Collaborative Teacher Learning in ELT

• This chapter is about collaborative teacher learning, focusing mainly on teacher communities.
• The analysis is based on international experience in English Language Teaching (ELT) in-service work.
• It provides recommendations on how teacher communities can support language teacher's professional growth.

Historical Overview of Language Teacher Education (LTE)

• Methodology courses for Foreign Language (FL) teachers in the USA existed in the 1920s, according to Schulz's 2000 review.
• The first English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher training course started in London in 1962.
• Those courses were forerunners to certificate-level TESOL qualifications like Cambridge CELTA and Trinity College CertTESOL.
• Applied linguistics emerged as a field in the 1960s and brought specialized academic knowledge and theory, represented in MA programs' curricula.
• Professional development for language teachers largely involved becoming familiar with the latest theory in applied linguistics.
• It was believed such knowledge would enhance classroom practices.
• Second Language Teacher Education (SLTE) emerged as a systematically researched and theorized field of inquiry in the last 30 years.
• Teacher education literature in language teaching is relatively underexplored compared to methods and techniques for classroom teaching.
• A landmark publication acknowledged the insufficient empirical basis of SLTE and the need to address it.
• It argued for a new view of language teacher education:
• Moving from a 'training' to an 'education' perspective.
• Recognizing that effective teaching involves higher-level cognitive processes, which cannot be taught directly.
• Teachers and student teachers adopting a research orientation to their classrooms and teaching.
• Less emphasis on prescriptions and top-down directives; more on inquiry-based and discovery-oriented learning.
• Focusing on experiences that require student teachers to generate theories and hypotheses and to critically reflect on teaching.
• Less dependence on linguistics and language theory, integrating sound, educationally based approaches.
• Using procedures involving teachers in gathering and analyzing data about teaching.
• These perspectives on SLTE have been developed since, with trends including:
• A shift from transmission, product-oriented theories to constructivist, process-oriented theories of learning, teaching, and teacher learning.
• Efforts to transform teaching through situated teacher cognition and practice and developing relevant linkages between theory and practice.
• Growing recognition that teachers' prior learning experiences powerfully shape their views and practices.
• A growing concern that teaching be viewed as a profession, with teachers developing theory and directing their professional development through collaborative observation, research, inquiry, and in-service programs.
• Teacher collaboration has long been recognized as a positive aspect of teacher's work and growth.
• Over 70% of lower secondary school teachers felt that collaboration was a feature of effective Professional development work based on 2018 TALIS results.
• Creating conditions for teacher collaboration is a desirable goal of educational systems.

Effective Teacher Development

• Varied global contexts for L2 teaching mean no single universally applicable formula for success in SLTD.
• Discussions of SLTD should identify contemporary trends that can be critically appraised for relevance to SLTD rather than discovering any transferable template for success.
• An understanding of key underlying theoretical principles and the ability to deploy these in a contextually appropriate manner.
• Borg (2015) concluded that there was an emerging consensus around several features of teacher development that allow it to 'achieve positive and sustained impacts on teachers, learners and organizations'.
• It is seen by teachers to be relevant to their needs and those of their students.
• Teachers are centrally involved in decisions about the content and process of professional learning.
• Collaboration and the sharing of expertise among teachers is fostered.
• It is a collective enterprise supported by schools and educational systems more broadly.
• Exploration and reflection are emphasized over methodological prescriptivism.
• Expert internal and/or external support is available.
• Classrooms are valued as a site for professional learning.
• Professional learning is recognized as an integral part of teachers' work.
• Classroom inquiry by teachers is seen as a central professional learning process.
• Teachers are engaged in the examination and review of their beliefs.
• Adaptive expertise is promoted.
• Student learning provides the motivation for professional learning.
• Teachers experience the cognitive dissonance that motivates change.
• Recurrent facilitative features also include:
• Professional learning should be iterative, with opportunities to apply learning in real practice, reflect and improve over time.
• Professional learners should see the relevance of the training to their job requirements and to their professional goals and aspirations.
• Development should be designed with a focus on impact on students, with formative assessment built in for participants.
• Organizational leaders and facilitators need to create and protect the conditions for learning, e.g. time and space, while identifying and removing barriers such as workload.
• Organisational leaders should demonstrate and encourage alignment between PD and wider goals/approaches, actively encouraging and supporting the buy-in of participants.
• Most reviews of effective professional development supported the idea that collaborative learning was beneficial.

Collaborative Teacher Development

• Teachers can only develop effectively when they do so together according to Johnston (2009).
• There is strong support in the literature for the value of encouraging teachers to learn together.
• Collaborative professional development:
• It is improvement in social capital among existing teachers as professional communities that will yield the greatest and most immediate returns.
• Teaching improves most in collegial settings where common goals are set and expertise is shared.
• Professional learning [is] steady, intellectual work that promotes meaningful engagement with ideas and with colleagues over time.
• Professional learners should engage in structured collaborative learning focused on problem-solving and enquiry.
• Collaborative teacher development can take many forms like reading groups, lesson study, social media groups, teacher learning communities, peer observation, curriculum study, mentoring, reflective partnerships, team student performance reviews, and collaborative action research.
• Wenger's notion of ‘community of practice' (CoP) has been an important influence on developments in collaborative professional development and is ‘a group of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise'.
• CoPs have five core features: a group, shared interests, a concern with practice (doing), regular interaction, and learning.
• In education, CoPs are often described using the terms 'professional learning communities' (PLCs) and ‘teacher communities'.
• The conditions that characterise teacher CoPs can vary enormously the literature does suggest that this form of collaborative professional development can contribute effectively to teacher change.
• A distinction can be made between emergent and designed teacher CoPs:
• Emergent teacher CoPs: the community is created organically and led by teachers themselves.
• Designed teacher CoPs: are formally initiated (by, for example, a ministry of education or teacher development project provider) and which teachers then participate in.

