An Evaluation of a Teacher Training Program in Drug Education: Results and Implications

Abstract

This paper describes an intensive training program in drug education for teachers, presents an evaluation of the program, and discusses the results in terms of the implications for future drug education programs. The major goal of the training program was to positively affect the teacher-student interaction concerning drugs by training the teacher in each aspect of the interaction, facilitating the teacher's awareness of his own drug attitudes and interpersonal style, developing insight into the psycho-social context of student drug usage, and providing accurate information about the pharmacological effects of drugs. Evaluation of the program was made with survey instruments administered on the first and last days of the three-week training course. The instrument consisted of items designed to assess demographic characteristics; training course expectations; attitudes about the educational process, drug usage, and controversial aspects of the current youth scene; drug knowledge; and the evaluation of specific aspects of the course. Although pre-post differences were relatively small and were not statistically significant, drug knowledge showed a substantial increase, and attitudes about drugs and drug users became less negative and more nonjudgmental. Attitudes about the educational process and feelings about youth essentially remained at the same level. An overwhelming majority of teachers felt that the training course had provided valuable results for them and that they would be better teachers as a result. There is little evidence, however, for any major attitude change in the manner they perceived drugs and the drug user from a philosophical and moralistic viewpoint.

It is important to reexamine the administrative goals of drug education programs, the process of selectively recruiting drug education staff, and inservice training strategies. An appropriate goal may be the facilitation of an awareness among students of their own motivations for using drugs and the development of a more intelligent decision-making process about drug usage. It appears from the training course data that those teachers with less traditional attitudes about education and/or less negative attitudes about the current youth scene tended also to have a less negative and judgmental attitudes about drugs and drug users and may thus be able to more easily establish good rapport with young people. Finally, the public school administration should treat drug education as a specialized subject area, and implement a selection process to identify those teachers who have the most likelihood of successfully achieving program goals. For this staff, inservice training might focus on the communication process, on the dynamics of value clarification, and on the adoption of effective interpersonal skills, in addition to more factual material.