Page 108 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 5. Perspective of the teachers – professional development Abstract
The study reported in this chapter investigated how teachers can be supported in expanding their teaching repertoire in the context of a specific innovation (the new adaptive teaching approach for speaking skills in foreign languages, described and investigated in the previous chapters). For teachers’ professional development it is important to take both teachers’ goals and their current teaching practice into account and to build on this existing teaching practice and provide steps which enable the incorporation of the new teaching proposal. In order to realize such a professional development trajectory, the design principle of modularity was used following other studies (Janssen, Grossman & Westbroek, 2015) and self-evaluation by the teacher was added as second design principle. An adaptive development trajectory was designed on the basis of these two interrelated design principles and we investigated whether adaptive learning routes could be realized within this development trajectory in which teachers could achieve both the goals of the innovation (the developed adaptive teaching approach for speaking skills in foreign languages) and their own objectives in a way that fitted in with and built on what they were already doing in their teaching practice. To this end, self-evaluations by the teachers (n=11) of their teaching practice were used to determine how they implemented the different procedures6 of the new teaching approach in consecutive lesson series and to describe their learning routes. In addition, an impact analysis (Janssen, Westbroek & Doyle, 2014a) was used to collect data about advantages and disadvantages of the regular teaching practice and lesson series based on the new teaching approach. The results showed that almost all teachers (10 out of 11) succeeded in expanding their teaching repertoire in line with the goals of the innovation and followed adaptive learning routes to their own satisfaction. We distinguished three different successful learning routes: builders who stayed close to their regular teaching practice and built stepwise on their routines towards a new teaching practice. Innovators with big steps back who experimented with new practices at the beginning and then took big steps back. A related group, innovators who refined, also
6 The adaptive teaching approach (the SpeakTeach method) consists of three design principles from the perspective of students (see chapters 3 and 4), and of two design principles from the perspective of the teacher. In this chapter, where the teacher’s perspective is central, we refer to the three design principles from the student perspective with procedures to avoid confusion. With design principles in this chapter we refer to the design principles from the perspective of the teachers: the use of modularity and self-evaluation by the teachers, because these were the design principles for tailoring the professional development trajectory to teachers’ goals and existing teaching practice.
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