‘Article Notes’ is a set of blog posts in which I write down my notes about articles that I read. These notes are not meant to be ‘academic’ or ‘formal’; rather, they are my ramblings and immediate thoughts in reaction to the content I read. I’ve written them up to help me remember the article, and to share my thoughts with those who are interested. I welcome your feedback and comments!
Reading Room 3
So, after a longer-than-expected hiatus, Anna Hasper and I are back running the Reading Room (see Reading Room 1 and Reading Room 2 if you’re interested about the previous articles we read). This time we decided to read and talk about Karen Johnson and Paula Golombek’s article Informing and transforming language teacher education pedagogy. We chose this article because it was a favourite of ours and we thought Johnson and Golombek’s perspective on Language Teacher Education (LTE) was worth exploring further. There were four of us in this Reading Room, which was a good number actually – we all had plenty of time to share our thoughts, ask questions, etc. As usual, in this blog post I’ll go over some of the pre-reading questions that I created, summarise the main points from the article, and discuss some of the most interesting points raised in the Reading Room.
Pre-reading questions
In what ways can teacher educators support or mediate teacher learning?
This is an interesting question because I feel that there are a million different ways, and many of them are context-sensitive. I also think that depending on the teacher you are working with, your approach to mediating teacher learning or providing support will change. Let’s look at an example from my context.
I work with a small group of teachers, but I’d like to focus on two of them. The names of teachers have been changed. Harry is a teacher who has been teaching for about seven years, and almost three of those in my academy. He is one of our Senior Teachers, and as such I have certain expectations of him. I also know the training and development he has undertaken, his strong and weak points, and how his current goals link to previous and future learning. Amalia, on the other hand, is an early-career teacher who has been teaching for about a year and a half. She holds a Master’s in TESOL, and so has a lot of knowledge about teaching. This is the first year that I am working with her.
So, what changes between working with these teachers? Some of the things that I feel are different include:
- Expectations: I expect that Harry will be able to deal with most issues in and out of the classroom with relative ease because he has been through those situations numerous times, and has developed significantly in certain areas. My expectations regarding Amalia, on the other hand, are much lower in the sense that I expect her to have issues that many early-career teachers go through. This is not always the case, of course (in both the case of Harry and Amalia actually), but these expectation do help me prepare and ‘prompt’ teachers in our coaching sessions.
- Explicit support: Harry requires much less explicit support now compared to Amalia. This is natural – early-career teachers often face many difficulties that require teacher educators to take more of an explicit approach to support (some might call this a directive approach). The support I provide to Harry, on the other hand, my be less explicit and take the form of exploratory questions.
These are of course two small examples – and they have been fairly simplified.
How much of an influence do you feel the context within which teacher learning occurs has on teacher learning?
In short, a huge influence. I’ve worked in contexts where there really was no ‘development ethos’ established, and no money was invested in identifying and developing bottom-up (i.e., from teachers) needs. The consequences? Well, I feel that this context had a lot of teachers who didn’t view their job very positively which in turn most likely impacted their job satisfaction and teaching (and this of course has a knock-on effect for learning). I also feel that that teaching team had so much potential, but because teachers weren’t supported, and didn’t see other teachers explicitly engaging in development, there were many missed development opportunities.
How do you feel the roles of pre-service and in-service teacher education differ? What implications do these differences have for teacher education?
Not having worked on pre-service courses before, I can’t speak from personal experience. However, I have been part of pre-service courses, and have examined them from an outsider perspective (e.g., through reading course overviews, speaking with pre-service trainers, etc.). I also have been part of a significant number of in-service training programmes. So, what differences have I identified? There are many of course, but let’s analyse on that I feel is particularly important.
- Goals of participants: In general, participants on pre-service courses have their sights set on entering the teaching sector (private or public), whereas with in-service courses, teacher goals very significantly. For example, I know that many teachers would like to further their job prospects, so they engage heavily with in-service development. Others, however, are happier with where they are and as such they don’t feel the need to push themselves. The implication here? For pre-service courses, the trainer needs to be adept at providing the support and modelling that participants who may have next to zero experience with teaching need. For in-service courses, trainers need to be aware of these goals and adjust their approaches to working with each teacher – some will need more support, some will want less ‘guidance’, some will feel negative toward development and as such will require ‘space’, etc.
