In-Service Training Management—A Case Study in Vietnam

In-service training is an integral part of an educational system as teachers always need to update their educational and professional knowledge for a more effective teaching delivery. Ensuring the effectiveness of the in-service training programmes is, however, very challenging. In this article, we introduce the use of the CIPO model, i.e., Context-Input-Process-Output, for in-service training management. We extend the classical CIPO model by integrating into it a quality assurance process. We conduct a case study in Vietnam over a sample of 163 teachers and develop an IT training course to demonstrate how the new model can be used in teacher training management. Finally, we discuss about the lessons learned and recommendations.


Problem Background
In-service training is part of the continuous professional development (CPD) for teachers and it plays a crucial role for the success of an educational system. The main purpose of in-service training is to provide opportunities for teachers to update their educational knowledge, professional skills, and to adapt to changes in the curriculum or educational policies. Therefore, teacher training is an important activity for schools around the world and this is especially true for developing countries like Vietnam, where there is a higher need to update the educational system to adapt to societal changes.
Recognising the importance of having in-service training and CPD for teachers, the Vietnamese government has invested significant efforts to run regular training programmes nationwide (Vietnam Ministry of Education, 2012;Vietnam Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, 2007). The current practice of teacher training in Vietnam, however, still has many drawbacks in terms of its effectiveness in meeting the needs of the teachers and in positively transforming the changes to the delivery to students. Currently, most of the in-service training activities are taken place through a hierarchical process where the national department of education provides guideline or training to representatives at provincial and regional departments of education before the representatives provide training to local teachers. The management of in-service training programmes is, therefore, rather challenging because this is often a coordinated activity between different management levels, from the national to regional departments of education to local schools and between different social stakeholders related to education.

Research Aims
In this work, we propose to develop a systematic model for in-service training management. The management of teacher training activities include managing the development of the training plans and programs, the implementation of the activities, and finally the inspection and evaluation of the outcomes. We show how the CIPO model can be used in teacher training management. In addition, we show how to extend the classical model to include quality assurance. We provide a case study to demonstrate the steps involved in the designing and conducting an IT training program to a sample of teachers in Ha Tinh, a province with a mixture of rural and urban towns in the central of Vietnam. Although the focus of this work is for in-service training in Vietnam, the extended CIPO model and the lessons learned from the case study could be applicable to other countries, especially those with a hierarchical management structure for teacher training.

In-Service Training for Teachers
The terms continuous professional development (CPD) is defined to include all activities related to the expanding and updating useful knowledge and skills to enhance a career performance (Lessing & Witt, 2007). CPD appears in all types of occupations. In education, the needs for in-service training has been analysed in details by Shaw (1995), whereby the importance of teacher training in England has been recognized since 1944. The main purposes for teacher training are both to meet the continuous changes from social needs and to improve the effectiveness of teachers in schools. Dean (1977) and Gaible and Burns (2005) emphasise that, although the subjects of professional development are the teachers, the ultimate beneficiaries are the students and it is important to evaluate how the training programmes affect practice in schools and classrooms. Gaible and Burns (2005) define teacher CPD as training programs for teachers to improve professional, pedagogical and technical skills. Occasionally, through these programs, radical educational requirements and policies from the higher levels are communicated to the teachers. The authors also emphasize that teacher training is a long-term and continuous process, and hence we have the terms 'in-service training' and 'continuous professional development'. Teacher career development includes not only courses to update knowledge but also other forms such as sharing teaching experiences (Gaible & Burns, 2005).
The importance of teacher training has been paid much attention in developed countries. In the UK, primary and secondary school teachers each have five days to foster themselves at school. These are called INSET days, where the acronym comes from the initials of the phrase 'in-service training'. According to Bradley, Conner and Southworth (1994), the INSET model of training dates back to 1978. On these days, students do not come to the school so that teachers and the school administration team and other staff can conduct the training programme. According to a survey conducted by Hustler, McNamara, Jarvis, Londra and Campbell [HMJLC] (2003), the main contents of a teacher training programme include planning to develop the curriculum (being allocated about 28% of the total training period), teaching methods (27%), professional knowledge (20%), and management issues (17%). There are also other contents such as helping students, the process of grading and returning exams etc. According to the authors, 71% of the time of the INSET programme is run by teachers and school administrators while 12% of these are from local officials. The participants might come from other schools, universities, and companies etc.

