practice
(Sykes, Bird, and Kennedy 2010). This paper argues that, although the teaching university
remains an important avenue to impart pedagogical theories and subject matter knowledge,
competency in teaching in the real world environment is job-specific, and so practical
 476 P.S.C. Goh and D. Blake

learning should be ‘on the job.’ One possible solution is to develop and situate teacher
preparation in the schools.

Change 3: developing and situating practices

Universities have been criticized as incapable, according to public perception
(Ramakrishnan 2014; Zachariah 2013), to change training to produce teachers who are
effective. Such mistrust among the public about the ability of the teacher institutions to
prepare competent teachers has become rather pervasive that the teacher institutions need
to heed their calls for change. Since learning to teach generally happens in actual work
setting, one possibility that should be seriously considered is to locate teacher preparation
to the schools, with the teacher institutions playing a supplementary role but working
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closely with the schools which now play the main role in preparing preservice teachers. In
such circumstances, new preservice teachers are immediately assimilated to the situation
that takes place in schools and work directly with new policies that are made by the state
districts for schools. But more importantly, these preservice teachers are now immersed in
the curriculum of practice.
Malaysia schools today present new challenges, with diverse students, policies,
changing curriculum, and conditions of work (sometimes difficult) that can influence the
performance of a teacher. If preservice teachers are cocooned within the institutions
without awareness of changing school circumstances, being confronted with difficult
situations during their one-off practicum can create stress that will impinge on their
competences. Beginning teachers have also voiced their difficulties assimilating to school
situations, and the anxiety and pressure have made some beginning teachers leave the
teaching profession (Goh and Wong 2014). Conventional training that is disassociated
from specific challenges and what is happening in schools may not be structurally
capable to close the gap between theories and practice (Sykes, Bird, and Kennedy 2010).
Nevertheless, university training is still relevant as it is better suited to provide training in
content-specific subjects and important foundations of teaching. However, the ‘art of
teaching,’ this paper argues, is still job-specific, and the practical aspects of teaching are
still embedded in the real environments of schools.
Such novel idea of situating training in schools will come with its own challenges.
Such bold change will involve the approval of the Ministry of Education, and even if
consent is given, the challenge of locating, supporting, and training in-service teachers to
take the responsibility of a teacher educator teaching in their classrooms can be immense.
Other practical challenges include the choosing of the schools to integrate with the
university. Some schools will be more competent than others to manage the integration,
and these organizational capabilities will reflect the present disparities of competences in
Malaysian schools. Alternatively, teacher preparation can be reimagined as an activity
that requires effective overlapping of the university and schools, with the possibility of
selected units that are ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ using site-based methods, that is teams of
teacher educators from the university working with teachers to deliver the units.
Coming back to the teacher education university of reference, it is therefore an
opportunity for it to help realize the national Education Blueprint’s aim of producing
quality teachers for the workforce where it models teacher preparation that is job-specific
and result-oriented. It needs to be bold to take the difficult challenge (ranging from
recruiting, sustaining, and integrating in-service teachers into programs of preparation)
toward developing, trying, and testing these new ways of preparing future teachers.
 Teaching in Higher Education 477

Concluding remark
The article attempts to present some changes that are needed to be made within a teacher
education university. Teacher education is still considered an important means of
professional development of new teacher, and strong links will always exist between
teacher education and with teaching in the schools (Cheng 2007). In a speech by the
Education Minister, Muhyiddin Mohd Yassin, he states that the Ministry of Education is
determined to implement programs and initiatives that enhance the quality of instruction
in our classrooms, and that learner must be provided with the opportunity to engage in
meaningful learning experiences that are challenging (Yassin 2013). But in order to
improve the teachers in schools, first, there must be concerted efforts toward improving
teacher education programs, so that that teacher education is able to connect future
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generation to the now-world (Hou 2009). Conventional teacher education is rightly the
place for acquiring knowledge and skills necessary in a teacher preparation program;
however, it can be accused of being stagnant and being inept to produce teachers who are
capable of moving beyond basic competence (knowledge and skills) toward teachers who
are creative and who are relevant to the real problems of classroom practices.
Three areas of concerns that have been raised in this article require Malaysian teacher
education programs to introduce changes and to reform traditional ideas. First, the article
argues that there is an absence of an initial teacher education curriculum that has greater
multicultural and indigenous sensitivity to better able to prepare teachers to teach in a
multiethnic classroom and to their understanding of the learning environments. It is
recognized that Malaysian classrooms are now becoming more diverse culturally, and that
the needs of some segments of the population especially the indigenous students have not
been adequately met. Second, the concern for the need of an enhanced practicum was
argued, and an enhanced practicum includes the need to overcome the traditional theory-
practice dichotomy and to have greater collaboration in deciding how to effectively
mentor preservice teachers. It is important to note that, apart from the personal stress and
misery that can inflict preservice teachers on practicum, they are also ultimately the ones
who will suffer the consequences of unpreparedness, tensions between teacher mentor
and trainee, and inadequate support during their practicum. Finally, the paper argues that
teacher preparation moves away from the conventional preparation found predominantly
in the world of universities to one that is situated within the schools or to one that has a
better balance in the university–school partnership, including the situation of key units to
be wholly embedded in schools, similar to what is happening in Australia’s teacher
education (Blake and Gallagher 2009). It does entail a rethinking of teacher education as
an activity that requires highly effective overlapping of school and university commu-
nities of practice.
The concerns facing teacher education in Malaysia discussed in this article are not
new and will endure, but effort to change within teacher education will not happen
without the willpower and determination to improve the effectiveness of preservice
preparation. It will also come with both suspicion and antagonism between the
universities, Ministries and its agencies, and the participating schools, but needful; else
the ultimate losers are the future teachers and their students as teacher preparation
institutes have somewhat lost their legitimacy to prepare effective teachers.
While there is a great need to make changes to the teacher education program, it can
only happen with great difficulty. Thus far, to the authors’ knowledge, the suggested
changes have not been integrated into a comprehensive strategy as yet by the Malaysian
 478 P.S.C. Goh and D. Blake

teacher education university used as an example in this article. Although this article
discusses some changes that are needed to be made within teacher education, it
understands that it will not automatically be the remedy to address the identified
concerns, but to envision innovation being made to the current system is indeed a step
closer to the realization of the aims of the Malaysian Education Blueprint. Britzman and
Dippo’s (2000) statement that ‘teacher education must always waiver between the poles
of hope for the future, that one’s effort in education can matter to the quality of lives
lived’ (33) do seem to echo Malaysian premier Najib’s vision of ‘A Promise of Hope.’

Acknowledgement
The first author is grateful to the Ministry of Education, Malaysia, for providing the Exploratory
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Research Grant Scheme that has enabled the authors to carry out the studies and writings to further
improve teacher education in Malaysia.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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