Reflective Practice in ESL Teacher Development Groups

From Practices to Principles

T. Farrell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230292550
• eBook ISBN: 9781137317193
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Formación del profesorado

Reflective Practice in ESL Teacher Development Groups discusses the concept of reflective practice in ESL teachers using data from a 3-year collaborative partnership in which three ESL teachers in Canada explored their professional development through reflective practice.

1

Professional Development

Introduction

For many experienced teachers professional development invokes mixed feelings of hours or days spent at workshops, in-service courses experienced as part of (the usually mandated) professional development they are required to do at certain point in their careers. One of the reasons for the negative feelings that teachers experience with some professional development courses is because they have usually been mandated by the administration and the topics of these courses have also been decided by the same administrators. Many times, the teachers who are in the front lines of these institutions have not been consulted and as a result do not have any real commitment beyond attending. This type of professional development has often been called top-down professional development because it comes from above by the administrator, and its opposite if bottom-up professional development. Bottom-up professional development comes from below in that teachers are consulted and many times decide how and what they want to develop (Richards and Farrell, 2005). This bottom-up approach sees teachers are voluntary attendees and engage in professional development because they want to reflect on their practice in order to better serve their students. Teachers who engage in such professional development must also realize that to be successful they must also consider where they are in their overall career development or where they and what stage they are at on the teacher career cycle because teachers have different needs as they progress through the different career stages. This chapter discusses professional development for language teachers. This discussion includes the important concept of teachers’ career cycles and the various stages and issues that teachers can experienced during the different stages they go through in their careers. The mid-career years are especially highlighted because of the main focus of the three experienced mid-career ESL teachers discussed throughout this book. The chapter then highlights the importance of language teachers of conducting their professional development through reflective practice.

Professional development

There are many reasons for teachers to seek professional two of which concern teachers at different stages of their teaching career cycles: novice teachers who have just qualified and teachers in their mid-careers. For novice teachers even though they have just qualified after taking their initial teacher education programs there is now increasing realization by language teacher educators that their teacher learning and developing has only just begun. Many ELT scholars consider that the ever-expanding knowledge-base of second language teacher education cannot always be accounted for in these initial teacher education programs, and so teachers will need to consider professional development throughout their careers. So the first reason for teachers in their early career years to immediately consider their professional development is that they may not have in fact acquired all they need to know in their teacher education courses. In fact, there is still no agreement as to what should be offered in such programs, or how long such programs should be.

Another reason for teachers to consider development is that after years in the classroom they may need to reflect on their working principles and see where these have come from and how they have been shaped over the years. This type of development is especially important for teachers in their mid-career years because they have accumulated lots of various kinds of educational experiences and as such may need time to step back to consider their own personal professional development. Indeed, from the point of view of the teacher’s personal development Richards and Farrell (2005: 9–10) maintain that a number of areas of personal professional development can be considered by teachers throughout their careers such as:

•Subject-matter knowledge: Increasing knowledge of the disciplinary basis of TESOL—that is, English grammar, discourse analysis, phonology, testing, second language acquisition research, methodology, curriculum development and the other areas which define the professional knowledge-base of language teaching.

•Pedagogical expertise: Mastery of new areas of teaching; adding to one’s repertoire of teaching specializations; improving ability to teach different skill areas to learners of different ages and backgrounds

•Self-awareness: Knowledge of oneself as a teacher, of one’s principles and values, strengths and weakness

•Understanding of learners: Deepening understanding of learners, learning styles, learners’ problems and difficulties, ways of making content more accessible to learners

•Understanding of curriculum and materials: Deepening one’s understanding of curriculum and curriculum alternatives, use and development of instructional materials

•Career advancement: Acquisition of the knowledge and expertise necessary for personal advancement and promotion, including supervisory and mentoring skills

So there are growing calls within the ELT profession for language teachers to regularly revisit what they know and what they think they know about teaching and learning and thus pursue various forms of professional development throughout their careers. Some of this professional development will be mandatory and delivered in a top-down manner while others types of professional development will be voluntary and undertaken by individual teachers in a bottom-up manner throughout their teacher career cycles (see below for more on career cycles).But what is professional development?

The term “professional development” has created a lot of discussion over the past 30 years in general education circles and there is still controversy as to its exact meaning. Much of the controversy surrounds the definition of development, what constitutes development and indeed, what teachers indent to obtain from development. For example, teacher development initiatives introduced before the 1990s were very linear in nature suggesting that teachers ‘develop’ in clearly defined, and fixed steps. It was suggested that teachers proceed through stages of development, and as Burden (1990) noted, transitions between stages were frequently viewed as relatively irreversible. However, Bell and Gilbert (1994: 311) opposed this view of teacher development and maintained that teacher development is in fact teachers learning about and “developing their beliefs and ideas, developing their classroom practice, and attending to their feelings associated with changing.” They said that teachers in development are actually learning about how they learn themselves. Furthermore, Bell and Gilbert (1994) suggested that the purpose of such an approach to teacher development is to empower teachers for ongoing and continuous development, rather than passing through any fixed steps or stages.

Reflective questions

•What does professional development mean to you?

•Do you think teachers follow defined stages or phases in their careers?

•Before reading about teacher career cycles below, what stage or phase of your career do you think you are in now and why?

•Describe your particular phase or stage?

