Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

This is my second blog post in response to my reading of Second Language Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Perspective by Karen E. Johnson, specifically to Chapter 7 on Inquiry-Based Approaches to Professional Development.  This chapter is really important to me because it combines my research interest on the professional development of English language teachers with my current position as curriculum coordinator at CESL, where one of my roles is to support and provide professional development for our faculty. Chapter 7 describes five models of inquiry-based professional development, which I am reviewing as options to implement.  They are as follows: Critical Friends Groups Peer Coaching Lesson Study Cooperative Development Teacher Study Groups Critical Friends Groups This model focuses on "exploring and analyzing the dynamic nature of student learning" through the use of protocol-guided conversations, which provide the participants (teachers) with a lot of str...

Earlier this month, I began my new role as curriculum coordinator at the Center for English as a Second Language (CESL) at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.  I am very excited to be back in my field and to put all my experiences, observations, and research into action.  This was an excellent time to thoroughly read Karen E. Johnson's book Second Language Teacher Education , published in 2009, the same year I started my PhD studies.  Unfortunately for me, I became aware of this book halfway through my dissertation project. In Chapter 6 of the book, Dr. Johnson introduces Engestrom's human activity system as shown in the figure above.  This nice triangle with arrows helps illustrate my mindset in terms of coordinating curriculum and professional development.  Let's enter this figure by concentrating on the subject (middle left), which is the learner of the community (bottom middle). For English language teachers, their students are the subje...