Last Thursday, I was reviewing literature for a research project that is just underway, and I came across a couple tables that resonated with me so much that I had to share it on Twitter. The tables come from Simon Borg's 2010 article "Language Teacher Research Engagement."
These tables would have come in handy if I had found them prior to my research project with teachers at an intensive English program (IEP) in the United States. They would have supported my professional learning and curriculum development philosophies as an administrator because I believe these two areas, professional learning and curriculum development, should have strongly overlapping goals as an English language teacher. Furthermore, I believe that it is in the best interest of an institution to support this in order to improve the curriculum. This belief is based on the assumption that curriculum is not static because is based on the needs of the learners, which are dynamic, as well as the research on English language learning and teaching, which is also dynamic. Additionally, the instructors must be able to internalize or understand the curriculum in order to interpret it correctly as pedagogy and assessment in the classroom.
In my previous institution, I was creating the working conditions for this to happen before it was stopped by new leadership. However, we had about a year of a solid foundation that can be transferred to and further implemented in other English language programs. Here is how framed it:
The table above shows how the institution must always evaluate learners' needs and the efficacy of research-informed practices for its context. The two bottom rows indicate how the roles are split between administration and faculty. The middle (light green) row refers to administrative roles, which were mainly designed and facilitated by me, the curriculum coordinator. The bottom (white) row refers to the faculty roles, which I will discuss in more detail.
Learners' Needs
Basically this is the main job of teachers. Formative assessment refers to any homework, quiz, or activity that measures the learning. These measurements should help the learner understand his or her ability and it should help the teacher decide if the learners need more or less time to work on what was measured (grammar, vocabulary, reading for main ideas, etc.). Teacher engagement and inquiry refers to getting a sense of each students' emotional and academic needs and aspirations. I consider this the "art" of teaching, when the teacher can sense if a certain activity is not going well based on classroom dynamics, time of day, current events, etc. I hope nobody is in disagreement that this is what most schools expect from their teachers; no change from the status quo.
Research-informed Teaching Practices
This is most often considered the optional part of teaching, but I think it should be required at a intensity level that is comfortable, appropriate, and suitable for the teachers. It should be required in a language program that is seeking to improve its curriculum based on the changing student population. I also believe it helps a program to be more innovative if the teachers can take ownership in the development of the curriculum and their learning. I believe this gives them confidence and passion for teaching that will yield better results in the classroom compared to the soul-crushing alternative of teaching the textbook or a scripted curriculum, which can be helpful for new teachers but not for all teachers.
The first role here is having discussions about the curriculum. At my previous institution, we averaged about one every other week; three times a term or six times a semester. Curriculum meetings are the best opportunities for the administration and the faculty to get together to understand what is working and what is not working. I usually themed two meetings to focus on one language skill like reading for example, and another two meetings would focus on speaking, listening, or whatever the faculty decide. As the curriculum coordinator, I conducted a literature review on that language skill and produce a written summary of the teaching implications to demonstrate what we were already doing well and what we were possibly neglecting. The first meeting emphasized reflective practice on that language skill to help teachers get into the mindset of analyzing and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum. It helped them understand that they should not be bound to a textbook or a curriculum if they do not serve the learning process. The second meeting focused on determining if we could incorporate other teaching practices suggested from the literature and encouraging cessation of teaching practices that had no or adverse effect on language learning. Basically, the second meeting helped us prioritize the IEP's student learning outcomes for the language skill in focus.
Taking a look back at Borg's Table 4 (2010), here is what I observed in the transformation of our teacher conditions during my short tenure at the IEP.
- Positive attitudes to professional development generally - Expanded because they were encouraged to share.
- Relevant knowledge and skills for doing teacher research - Some teachers were able to identify areas of improvement in their own teaching and/or in the curriculum that could eventually be investigated through a research project
- A willingness to take risks - I believe I saw this as the greatest transformation in the program while I was there. We were making great progress as a team to develop the curriculum.
- The confidence not to feel threatened by the revelatory nature of teacher research - I saw a divide in our faculty here, in which some gained confidence but others lost confidence. Some teachers were more comfortable just following the textbooks, and a critical stance towards beloved textbooks was quite threatening.
- Openness and a desire to collaborate with others in being research-engaged - I developed a bias towards the teachers that developed in this direction, although I tried to encourage in others. This resistance actually inspired my current research project.
