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- 1. UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE LA SANTÍSIMA CONCEPCIÓN FACULTAD DE EDUCACIÓN PEDAGOGÍA EN EDUCACIÓN MEDIA EN INGLÉS “PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT” Reaction Paper Course: English Methodology Professor: Roxana Correa Student’s name: Angel Sandoval Villarroel 19th November, 2013
- 2. SUMMARY The author Penny Ur in the book called “Methodology in Language Teaching” makes a distinction and adds some separations to the term „professionalism‟. Ur (2002) points out that a professional is not the same as being a lay, an amateur, a technician or an academic, but they are all different concepts that people often tend to confuse. This author contrasts every of these concepts in the following definitions: a lay, is a person who does not belong to the professional category, but he or she knows something about a certain matter. The term amateur refers to a person who does something just for vocation or passion of it, but not necessarily has to be formed as a professional. The third concept that Ur (2002) introduces is technician, which is related to skills, for instance, a technician is a skilful person that throughout time he or she acquires more expertise by doing something. On contrary, to be a professional requires taking courses of action and be instructed based on knowledge or thought of a certain matter. Finally, Ur (2002) distinguishes another segregated term of professionalism, which is academic. Normally, an academic goes beyond a professional person, because it is more related to further research and new findings becoming an agent of real-world change. Additionally, Ur (2002) lists several labours that a professional English teacher must do: be part of a community, be committed, a publisher of new ideas and techniques, a constant learner, is autonomous and trainers of new teachers. Pettis is another author that discusses the huge importance of being a teacher of English as a second language (ESL). Pettis (2002) starts by saying that to become a complete professional English teacher, a combination of principles, knowledge and skills are needed to success, which will allow us to fulfil the gaps in our personal professional development and to be powerful educators at the same time. She also remarks the possibility to be flexible with the framework in order to look for new activities and techniques to teach English according to students and contextual needs to, therefore, make better decisions. In addition, Pettis (2002) highlights that a personal commitment as an ESL teacher is required. This is not only to assist to school and do the same repeated activities and make use of the same techniques every single year, but renew and innovate every school year with new materials. This has to be with professional development as well, it does not matter if it takes more work and the payment is the same, it refers to the huge responsibility that ESL educators have as education formers.
- 3. An author concerned in classroom research, is the Australian Elizabeth Taylor who put special emphasize on the importance of how much the teacher knows about his or her own classroom. To reach this goal, Taylor (2002) states that it is necessary to work in collaboration with another teacher who has the same interests, which will benefit teacher‟s investigation in the classroom by sharing ideas and discussing what could be done. Together with this, it is essential the permanent readings of previous research about what the best ways to teach English are. Regarding this issue, Taylor (2002) mentions a practical example of a comparison between a lesson based on smallgroup work and a teacher-directed one. In the small-group lesson, Anne, the teacher mentioned in the example, found out that there is more communication among students, therefore, the instances to participate and use the language in the class are higher instead of only responding to the teacher in a fronted lesson for instance. After she noticed that the students took different roles in the groups, which were: leader, participator, nonparticipator and negative contributor, she set up two activities using the two types of lesson. As a conclusion, Anne found that working in groups allows students to be more independent during the task and besides, the roles are more remarkable. For this reason, it is important for Taylor to do a research of our own classroom, which will give teachers a straight direction to follow with their students. Brown (2001) in his book “Teaching by Principles” makes reference to the continuation of teacher‟s education. He distinguishes peak performers and “good” language teachers. The first concept refers to people who reach their fullest potential. These teachers have the following characteristics: they set their own realistic goals with their students; they set priorities by solving what is more important first; they take risks and finally, they know how to manage the stress in the demanding career as it is teaching. Similarly, the second term goes together with being competent, critical thinking, love for the English language, cultural adaptability, professional citizenship among others. Classroom observation is another topic that Brown strongly promotes; he states that by reciprocal observation with other teachers, both observer and observee end up being benefited through mutual feedback to strengthen weaknesses. Linked with this, through observation, teachers have a go in classroom research to develop new approaches and modify techniques to improve the teaching process. Besides, Brown (2001) suggests being specific in questions to answer and organized with results, in order to facilitate comprehension when sharing new findings with other colleagues. This
