Invitado/ Guest writer
Cathy Ellis
worked in Barcelona for many years as a teacher and teacher
trainer. For the last two years she has been working freelance in the UK,
Poland, Brazil and the Republic of Georgia. She is at present working as a
temporary trainer at Solihull College in the West Midlands.
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Working as I mostly have been in recent years on intensive teacher training programmes which transform laypeople into EFL teachers in four weeks flat, there hasn’t been much time to pay more than lip-service to teacher development - rather it’s a mad rush through lesson planning, observations, feedback and assignments until the trainees cross the finishing line in a flurry of nerves, excitement, exhaustion and paperwork. After that the candidates who by now we trainers have got to know well disappear into the vast world of English language teaching, sometimes without further trace, and as far as development goes we can only keep our fingers crossed and hope they end up in schools with some kind of in-service training and motivated colleagues.
But what exactly is Teacher Development? As Paul Davis pointed out a couple of years ago in the Pilgrims online magazine, the idea of development has only fairly recently been transferred from social work and therapy to the world of EFL and in some cases simply as a straight substitution for what used to be called teachers’ meetings or even training sessions. But teacher development is more than just being observed by your Director of Studies or someone in a similar position of higher status (which can be with other ends in mind than your professional development) or more than gathering, say, five new ideas for using songs, essential as this kind of information is, especially but not exclusively when you are a novice teacher (and from my own experience of conference sessions, a few new practical classroom ideas always go down well at all levels).
I looked up “develop” in the dictionary and found this - “to expand or realise the potentialities of; bring gradually to a fuller, greater or better state”. Heady stuff! Or as Adrian Underhill puts it in Head and Taylor’s “Readings in Teacher Development”, developing awareness is a process of reducing discrepancy between what we do and what we think we do. He outlines four stages of development:
Unconscious incompetence - I am not aware of something I am not doing well
Conscious incompetence - I become aware of doing something in a way that is not what I want
Conscious competence - I find that I can do this thing in a better way as long as I keep my attention on it
and finally....Unconscious competence - This becomes natural, leaving my attention free for something else.
Stage two is the most uncomfortable one and the one I’m sure many trainees feel as they become more aware of what they could be doing, but also aware that they aren’t yet able to do it, but it applies equally to experienced teachers examining their own classroom practice. As Bozana Knezedvic puts it in a recent article on Action Research, “This stage also involves reflection, an inner dialogue and a desire to do something differently.”
When I think back to my own early days in teaching, I spun off the carousel of my initial training course into a 25 hour a week timetable at a language school in Bilbao and the prospect of seven different levels a week, plus living in a culture that was new to me and with a language on which I had only a tenuous grasp. My first year’s teaching at least was a breathless race to keep up with planning and lessons followed by late nights recovering in the local bars, conveniently placed on the lower floors of the same building as the school. It was quite some time before I was able to stand back from what I was doing and think about how I was developing as a teacher. I’m sure if I were to have in front of me my sketchy lesson plans from that era or a video of one of my classes (should such a thing exist), they wouldn’t bear much resemblance to what I now do in the classroom and if they did, no doubt I would have dropped out of teaching years ago from sheer boredom and lack of motivation.
So what has helped me “develop” ? Well, I suppose it could be summarised as reading, talking, listening, observing (both myself and others) and experimenting. Reading - no shortage of material here. Taking part in the RSA/Cambridge DTEFLA (now DELTA) gave me access to more methodology books and also the time to read them (!) and talk to fellow participants and tutors about current classroom practice and its methodological basis. And since then, reading journals and articles, going to conferences, keeping up to date with recent developments like the lexical approach, task-based learning, using the Internet.....Talking and listening - talking to colleagues about their classes and their ideas, and to students about my classes with them and how they felt about learning English and listening to what they had to say - not that I always agreed with it, or could adapt myself to their suggestions. When a colleague substituted for me in one of my classes and, according to my students, spent most of the lesson perched on a desk pretending to be a parrot, it was another lesson in learning that you can only aim to be the best teacher you can be within your own, shall we say, limitations although that word has too many negative connotations. Observing - observing fellow trainees on training courses and being observed myself with the subsequent feedback, not always a comfortable experience but a fruitful one. And finally experimenting - usually in the privacy of my own classroom!