Emergent Teacher CoPs

• Padwad and Parnham (2019) discuss a form of emergent teacher CoPs called English teacher clubs (ETCs).
• Small close-knit groups of teachers
• Characterised by friendliness
• Informality, an absence of hierarchy
• A mixture of amateur and professional interests
• Voluntary groups of teachers coming together to help each other address their concerns and improve themselves as teachers.
• Anecdotal evidence exists that ETCs operate in many countries, though research into their effectiveness is limited.
• The most prominent mode of working in teacher clubs is talk: sharing of feelings and concerns, exchanging ideas and experiences, supporting with suggestions and advice.
• ETCs are self-managed, with teachers responsible for how they operate and what they discuss.
• Meetings occur frequently, but they are 'not very structured or agenda-driven'
• Positive interpersonal dynamics are another feature of ETCs.
• Personalization and individualization as key benefits
• The range of possible areas for professional development is thus unlimited.
• ETCs enhance teachers' sense of autonomy and create a safe space within which members are able to talk freely about concerns and challenges.

Challenges that arise in the context of ETCs include

• Sustainability, as ETCs may not survive due to ineffective leadership, shortage of resources, dwindling motivation, teacher workloads, and lack of external recognition.
• It is unlikely teachers will organically form CoPs and be able to sustain them autonomously without a supportive infrastructure.
• Effective leadership is a feature of successful CoPs and ETCs will also benefit from the presence of one or more teachers who assume a coordinating role.

Designed Teacher CoPs

• Designed teacher communities retain the core features of CoPs more generally with regular interactive meetings where shared aspects of teaching and learning are discussed.
• Designed teacher CoPs lead to practical ideas which teachers can take back and try out in their classrooms and creating safe and trusting environment for teachers to discuss their work also remain central.
• Designed teacher CoPs are initiated externally and set up within pre-determined parameters.
• Number of meetings, frequency, structure, and content determined with limited teacher input.
• Applied at scale
• Designed CoPs are characterized by a structure which regulates the stages teachers will go through during each meeting.
• Share focuses on discussing teachers' classroom experiences, while ‘Read' and 'Watch' activities provide texts and videos for teachers to engage.
• Application of new ideas to the classroom and continued online interaction (typically on Facebook or WhatsApp) takes place in between the monthly sessions.

Features include

• Structure is one of their key features.
• Package of materials is provided for the teachers at least initially.
• A more formalized coordinator role.
• Coordinators play a central role in designed CoPs and should be chosen according to clearly defined criteria as well as receive appropriate preparatory training for their role and further ongoing support.
• Teachers, coordinators, and local educational authorities expressed positive attitudes.
• Benefits included increased levels of teacher confidence in the classroom and improved professional motivation with an increased range of pedagogical skills and strategies and a wider range of resources to support learning.
• Greater sense of professional autonomy and dialogue.

Challenges

• They are mostly systemic in nature.
• Limited awareness and understanding of CoPs.
• Scheduling of CoP meetings at the weekend with no reduction in regular teaching workloads for teachers or coordinators.
• Sustainability is also a concern and designed teacher CoPs operate within time-bounded projects and when these end the support projects provide is withdrawn.
• Teachers may become dependent on the external provision of materials.
• Teachers were nominated by their employer rather than volunteers.
• Teacher motivation is more important than teacher autonomy when it comes to professional development.

Moving Teacher CoPs Online

• As a result of COVID-19, education and teacher education have been forced to transition to approaches that are largely or wholly remote or online.
• Going virtual with a formal CoP-based professional development programme can present very substantial challenges with complications including:
• Limited technological infrastructure (especially good quality Internet)
• Lack of technological support for teachers (for example, no access to free Wi-Fi)
• Low levels of technological competence among teachers (for example, no experience of working with apps such as Zoom)
• Reliance on smartphones to get online
• Families sharing one device in a household, meaning that teachers could not use it whenever they needed to
• Financial constraints affecting, for example, teachers' ability and willingness to pay for data and devices
• An educational culture that highly values face-to-face social interaction
• An educational culture in which hard copies (not e-copies) of materials are highly appreciated
• Generally negative attitudes to learning online
• Lack of privacy at home, meaning that cameras and microphones often could not be kept on during sessions
• A general unwillingness by teachers to contribute orally during online sessions
• Variable skills among teacher educators for facilitating online professional development.
• Efforts to organize online CoPs should be grounded in a systematic analysis of the pre prevailing conditions to ensure that the CoP is aligned with these and does not make unrealistic assumptions.

Recommendations for Practice

• Teachers can learn effectively together and from one another.
• In relation to teacher CoPs, there is theoretical support for their value in supporting teacher learning and practical evidence
• There are three recommendations that can be made.
• It is useful to think about teacher CoPs on a continuum where emergent CoPs and designed CoPs represent contrasting positions.
• Individuals responsible for creating teacher CoPs recognize what is known about effective professional development and draw on this insight accordingly.
• Teacher CoPs should be set up in a manner that is contextually feasible and appropriate.
• Designed CoPs often unfold in contexts where:
• teachers benefit from working time to engage in professional development
• supportive leadership within schools
• trusting collegial relationships exist
• there is recognition for their efforts to improve and experiment
• there is space