Page 159 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

activities that serve the purpose of improving speaking skills as they are used as activities for improvement.
Furthermore, the students’ self-evaluations with plans for improvement provided opportunities for more adaptive learning routes of students and, therefore, more differentiation of activities, feedback, pace, working methods and variation in the degree of steering. How much will depend on the teacher, the students and their context. Since all kinds of variations are possible with the design principles of the adaptive teaching approach, the teachers can adapt the approach to their teaching practice. This will also mean that there will be a lot of different SpeakTeach practices as a result (see chapter 3).
Regarding implications for professional development trajectories, this study showed how trajectories can be tailored to teachers’ needs by using the principles of modularity and teacher self-evaluation so that teachers can follow adaptive learning routes.
The practical adaptive approach in this study was developed for speaking skills. The approach might be applicable to other foreign language skills. First of all, its flexibility and the way the teaching approach is made practical using the steps of the Bridging Model could be adopted for other pedagogical reforms. In addition, the way it ensures that feedback and learning activities can be tailored to meet students’ needs, namely through an iterative learning process of self-evaluations followed by feedback and tailored improvement activities, could also be applied to different subjects as well as to other components of the modern foreign languages curriculum such as listening skills. Students could for instance analyse what they have done well and what they have not done during a listening test, a reading test or in a self- written text, then make an improvement plan and take the test again.
The design principle of self-evaluation could also be used systematically in other subjects. In STEM subjects, for example, students could evaluate their own practical research. The self-evaluations should make students aware of the steps they have to take and at the same time they should give the teacher insight into what the students notice and understand of their learning process and what needs to be improved. This would allow the teacher not only to give feedback on the research done, but also to give feedback on the students’ reflections and guide them on a regulatory level.
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