Page 114 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 5. Perspective of the teachers – professional development
teachers to reflect on their experiences and to formulate and try out new resolutions. For professional development in the context of innovations, reflective thinking and acting is also considered to be important because it helps teachers to gain insight into the relevance of innovation in relation to daily teaching practice and because connections are made with their own teaching repertoires (Borko et al, 2010). Similarly, language students are also invited to reflect on their experiences and to formulate and try out new resolutions. Since we use the term self-evaluation in the student context to refer to these processes, we will use the same term in the context of teacher professional development.
Although self-evaluation is widely valued, it is often difficult for teachers to relate their current teaching practice to the innovative approach, because innovative approaches are often described at a quite abstract level in terms of the criteria which the design and enactment should meet (Janssen et al., 2013; Kennedy, 2016b). Modularity can facilitate targeted self-evaluation by representing the current teaching practice and the innovation in similar building blocks at the same level of description which enables the teacher to compare their current teaching approach to the proposed innovation and to note advantages and disadvantages. On the basis of the self-evaluation of the existing and desired situation, the teacher formulates goals and intentions for improvement, and chooses how and in what steps, to integrate the building blocks of the innovation (the new teaching approach) into his/her teaching practice.
Teachers’ self-evaluations also enable them to tailor the professional development trajectory to their own needs as they provide information for both the teachers themselves and the facilitator of the professional development trajectory about what the teachers do, experience and wish to achieve and what tailored input and activities are needed. Instead of prescribing a specific method and activities, the self-evaluation allows facilitator and teacher to make decisions together about the necessary guidance, input and activities and what the next steps could be. Since teachers are likely to differ in their existing situation and their goals, there will be a need for adaptive learning routes. A professional development trajectory must take these differences into account. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work. Instead, different activities are needed from which teachers can choose (Henze, Van Driel & Verloop, 2009). For this reason, we decided to start the professional development trajectory with a self-evaluation by the teacher followed by differentiated activities.
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