Summary of the article
Normally, I would write my own summary, but I want to raise awareness of this brilliant AI tool: SciSummary. Basically, you can upload an article and it will give you a short, medium or long summary of the text. Why is this important? Well, I’ve been reading academic articles for many years now and I still find some of them difficult to understand – and some of them downright boring or poorly written. If at times I struggle, how can I expect my teachers to engage with academic research articles? If we would like teachers to engage more with academic research, they need to have the right tools and this might be something that can help bridge the research-practice gap at the practitioner level. Anyway, enough blabbering from me – here is the summary from SciSummary:
The paper discusses the evolving landscape of language teacher education (LTE) and the importance of greater attention to LTE pedagogy. It highlights the shifts in LTE programs in different sociocultural, educational, and institutional contexts and the implications for the preparation of English language teachers. The authors argue that LTE pedagogy, informed by a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective, is critical in meeting the needs of current and future English language teachers in an increasingly diverse, mobile, unequal, and globalised world. The paper offers eight interrelated propositions that constitute LTE pedagogy as a central domain for the knowledge-base of LTE. It emphasises the significance of documenting and analysing LTE pedagogy in shaping the professional development of language teachers and the accountability of teacher educators in this domain. The paper underscores the challenges and complexities associated with enacting these propositions in the real-world context of language teaching.
The propositions
Ok, so I’m not going to leave it there – we do need to go a little deeper 🙂 As you’ve read, Johnson and Golombek (2020) put forward their eight propositions. Let’s briefly explore these now.
“As a result, teacher educators must create locally appropriate
Johnson and Golombek, 2020, p.120
professional development opportunities, practices, and resources that are socially, culturally, historically, and institutionally situated in and responsive to teachers’, students’, and community needs.”
- LTE pedagogy must be located: In short, what we do needs to be right for the context in which we are training. We need to be aware of the histories of the people taking part in the training, and be aware of how the local context impacts how training occurs, how teaching unfolds, etc.
- LTE pedagogy must recognise who the teacher is and who teacher wishes to become: Here we start to explore the idea of teacher identity, and the authors emphasise the one of our roles as teacher educators is to help teachers “adopt, try out, and develop” (Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p.121) difference identities.
- LTE pedagogy must be intentional and goal-directed: these intentions and goals must be made explicit: So, from this I take that as teacher educators we need to be transparent and communicate the ‘why’ of what we are doing. The authors also talk about the idea of “unpacking” (Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p. 121) what we as teacher educators have internalised so that we can use what we’ve unpacked with teachers, and so that we can also continually develop. In this sense, LTE is a two-way learning process.
- LTE pedagogy must create opportunities to externalise everyday concepts while internalising relevant academic concepts through authentic, goal-directed activities of teaching: So, here the authors talk about teachers coming to LTE programmes with “a lifetime of schooling experiences as students” (Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p.122). In effect, they are referring to what Lortie (1975) labelled The apprenticeship of observation. What does this mean for teacher educators? Well, we need to help teachers bring these implicit beliefs about teaching to the surface so that they can be analysed explicitly – this will then help teachers change their beliefs about teaching (or see where they are going right/wrong, etc.).
- LTE pedagogy must contain structured mediational spaces where teachers are encouraged to play/step into being and becoming a teacher: Here the authors are emphasising that teacher educators need to take on a mediating role. That is, help teachers progress to and through their upper limits of development through dialogic interactions, modelling, and making explicit our own expertise.
- LTE pedagogy must involve expert mediation that is responsive to teachers’ immediate and future needs: “Responsive mediation requires that teacher educators focus on the particulars embedded in teachers’ current instructional context, including the challenges, tensions, and joys the teachers are experiencing” (Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p.124). I view this as a mix of differentiation with teachers (focusing not only ‘skills’, but also the affective domain) as well as guiding teachers through reflection activities.
- LTE pedagogy must have a self-inquiry dimension, involving teacher educators and teachers working together or by themselves, in which they seek to trace teacher professional development as it unfolds over time and place: Here we start to look at the idea of narrative inquiry – exploring the stories of teachers, and looking at how they have evolved over time. This is a much deeper level of reflection, in my opinion.