These five areas were noticeable because teachers were engaged with research but not in research. I believe only a couple teachers engaged in research that was inspired from curriculum development, but their research was not collaborative.
The second role for faculty was engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), which is a practice I learned from my colleague at Kirkwood Community College when I was part of a faculty development team. For extensive details on SOTL, I urge you to visit the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's website at https://my.vanderbilt.edu/sotl/.
I was in the beginning stages of setting up a SOTL model that fit the needs and time constraints of our faculty through a research project that is now under review for publication. I modeled how a research project could be conducted through collaboration with other teachers. After completion of that research project, I planned to help support others' in research projects they had. Unfortunately, new leadership put an end to the SOTL project, but these are the project conditions I had in place before it was halted. The report below is based on Borg's Table 5 (2010).
- Relevant - The curriculum meetings made this so.
- Feasible - I modeled how this could work.
- Structured - I provided guidance.
- Supported - By me and by a professor in the university's Department of Linguistics
- Voluntary - Exclusively
- Democratic - Yes, of course. Uninterested teachers could opt out.
- Collaborative - We weren't able to see the extent of this collaboration beyond my model.
- Pedagogical - Most teachers preferred it to be pedagogical.
- Shared - The curriculum meetings supported this.
- Concrete - Yes, it was to improve teaching & learning at our IEP.
- Integrated - That's how I designed it.
Workplace conditions
My first year at the IEP was dedicated to helping improve the workplace conditions to allow for better instruction and professional learning. A lot of curriculum work that faculty had to do before I was hired was time-consuming and unproductive. Not only did I have to transform the curriculum development process, but I had to transform the minds of the faculty to see that curriculum development could be beneficial to their professional learning.
My second year was when the workplace conditions were getting close to my ideal for curriculum and faculty development. Below are my responses to Borg's third table (2010), which I did not share on Twitter earlier. As I stated earlier, I hadn't read Borg's article until afterward, but I believe I was creating many of these conditions.
First and foremost, educational institutions need at least one administrator that supports teachers and has the power to create the first two of the working conditions in the table above. I consider time for doing research to be included in part of the lesson planning time, which was quite limited when I started working there. This is how I helped maximize time and resources for helping teachers engage with research:
My first task was to make teachers' time worthwhile: focused solely on teaching, learning, curriculum development, and professional learning:
- I helped eliminate many unproductive curriculum and assessment committee tasks that dominated teachers' time outside the classroom
- I identified redundancies in the standardized assessment process that took up a lot of time in terms of proctoring, distribution, analysis, and interpretation
- I helped organize and develop a free teacher-centered "unconference" for our teachers and other IEP teachers in the region
My second task was to make relevant research accessible and available to the teachers:
- I identified how the student learning outcomes were based on evidence (research)
- I identified areas of research that our curriculum overlooked
- I dedicated most time during our curriculum meetings in our second year to discuss how we can better align research with our curriculum and teaching practices
- I made all literature I collected available through our LMS so teachers could read the articles that covered issues that resonated with them in our meetings
My third task was to demonstrate how to assess learning, teaching, and curriculum using research in a time-efficient process. I was unable to complete this task for reasons outside of my control.
- Focus each 8-week cycle on one language skill
- Develop better tools for assessing students' language skills, academic skills, and language learning beliefs (metacognition)
- Redesign the teaching appointments to help teachers develop their pedagogical strengths and weaknesses in intervals and at a pace that does not impede the students' learning process (This avoids the sink-or-swim approach of putting a teacher in a class in which he or she has little to no experience in terms of students' proficiency level or skills. When the teacher sinks, the students may sink as well.)
This third task would then provide better opportunities for interested teachers to engage in research with the support from me and the professor from the Department of Linguistics.
Conclusion
I have been lucky in my career to have been in institutions that more or less provided teachers opportunities to engage with and in research. The most successful programs were the ones that created and supported a collaborative teaching and professional learning environment, which I believe all teachers deserve. I believe it is in the institution's long-term best interests to support this type of environment because it grows great teachers. Great teachers are far more memorable than a great curriculum, and that's how one's reputation as a great school grows.
Reference
Borg, S. (2010). Language teacher research
engagement. Language Teacher, 43:4, 391–429.
doi:10.1017/S0261444810000170
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