In-Service Training Effectiveness and Management
Recently, there have been a number of empirical studies on the effectiveness of in-service training programmes around the world. Ozer (2004) studies in-service education in Turkey and concludes that only a small number of teachers who have undertaken the programmes willingly. Ayvaz-Tuncel and Çobanoğlu (2018) conduct a descriptive study over 494 teachers who took the training. The authors make a rather strong conclusion that "in-service training did not make any contribution to some teachers and their personal development" and suggest that "more time and effort should be invested into the planning process". Uztosun (2018) studies feedbacks from teachers in Turkey on the effectiveness of in-service training programmes. The author provides a list of weaknesses emerging from these programmes and concludes that there is a lack of matching between the training contents and the teachers' needs. Sabri (1997) studies the effectiveness of the in-service teacher training programmes in Palestine and concludes that planning the lesson and setting the objectives are the most important factors for the success of a training programme. Nzarirwehi and Atuhumuze (2019) study in-service training effectiveness in Uganda and conclude that the benefits of the training "can only be realized when the training is properly planned, implemented and continually evaluated, and in the presence of certain resources and incentives." Omar (2014) also highlights the benefits of having in-service education in Malaysia and re-emphasise the importance of meeting the need of teachers. Haydn, Barton and Oliver (2008), in particular, suggests that more focuses should be placed on a bottom up approach where extra teacher-led activities are allocated to the teacher CPD. Shaw (1995) suggests that in order for in-service training to be effective, there must be a combination between regular trainings at school and training through external organizations. In-service training not only provides teachers with new knowledge and skill sets but also to allow all stakeholders including teachers and management staff to review the effectiveness of the teaching process, and to propose and implement further training. In the case the knowledge need updating and retraining must be acquired from outside, the school will invite outside organizations to guide. Hustler et al. (2003) argue that the design of the teacher CPD programme should be appropriate to the specific o this ). We ocess,

Finding the Demands and Contents of CPD Programs (Context & Input)
In terms of Context, there have been many documents confirming the goals and policies of the Vietnam National Department for Education on the need to improve the quality of teacher in-service training and to apply ICT in teaching (Vietnam Ministry of Education, 2012;Vietnam Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, 2007). In order to find out the most essential contents for the in-service training programme, we conduct a survey over the sample of all the teachers from six secondary schools in Ha Tinh (163 teachers in total). The teachers are asked to choose the most relevant training programme that they need; these include A) professional training on subjects such as Math, Physics ..., B) Training on occupational ethics, C) Training on teaching methodology, and D) Training on information technology. The survey results show that IT is the topic that the teachers need the most.
We then interview a random sample of teachers to understand the barrier for them concerning IT skills. It is quite surprise that many teachers are hesitant in using computers for preparing electronic teaching materials in Words or PowerPoint mainly because of their slow typing skills. Many believe that they are not using the right fingering techniques. The time taken to prepare lecture materials varies significantly from one teacher to another. On average, to prepare for a 45-minute lecture, some teachers take about 20 minutes, while some other takes more than 2 hours. Although this partly depends on the subject experience and the knowledge of the teacher, the main underlying reason for this is due to the variation on the IT skills and largely on the typing speed. In fact, older generation teachers often has a greater educational experience but still spend longer time preparing for teaching materials due to their inferior IT skills in general and typing in particular.