•Have you ever felt that you have plateaued yet or gone a little stale in your teaching career?

•If yes, describe your feelings and what you think has lead up to these feelings.

Regardless of which definition of teacher development one adheres to, Burden (1990) maintains that in order to understand teacher development, it is important to understand the interaction of physical, psychological, and social aspects of human development. In other words, teacher development should be included in the broader context of adult development. Early recognition of the relationship between adult development and teacher development came from Sprinthall and Thies-Sprinthall (1980) and Burden (1990). Sprinthall and Thies-Sprinthall (1980) for example, asserted that consideration in any training model (however, see below for definition of “training” as opposed to “development”) of teachers should be given to the teacher as adult learner. Also, Burden (1990: 325) pointed out that when designing programs to promote teacher development, “it is important to recognize how adults learn, how they prefer to learn, and what they want to learn.” However, more recently, Cooper and Boyd (1998: 58–59) have maintained that traditional models of staff development often ignore principles of adult learning, where adult development is linked to their self-worth and efficacy. They suggest that adults in such a program learn through active involvement following such principles as:

1.Opportunities to try out new practice and be self-directed in the learning process.

2.Careful and continuous guided reflection and discussion about proposed changes and time to analyze one’s own experience, since experience is the richest source of adult learning.

3.Personal support for participants during the change process.

4.Provisions for differences in style, time, and pace of learning.

Reflective questions

•Why do you think staff development (in-service) programs tend to ignore principles of adult learning outlined above?

•When taking an adult learning approach to teacher development, which methods and procedures should be made available to teachers in an in-service program?

It is important at this juncture to emphasize that different terms such as teacher education, training and development have different meanings and involve different emphasizes for teachers. For example, the terms training, preparation, education, and development have been used very loosely in the literature when discussing the preparation and development of teachers for the classroom (Lange, 1990). Lange (1990) suggests that he first two are somewhat unsatisfactory because he says ‘preparation’ suggests an idea of supplying future teachers’ needs before they really begin their work but this does not necessarily suggest helping them to continue their development throughout their whole careers. In addition, Lange (1990) maintains that the term “training” suggests a misleading sense of completeness in the preparation of teachers whereas as the term “development” connotes more of a continuance. In second language education the term “development” suggests that teachers be prepared to be able to make their own informed decisions about teaching well beyond the initial teacher education course (Richards and Farrell, 2005).

Training

It is important to note that when teacher educators put an emphasis on training, they are looking for learner teachers to be able to isolate, practice, and eventually master discrete teaching behaviors such as teacher talk, wait time, and use of questioning techniques. As Freeman (1982: 21) notes, in such training approach “the teacher learns to teach the same way as I learn to ride a bicycle.” Wallace (1991) has called the training approach the “craft model” of teaching in which the master teacher tells the students what to do, and shows them how to do it, with the students imitating it exactly. Within this craft model of teaching, the teacher educator’s role will be that of direct intervention to transmit the required, “correct” knowledge and skills to the dependent pre-service teacher. Some teachers, especially inexperienced, pre-service teachers, like this approach because of their own insecurity; they see supervisors as authority figures and looks to them for security and advice. For in-service teachers, a training approach would assume that supervisors/leaders would know (experts) what good teaching is and participating teachers would have to change their teaching behavior to meet the expectations of the supervisors/leaders. However, a training view of teaching leaves second language education at the level of knowledge and skill; knowledge in the form of what is being taught, to whom and where; skill, the basic component, in what to do in the classroom (give instructions, present materials). The training model is also limited by the fact that we still do not know exactly what the cause–effect of teaching to learning outcomes is; not enough is known about how teaching behaviors result in student learning.

Development

In the 1990s within the second language teacher education literature there was a move away from a training approach to a development approach. Although we can talk about the craft of teaching, such as checking attendance, we cannot really say exactly what the “art” of teaching entails. However, a developmental view of teaching recognizes this “art” aspect of teaching as well as the craft of teaching, recognizing professional development as a continual intellectual, experiential, and attitudinal growth of teachers. In this approach, the role of teacher educators, supervisors, and workshop leaders changes from a prescriptive type leadership (training) to providing opportunities for teachers to participate in a variety of activities (Farrell, 2013). These opportunities can be subsumed under a reflective practice approach to teacher development. This bottom-up approach to teacher development involves a reflective analysis of a teacher’s practices and will be the main focus of the contents of this book. Reflection in this approach is viewed as a process whereby teachers examine their beliefs and practices about teaching and learning so that they can better understand these beliefs and practices.

Thus because of the expanding knowledge-base of second language teaching, it has been suggested that language teachers today are more in need of some sort of professional development not because they have been inadequately trained but as Richards and Farrell (2005) have suggested, because they cannot possibly be taught everything they need to know at the pre-service level of training and education. Indeed, it is also a given now that language tea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: From Practices to Principles
• 1  Professional Development
• 2  Reflective Practice
• 3  Reflection through Discussion
• 4  Reflection through Writing
• 5  Reflection on Teachers’ Beliefs
• 6  Reflection on Teachers’ Roles
• 7  Reflection on Critical Incidents
• 8  Resisting Plateauing through Teacher Reflection Groups
• 9  Developing Teacher Expertise
• Final Reflections: Professional Self-Development
• References
• Index