Abstract—Teacher education provides the initial step in the professional development of preservice teachers introducing them to new viewpoints while providing them with information and skills. This knowledge is but not limited to subject and pedagogical content knowledge that form the basis of quality teaching. However, studies have seldom evaluated the effectiveness of teacher education in producing more skilled and thoughtful teachers. This study examines preservice teachers’ opinions about the effectiveness of their initial training and how it affects their self-efficacy. Using semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions, data was gathered from ten preservice teachers purposively selected for the study. The results showed that the effectiveness of teacher education depends on the strength of micro-teaching, good supervision; pedagogical content; and ability to manage classrooms. Consequently, the study highlights deficiencies in teacher education resulting from the following: teaching practice as a component of teacher education was too short to give them time to practice; their mentors did not allow them to practice most of the time, allowance to teach teaching subjects, they are sometimes misused by their mentors in that they do a lot of their work; they are forced to take several courses of which when they fail,  due to clashing time-tables they have to repeat courses; they miss tests, lack of pedagogy by some of their lecturers. This implies that even though teacher education is significant in developing preservice teachers’ professionalism, it can highly decrease their efficacy. Providing effective teacher education to preservice teachers prolongs their stay in the teaching profession. 
 

Keywords—micro-teaching, inadequate training, teaching practice, mentors, self-efficacy, pedagogical content knowledge, teacher education

Cite: Mamosa Thaanyane and Thuthukile Jita, "Examining the Effectiveness of Teacher Education in the Lesotho Context: Implications on Teachers’ Efficacy," International Journal of Learning and Teaching, Vol. 10, No. 5, pp. 631-636, 2024.

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