- 4. author emphasizes a term called “critical pedagogy” which means to be critic, as the authority in the classroom, in activities connected to controversial issues, such as nonviolence, human rights, gender equality among many others. As a result, Brown (2001) proclaims that educators are more than teachers of English, but agents for change and formers of people immerse in a hard world in desperate need of change. Hayes (2000) by his part is more focussed on an innovation program to teach English in a large scale. This model is called „Cascade‟ due to its effect when it is implemented. This innovation to educational system consists mainly in training other people in extra time by a staff of in-service teachers with a higher level in terms of knowledge of the language. One of the main advantages that this attractive program has is that it costs effective, it does not require long periods out of service and it uses existing teaching staff as co-trainers. Hayes (2000) also notices some devastating disadvantages if the model is not well applied. One of them is that the content might vary significantly as the cascade goes down, yet it would not be a problem of the „Cascade‟ model, but the manner in which it is often implemented. For this reason Hayes (2000) calls trainers to use it more as an experiential method rather than transmissive, make it open to interpretation with rigid adherence and avoid decentralization of responsibilities. This author decided to apply this program in a project in Sri Lanka, obtaining many reflective results, for instance, the „Cascade‟ model success will depend directly on how engaged the teachers are with the project and specially respecting strictly the main principles to get good results. Another aspect he considers important is to aim to the national curriculum of the country in which this program is developed and has it as a general goal in terms of objectives with the trainees. EVALUATION The distinction made by the author Penny Ur in the book “Methodology in Language Teaching” seems to be clearly explained, when contrasting every concept versus the „professional‟ term. I totally agree in one of his explanations that I would like to highlight, Ur (2002) states that sometimes an amateur (let‟s say) teacher of English outperforms at the same level of a professional one, even though they do not have professional formation. I personally think that there must be many amateur teachers
- 5. around with real vocation to teach, but it has to be complemented with knowledge. While reading, something that called my attention was that what makes us professional teachers of English, in comparison to native English speakers, is that we have the knowledge of how the language functions in several linguistic aspects. Besides, we know the theory of how to manage a classroom and the different techniques to teach the target language properly. Furthermore, reading Ur has been a kind of extending my vision of the importance that our profession has in the educational world. Generally, when we start a pedagogical career the first thing that comes to our minds is just stand up in front of forty five students inside a classroom and teach them what we know ignoring the important responsibility that we have behind, but through this reading I realised that it goes beyond that, it involves a constant learning process from our own students, includes to be part of a community of teachers and share and exchange our ideas, discuss about new strategies to teach and so on. In my personal opinion, I strongly believe that to become a powerful professional teacher, a bite of all the concepts Ur distinguishes (lay, amateur, technician, professional and academic) are required to success with students learning process. It is vital to have the passion of teaching as amateurs have, be technically skilled, have the knowledge of what we are doing and also take the opportunity to investigate new strategies and test ourselves. Pettis (2002) reflects on the idea of requiring principles, knowledge and skills to be an effective professional teacher, which is close to Ur‟s classification but mixed in these three new concepts. Personally, I think that Pettis‟ explanation is logic in terms of taking into account the basic tools that any teacher must have for his or her personal development. Joanne then discusses an important issue, which is very common nowadays, that is many teachers resign on knowing the basic aspects of the language if they teach to primary grades. I think that if we are teachers of a foreign language as it is English in our country, which is getting more relevant every day, we must know everything about teaching a language, from the grammatical aspects to the phonologic features no matter what grade or level we are teaching to, this is what makes us professionals and competent in the real world. Going through the reading, Pettis (2002) refers to novice teachers by citing Freeman (1982) who says that one of the main differences novice teachers have with experienced ones is that novices concern more with What to teach?. I disagree with this statement, because I as a pre-serving teacher of English think that nowadays there is plenty of material such as course books, on line
- 6. activities and uncountable technological resources of which we can pick a topic and teach it through entertaining activities. Apart from that there is the curriculum in which we can rely on and start exploring How to teach? as experienced teachers do. This is part of our own personal commitment to our essential labour in educational world, as Pettis (2002) states, if our dedication and responsibility are true, I firmly believe we should make a personal evaluation, new resolutions and set new challenges at the beginning of every school year as she mentions in the reading. Taylor (2002) is another author who concerns about the huge responsibility that teaching a language implies, but in a more sophisticated way, that is to investigate our own classroom and collaborate with other teachers. When reading Taylor, I realised that it would be a great idea to start working with another colleague who has the same interest as me in order to support each other and discuss about our impressions related to our students‟ progress, their strengthen and weaknesses. Regarding to the exploration of the classroom, this author exemplifies two types of lesson (small-group and teacherfronted lesson). From my point of view, I found interesting that in small-group lessons students adopt different roles, which is good at all levels of learning, but I would say that the application of one of these lessons has to depend directly on the level of English by part of our students, for instance, if the level is low, I suggest a teacher-fronted lesson for a very simple reason, as it name says it, the teacher has the main role in the class so he or she can model the language structures (grammatical and phonological) as he/she speaks to students. Then, I would recommend jumping into small-group lesson, which implies more independence by part of the students. Now, I like that Elizabeth Taylor promotes teachers of English to do a classroom research, which I am sure it is very important to a proper teaching of English, but I have to be realistic, probably, very few teachers are encouraged to do this, yet the majority of educators do not do it for several reasons, time, demand and extra work. For my part, I would like to do a deep research of my classroom if I could teach only to one class as in the example provided by the author, but I think it is difficult in our country, as we Chilean teachers teach to more than one class, especially when they correspond to different levels. For this reason, our work turns more time-consuming, more demanding and we will not want extra work to be worried about.
