Too often, teachers say that the professional development they receive provides limited application to their everyday world of teaching and learning. Here The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory shares a five-phase framework that can help create comprehensive, ongoing, and — most importantly — meaningful professional development.
The North Central Regional Educational Laboratory has developed a research-based professional development framework that promotes ongoing professional development and encourages individual reflection and group inquiry into teachers’ practice. In practice, the five phases overlap, repeat, and often occur simultaneously:
- Building a Knowledge Base. The purpose of this phase is to acquire new knowledge and information and to build a conceptual understanding of it. Activities in this phase might include goal setting, assessing needs, participating in interactive workshops, and forming a study group.
- Observing Models and Examples. The purpose of this phase is to study instructional examples in order to develop a practical understanding of the research. In this phase, one might participate in activities such as school and classroom visitations, peer observation, using instructional artifacts, co-planning, and listening to or watching audio and video examples.
- Reflecting on Your Practice.The purpose of this phase is to analyze your instructional practice on the basis of new knowledge. Activities in this phase might include the use of journals or teacher-authored cases for collegial discussion and reflection.
- Changing Your Practice.The purpose of this phase is to translate your new knowledge into individual and collaborative plans and actions for curricular and instructional change. Activities might include action research, peer-coaching, support groups, and curriculum development.
- Gaining and Sharing Expertise.The purpose of this phase is to continue to refine your instructional practice, learning with and from colleagues while also sharing your practical wisdom with your peers. Activities in this phase might include team planning, mentoring or partnering with a colleague, and participating in a network.
(From Five Phases of Professional Development, Teaching Skills)
III Developing background knowledge (B1/B2/C1)
1. Choose the meanings of the verb to teach which are related to academic encounters:
1. Impart knowledge to or instruct (someone) as to how to do something
1.1 Give information about or instruction in (a subject or skill)
1.2 Work as a teacher
2. Cause (someone) to learn or understand something by example or experience
2.1 Encourage someone to accept (something) as a fact or principle
2.2 Make (someone) less inclined to do something (from Oxford Dictionaries).
2. Explain the meaning of the term educator, using the following information:
Definition: A person who provides instruction or education; a teacher.
Synonyms: teacher, tutor, instructor, pedagogue, schoolteacher, schoolmaster, schoolmistress, master, mistress; educationalist, educationist; supply teacher; coach, trainer; lecturer, professor, don, fellow, reader, academic; guide, mentor, guru, counsellor; Scottish dominie; Indian pandit
North American INFORMAL schoolmarm
British INFORMAL beak
Australian/New Zealand INFORMAL chalkie, schoolie
ARCHAIC doctor, schoolman, usher (from Oxford Dictionaries).
3. Read the fragment of the article ‘The Desired Cooperator: Preservice Preferences and Role Confusion During the Teaching Practicum’ by Doug Hamman and Jacqueline E. Romano, College of Education, Texas Tech University. What is a problem under discussion? What are expectations of a cooperating teacher / a student teacher? Can you explain the reasons of role confusion?
Context of Teaching Practicum Contributes to Confusion
Despite the dominant role played by cooperating teachers, or perhaps because of it, the process of learning to teach is not without problems. Nearly 35 years ago, Lortie (1975) described the teaching practicum as a setting that provides student teachers with little opportunity to explore their own instructional and management approaches thereby thwarting experimentation and helping to entrench current instructional practices. Researchers have tended to attribute negative aspects of the teaching practicum to institutional constraints inherent in a real-world setting (i.e., cooperating teacher’s responsibility to current students), and often to characteristics of cooperating teachers who are unable or unwilling to support the needs of an adult learner in the context of learning to teach (e.g., Borko & Mayfield, 1995; Guyton & McIntyre, 1990). Ganser (1996), however, suggested that one possible reason for the limiting nature of the teaching practicum might be attributable to role confusion among university, cooperating and student teachers.
Role confusion during the teaching practicum is created and perpetuated by a lack of clear definitions and expectations related to support, supervision and exploration. Conclusions drawn from a recent review of the literature by Clift and Brady (2005) seems to support this assertion about role confusion contributing to practicum situations that are less than optimal. For example, the authors found evidence suggesting that student teachers are themselves often struggling with contradictory ideas about students, teaching and learning, often do not accept ideas and concepts from university-level teaching courses, begin to show an increasing interest in classroom management and a decreasing interest in student learning, and are often at a loss for coping with the contradictions and inconsistencies they encounter.
Koerner, O’Connell-Rust and Baumgartner (2002) also reported similar findings concerning role confusion. They found that student teachers often expressed a desire for cooperating teachers to serve as mentors, but then also wanted to be given autonomy when it is time to assume greater responsibility as the practicum progresses. In their findings, the authors were surprised to find that student teachers, while desiring guidance, did not express a strong desire to work with cooperating teachers who possessed greater degrees of professional and pedagogical knowledge. The situation described by these researchers seems ripe for confusion on the part of cooperating teachers who have to determine when to offer suggestions or to intervene more directly, and on the part of student teachers that are eager for autonomy but may still desire direction.
IV Exchanging views and ideas (B1/B2/C1)
1. Group work. Organize a brainstorming session. Compare the meanings of the verbs to teach, to instruct and to educate.
2. Discussion.Do teachers have to teach, educate or instruct?
V Summarizing the topic (B1/B2/C1)
- Give a talk on issues of modern education.
- Make a power point presentation on the topic Types of Teachers (the principles of an effective presentation see in Unit 5).
VI Project work (B1/B2/C1)
- Work out a questionnaire on skills an effective teacher should have. Interview your group-mates. You may do it using the Internet as a mediator. Present the results of your survey in a Report.
- Write an essay on one of the following topics:
1) My dream is to become a teacher.
2) A teacher vs. an educator.
3) Challenges of modern teaching.
4) My teaching experience.
B PRACTISING SKILLS
TEXT 1 (B2/C2)
Put the word(s) in brackets in the right form.