Page 109 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

experimented directly with new practices, but did not take big steps back afterwards. Instead they consolidated and refined the application of the procedures of the new teaching approach.
5.1 Introduction
Educational innovation has been strongly linked to teachers’ professional development (Borko, Jacobs & Koellner, 2010; Kennedy, 2016a). There is agreement in this context regarding features of professional development that are effective in improving teaching practice: the content should be situated in practice; it should be focused on students’ thinking and learning; innovative practices should be modelled and coached; and teachers should be actively and corroboratively engaged in professional learning communities (Borko et al., 2010).
In addition to these effective features, it is increasingly recommended that teachers’ professional development be approached adaptively. In line with the assumption that students learn better when education is tailored to their learning needs (Corno, 2008; Van de Pol, Volman & Beishuizen, 2011), it is important to attune to the teachers’ goals and to their current situation (e.g. Kennedy, 2016a; 2016b; Janssen, Westbroek, Doyle, & Van Driel, 2013).
In the context of an innovation, however, it is difficult to realize adaptive learning routes. In this case a desired direction for professional development had already been determined and in general the purpose was to encourage teachers to expand their teaching repertoire by following a specific innovative teaching approach. According to Kennedy (2016a: 973), we do not have well developed ideas about how to help teachers incorporate new ideas into their ongoing systems of practice.
This chapter focuses on the question of how, in the context of a specific innovation, adaptive learning routes can be realized in which teachers can achieve both the goals of the innovation and their own objectives in a way that fits in with and builds on what they are already doing in their teaching. To this end, two interrelated design principles for an adaptive professional development trajectory were explored, namely modularity and self-evaluation. These two design principles were elaborated for adaptive professional development in the context of an innovative teaching approach for speaking skills in foreign languages. We investigated to what extent the professional development trajectory actually led to adaptive learning routes for the participating teachers.
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