- 7. Based on Brown (2001) now, the fact that we teachers continue developing as professionals of education is extremely important if we want to do our best when teaching to our students and also take the best from them. It is essential that we learn how to reach our best potential and become more like peak-performers and be capable of taking risks, make important decisions and avoid falling into a stressful life as Brown (2001) characterizes them. Actually, I have seen in my short experience, as a pre-service teacher, many teachers that see this as an unreachable utopia. I have seen teachers that at the moment of facing the reality of our educational system are conformed with few and poor results by part of their students, so they still doing the same old fashioned activities for many years or simply doing nothing at all. I have also seen desperate teachers that they just do not know how to work with their students, because there is neither motivation nor interest to learn English. I think it is time to change the typical negativity that most of Chilean teachers of English have deeply in their minds and start from doing a minimal effort. Together with Taylor, but going beyond I like Brown‟s proposal of collaborating with another teacher and observing their classes each other, this is a good idea to develop our professional thinking and be critical. However, from my viewpoint I would suggest to do this paired work mainly to novice teachers who are the ones that need more guiding work. It would be a great idea to collaborate with an experienced teacher and observe his/her classes and do the same mutually to share some opinions, give feedback, and improve the weakest parts. I would say that the need for suggestions is not only for beginners, but also for experienced, sometimes, we novice teachers have new innovative ideas and material to apply to the teaching process, so we could share these stuff with them which are essential to catch students‟ attention and interest. When reading Brown, I liked something that caught my eye at first and it is the perfect phrase to put everything in a frame: “we are not simply teachers of English, we are more than that. We are agents for change in a world in desperate need of change: change from competition to cooperation, from powerlessness to empowerment, from conflict to resolution, from prejudice to understanding” (Brown, 2001). Regarding the „Cascade‟ model proposed by David Hayes (2000) I agree on the idea of innovate in the educational system, notwithstanding I would not apply that method in anyway although it is an interesting and attractive method to gain time if applied correctly.
- 8. . Despite of its advantages, I think it has more disadvantages, because first of all, if we want to do things properly, we have to take it critically and take the time it implies to do it, also be conscious about what we are teaching from a solid base. However, when using the „Cascade‟ training and as the cascade goes down, the content that is taught tends to vanish as it is affected by many factors such as the teacher‟s point of view at a certain level in the cascade, the evolution of the development of the ideas, the deviation of the main aim of the learning process, the addition and reduction of the content by part of the teachers, some might have understood in a different way among many other circumstances. Based on this, I think that unfortunate situations are more likely to happen, besides, teaching English requires time and dedication as well as being clear at the moment of explaining it linguistically. Apart from that, reading Hayes was not appealing to me, even though his arguments were well supported by evidence, I found his explanations quite confusing and I expected more from his conclusion, which was a brief repetition of the „Cascade‟ principles without mentioning the results obtained in Sri Lanka.
- 9. References Brown, H. D. (2001). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.). Pearson Education. Freeman, D. (1982). Observing teachers: Three approaches to in-service training and development. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 21-28. Hayes, D. (2000). Cascade training and teachers' professional development.ELT journal, 54(2), 135-145. Pettis, J. (2002). Developing our professional competence: Some reflections.Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice, 393-396. Richards, J. C., & Renandya, W. A. (Eds.). (2002). Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice. Cambridge University Press. Taylor, E. (2002). Research in your own Classroom. Methodology in language teaching, 397403.