Page 138 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 5. Perspective of the teachers – professional development
evaluations of the speaking performances. He was open to using parts of the SpeakTeach method in the future but did not yet know how and with which groups. In the subsequent school year, Koos reported that he had not applied any parts of the Speak-Teach method.
5.6 Conclusions and discussion
It is important for teachers’ professional development to take both their goals and their current teaching practice into account (e.g. Kennedy, 2016a; 2016b; Janssen et al., 2013). This is not, however, self-evident when a professional development trajectory is aimed at learning to design and execute lessons according to a specific innovative approach. Innovative approaches are often formulated in abstract ideas and goals. As a result, it is often not clear to teachers how they can efficiently transform the innovation into concrete classroom activities that fit in with existing classroom demands and their other goals (Doyle & Ponder, 1977; Janssen, Westbroek, Doyle & Van Driel, 2013; Janssen et al., 2015; Kennedy, 2016b).
For this reason, this chapter focused 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 class. To this end, two interrelated design principles, namely modularity and self-evaluation by teachers, were used to develop an adaptive professional development trajectory. The professional development trajectory in this study aimed to support foreign language teachers to expand their repertoire of adaptive feedback and differentiated activities for improvement in their regular teaching of speaking skills, because research has shown that adaptive feedback is desirable, but not common in teaching (Lyster et al., 2013; Yoshida, 2008; Gass & Mackey, 2012), due to practical constraints of the classroom ecology (Chapter 3; Corda, Koenraad & Visser, 2012; Fasoglio, 2015).
The aim of this study was to determine the extent to which the professional development trajectory, in the context of the innovation, was actually found to be adaptive according to teachers themselves. We also set out to investigate whether teachers achieved the goals of the innovation and their other goals to their own satisfaction by following the learning routes they had chosen themselves, and whether they intended to apply all or parts of the innovation in the future.
The results show that all of the teachers had goals in line with the goals of the innovation and that almost all of them also had other goals. In general, they were satisfied
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