- LTE pedagogy must demonstrate a relationship of influence between teacher professional development (as a result of LTE pedagogies) and student learning: In short, we need to be able to see an impact on student learning as a result of training and development practices that we engage in.
Our responses
In general, we all held quite positive views towards what was put forward in the article. I think it’s quite clear why all of what is mentioned above is ‘good’ for LTE pedagogy. With this in mind, I’d like to summarise some of the more critical points or questions we had.
- Are these propositions too idealistic? The group in this Reading Room came from varied teacher education backgrounds and contexts. We all recognised, however, that ensuring all of these propositions are ‘applied’ in all contexts might actually be unrealistic. For example, is it possible to be aware of all of the ‘histories’ of all participants on pre-service courses? And is it possible to be able to cater to all their future contextual needs, considering some of them my go on to teach in higher education, while others in private academies or schools in low-resource areas? Perhaps, however, it’s good to have the ‘ideals’ that we should be aiming for, and these propositions can act as an evaluative tool. What do you think?
“Within these structured meditational spaces, teacher educators should identify the upper levels of teachers’ potential (i.e. zone of proximal development) as teachers attempt to enact their teaching activities in ways that are beyond their current levels of competence and comfort.”
Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p.123
- Is it possible to identify the upper levels of teachers’ potential? I suppose this is an extension of our previous point, and connects with the idea of ‘achievability’. Can we as trainers really identify the upper levels of teachers and help them progress to the next ‘level’? Myself, I feel this is possible when teacher educators work with the same teachers over many years and relationships are built, experiences are had, etc. What about pre-service courses, though? Or short in-service courses? Is this realistic? I think many teacher educators on this courses have pre-conceived notions of what the upper limit is, and this is a pragmatic choice, because if they have to work with the upper limits of every teacher then it becomes a gargantuan task. Perhaps we are reading too much into the proposition though – I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
“In most L2 teacher education programs, teachers do have opportunities to learn the academic concepts that represent the systematic generalised knowledge that has emerged from theory and research of their subject matter (i.e. knowledge about language, second language acquisition, multi-literacies, etc.), however more often than not these academic concepts are not linked to the day-to-day activities of teaching/learning in L2 classrooms?”
Johnson & Golombek, 2020, p.122
- SLA is not linked to the everyday activities of language teachers? This was a point that I disagreed with wholeheartedly. I know that the author elsewhere have argued that certain academic knowledge about teaching is not necessary for teachers, and other writers have been quite critical of this perspective (e.g., Geoff Jordan and Mike Long offer a brilliant critique of all that is wrong about a socio-cultural approach to teacher education in their brilliant book English Teaching Now and How it Could Be). In our discussion, we all agreed that certain knowledge about how language are learnt is in fact very important for teachers, especially as they develop. The delivery of this knowledge, however, is what needs to be focused on. One of members of our reading room, Jasmin, told us about how Danny Norrington-Davies has been raising teacher awareness of SLA findings on pre-service courses through the use of snippets. This is, in my mind, an excellent start – and should be continued throughout a teacher’s career. I don’t think teachers need to be experts on SLA; however, I do believe that teachers need to have an understanding of the basics of SLA – things that we’ve known for a good 40 years! Things like the importance of negotiation of meaning, how vocabulary is acquired, why focus-on-form is important, etc. In short, this was one of the parts of the article that most of us disagreed with to a certain extent.
- Hard to see what the authors mean with examples: What would have made this article stronger in our opinion would have been the inclusion of examples for each of the propositions. These could have been in the form of vignettes, or even links to articles that exemplified what the authors were talking about.
Final notes
This article is a must-read in my opinion. Even though we were quite critical of certain points, I do believe that the propositions put forward are really quite good and something to ‘aim’ for in LTE programmes. This being said, being critical of the article actually raised some interesting points for all of us, and, at least for me, led to a much greater understanding of the concepts put forward in the article. One thing that I’m extremely grateful for with these Reading Rooms is the opportunities that I’m provided with to see other very experienced teacher educators engage with LTE research and texts. This in itself is helping me become more critical, and is helping me see many other perspectives. Basically, I’m saying you should all get involved in Reading Rooms!
References
Lortie, D. (1975). School Teacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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