The obverse of teacher development is, I suppose, teacher ....stagnation? By this, I don’t mean taking a lesson plan from last year’s file and using it with this year’s class with minimum preparation time - we all need to do this to cope with busy lives and full timetables. But I do mean taking that lesson plan and “executing” it over and over again without adapting it in response firstly to what happens inside the classroom, gauging student reaction to it and making changes, and secondly to what is happening outside the classroom - debates about the value of long-standing practices, such as the teaching of grammar on a one sentence, no context basis, or on how to approach the reading skill.
Developing as teachers is what keeps us interested and motivated, ready to question our own classroom practice and to try out new ideas. Being motivated ourselves helps our students to be motivated. And the students themselves and their needs are also changing - teacher development helps us to keep abreast of these needs and to adapt our teaching accordingly.
In fact as Jim Scrivener says in “Learning Teaching” - “In order to improve the quality of our relationships in the classroom we do not need to learn new techniques; we need to look closely at what we really want for our students, how we really feel about them. It is our attitude and intentions rather than our methodology that we may need to work on.”
Some Practical Ideas for Your Own Teacher Development
If you're in a situation where you can arrange it, why not try to team up with a colleague for some peer observation? Observing someone else's class doesn't mean you have to go in for heavy feedback and criticism afterwards and refuse to speak to each other for the rest of the term - the post class chat can be an "alternative" model, that is you give alternative suggestions for activities the teacher has done, not in the spirit of "I can do it better", but rather "This is a way of doing it differently – why not try it?" Alternatively, you can plan the class together as an amalgam of two people's ideas - then feedback on how well your plan went, rather then on "teacher performance". Or identify a problem area and ask the other teacher to give you feedback on it and suggest alternative courses of action.
Peer observation can be
problematic when timetables don't allow for it – so in this case, you could swap
groups for one lesson and teach your colleague's lesson plan to their students. Or swap
plans for a class at the same level - teach your class but with another teacher's lesson
plan and then feedback on it together and
suggest modifications.
Get some student feedback
with student questionnaires - ask your students to comment on the different activities
you've done during a class – this doesn't have to be a lengthy process, just provide
a list of the activities and a choice of, say, three "faces" - a smiley one, a
frowning one and one in between - students could write just a sentence enlarging on their
opinion, or suggest an alternative activity. Or if this seems too threatening, why not
experiment with just one activity you've never done before and ask for feedback on that,
rather than risk discovering that students don't like your favourite activities that
you've been doing all
year!
Another simpler idea is just
to change the order of your activities and see what happens!
Write yourself a list of "rules" about one area of teaching - eg: with free
speaking activities, "Never correct students during fluency activities", or with
listening activities "Always pre-teach problematic vocabulary" – then break
the rules and again, see what happens!
Take out a subscription to a journal - "English Teaching Professional" is a good start, full of practical ideas and theoretical background - or get hold of a recent book on, for example, teaching grammar - "How to Teach Grammar" (good title!) by Scott Thornbury is again a good mix of theory and practice.
Take a piece of material and brainstorm ideas with a colleague on activities to use with it.
Take a blank tape into the
classroom and tape yourself "in action". Play it back - maybe make a transcript
of sections of it - do you think you're talking too much? Do you give students time to
answer your questions? Do you let some of them dominate too much? What kind of questions
do you ask them? Would rephrasing them get more response?
Cathy Ellis, Spring, 2001.
We would be interested to know if you try out any of these activities, and,
if so, what the results are. Drop us a line at forum@atlanticls.com