Page 156 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 6. General conclusions and discussion
the teachers were able to apply the design principles with the available means and in the available time. The use of modularity meant that there was no prescribed SpeakTeach method but opportunities to use the core of the approach, the three design principles, in a variety of ways. The results showed that 12 of the 13 teachers made full use of those opportunities for variation in order to tailor their teaching to their students. They used the three design principles to produce many different variants of SpeakTeach lessons.
It should be noted with regard to these findings that the analyses in chapters 3 and 5, which investigated the extent to which teachers implemented the design principles of the adaptive approach, were based on teachers’ data about their own design of the lesson series. In further research, teachers’ behaviour could be observed to find out how they implemented the teaching approach in their lessons. Furthermore, which feedback and activities the students actually received to improve their speaking performances was not investigated. Follow-up research examining teachers’ choices regarding the kind of feedback and the concrete provision of learning activities on the basis of the students’ plans, would provide more insight into how teachers tailor their feedback and activities to learners’ needs. In line with this, it would be interesting to investigate how to get the iterative process of self- evaluation followed by feedback and improvement activities to bring about an increasingly higher level of attainment of the speaking goals.
On the level of teachers, the principle of teacher self-evaluation was added to the Bridging Model in order to make the teachers’ professional development trajectory adaptive to their needs. An adaptive approach to professional development is being recommended which attunes to the goals and to the current situation of the teachers (Kennedy, 2016a; 2016b; Janssen et al., 2013), but it is acknowledged that it may be difficult to realize in the context of an innovation. In their model of adaptive expertise, Bransford and Darling Hammond (2005; 2007) suggest a stepwise progression that balances the development of routines and innovation, but they do not discuss how such a learning route can be achieved and supported in a development trajectory. Teacher self-evaluation lets the teachers reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of their existing teaching practice in relation to the proposed teaching approach. Reflection on practice has been widely accepted as an important ingredient in professional development trajectories (Marcos, Sanches & Tillema, 2011). However, the difference between this and other approaches is the combination of the design
154
152