Designing and Conducting the Training Program and Evaluation of Outcome (Process & Output)
The survey and interviews led us to designing a mini typing course for the teachers and for us to put the remaining parts of the CIPO model into practice. The program selected is from https://www.typingstudy.com/en-vietnamese-3/, which has been used free-of-charge by people around the world. The course is available in over 100 combinations of keyboard settings and languages including Vietnamese. The program includes 15 lessons to practice typing skills. Each lesson includes online exercises and these are formative assessments. There is also a final exam of the course.
The mini IT course is taken by all the teachers, who are introduced to the typing course by the educational department and the schools' administration teams. Each teacher registers an account and participates in online theory and practice lessons. After each lesson, the teacher sends the practice results to the school administration and the educational department. The result will show the speed and accuracy of the teacher in using the characters on the keyboard. From there, the administrators and the education department can give specific formative feedbacks (for example, the aspects that teachers should practice more). The mini course includes a final test on the teachers' IT skill. The online test provides us with individual teacher's scores.
As teachers are taking the training courses in the same way as students are learning, we pay particular attention to the feedback mechanism, which can be classified into the two most important categories: formative and summative feedback (Biggs & Tang, 2007). The online exercises are viewed as formative assessments and teachers received constant feedback on their progress. The final test and results are considered as summative feedback. Black and William (1998) argue that there is strong evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards of achievements.
We also provide post-evaluation of the teachers' typing skills through surveys and interview. In addition to the typing skills, teachers report that the course provide them with more confidence to use computer for their educational purpose such as preparing for lecture notes or slides.

Discussion: Lessons learned and Recommendations
The first lesson that we have learned is on the importance of incorporating the teacher's need in designing in-service training programme. This reaffirms the finding from the literature including Sabri (1997), Nzarirwehi and Atuhumuze (2019), Omar (2014), Bozkurt et al. (2012) and Haydn, Barton, and Oliver (2008). We also find that conducting surveys and interviews can provide us with helpful information. For example, from the interview, we learn that many teachers expressed their barrier to using computer for preparing electronic teaching material because of their lack of confidence in typing despite the fact that most of them have received basic IT training certificates from universities or third parties in the past. This is due to an interesting fact that the importance of the typing skills was undermined in those past IT training programmes.
Second, we find that output management is important for in-service training activities because it is not only for the pure evaluation of the training results but also to monitor and evaluate the performance of each teacher and their career advancement. This also allows us to assess the quality and effectiveness of the training programmes and to ies.ccsenet.org International Education Studies Vol. 13, No. 10;2020 6 adjust the training process accordingly to meet teachers' needs and societal changes. In order to effectively manage the outputs, it is necessary for teachers to register the plan of applying the training results into practice. In our case, we ask teachers to apply what they learned (i.e., typing skills) into their daily work (i.e., preparing lecture materials).
Third, we re-emphasise the importance of incorporating the evaluation process into the training program. We also find that random assessment can be helpful where multiple level of management is involved in the process. The evaluation of in-service teaching activities involves assessing individual outcomes as well as comparing between the training results against the objectives and the criteria set out in the programme. Through inspection and evaluation, a reverse information channel can be created so that the management team can receive feedback to adjust the training programme as well as the training process to achieve further efficiency in the future.

Conclusion
In this paper, we introduce an extended CIPO model for managing the in-service training process for teachers. We demonstrate the model by designing a small IT training course and by describing the steps involved, from studying the context to understanding the real needs of the teachers to actually conducting the course. The extended CIPO model also incorporates the quality assurance during the process so that constant feedback and adjustments could be made. In the case there are multiple levels of management involved, random assessment can help enable cross-evaluation while reducing the cost. Finally, we conduct a mini IT training course in Vietnam over 163 teachers from six secondary schools in order to demonstrate the steps involved in the extended CIPO model. Lessons from running the course re-emphasise the crucial role to study the needs of the teachers while designing the training program and the importance of incorporating the quality assurance into in-service education. In the context of this article, we demonstrate use of the extended CIPO model in managing a mini IT training course for teachers; the framework and the lessons, however, can be applied to other in-service training contexts or general continuous professional development courses.