English in Inclusive Multilingual Preschools. Kirsten Birsak de Jersey
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The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Michael Wallace (1991) has built on the notion of teachers as reflective practitioners and provided a framework designed for foreign language teachers’ professional development. I will base my approach predominantly on the concepts put forward by these two researchers. Schön analyses reflective practice as involving two processes: reflection-in-action and reflection–on–action (Schön, 1983, p. 54-55). Reflection–in–action takes place during the action (p. 54), in our case during the teaching process: This means that it results in spontaneous reactions to incidental situations while teaching. This is closely associated with knowing-in-action which Schön describes not only as spontaneous reactions, but also as “intuitive performance” (p. 49). Reflection-on-action takes place after a practice phase or activity has been completed, in my case teachers after the English lessons when teachers reflect on their teaching. Wallace (1991), in his ‘Reflective Practice Model of Professional Development’, recommends that teaching practices are to be reflected continuously as to their appropriateness to the group of learners and teachers in question. As has been already outlined in the introduction to chapter 5.3, the model that I have designed to meet particular preschool teachers’ needs takes Wallace’s ‘Reflective Practice Model of Professional Development’1 (p. 49) (→ diagram 5) as a fundamental guideline. This model will be referred to here again and it will be described in detail so that the changes made which would suit preschool teachers’ needs become apparent.
Diagram 5: ‘Reflective Practice Model of Professional Development’ (Wallace 1991: 49)
Stage 1: The target group in Wallace’s reflective model consists of trainees. The trainees in my case are qualified, employed preschool teachers who are involved in their profession (Wallace, 1991, p. 48) and who have developed competences in managing preschool groups. But as regards the purpose of my project, they may or may not have had some experience in teaching foreign languages (including English) and they will have developed certain attitudes, knowledge and skills from their general preschool teaching experience in general and from teaching German as a second language in particular. Following Wallace’s model, it is “the stage the person … is at before beginning [the] process” (p. 48). It is a fundamental assumption underlying his model that the primary agent in the development process is not an academic researcher or expert (in my case the teacher educator), but rather the trainee her/himself. I refer to this idea when I build on participating preschool teachers’ contexts and expertise:
The ‘reflective model’ deliberately highlights the trainees and what they bring to the training / development process. … [It] emphasises the fact that people seldom enter into professional training situation with blank minds and / or neutral attitudes … [which includes], ideas, beliefs, … etc. all of which shape our behaviour in various typical or consistent ways. (p. 50)
This is particularly true for second language teacher education as we know since Lortie’s study (1975) who described “the phenomenon whereby student teachers arrive for their training courses having spent thousands of hours as schoolchildren observing and evaluating professionals in action” (Borg, 2004, p. 274) as apprenticeship of observation. “This contrasts with novices learning other professions, such as those of lawyers or doctors. … This apprenticeship, he argued, is largely responsible for many of the preconceptions that pre-service student teachers hold about teaching” (p. 274). Johnson and Golombek (2011) refer to Lortie’s early findings (1975) when they say that “teachers typically ground their understandings of teaching and learning as well as their notions about how to teach in their own instructional histories as learners” (p. 1). Wallace (1991) describes ideas, beliefs and attitudes as constructs, that is, a cluster of related concepts (p. 50). Just as the trainees that Wallace has in mind, the preschool teachers develop from the basis of a cluster of existing attitudes, ideas and beliefs on how children should be taught in general and how languages should be taught to children in particular. Therefore, it is a fundamental requirement to build on their attitudes, but also their knowledge and skills that they have accumulated through their experiences. This entails the need to re-assess their acquired teaching habits which may not support children’s language learning appropriately.
Stage 2: Received Knowledge covers “facts, data and theories often related to some kind of research” (Wallace, 1991, p. 12). Wallace uses this terminology to stress that the trainee “has ‘received’ (the knowledge) rather than ‘experienced’ it in professional action” (p. 12). His term experiential knowledge derives from Schön’s knowing-in-action and reflection (p. 13). He sees the experiential knowledge in professional action (practical experience) as the core of his reflective model which is in “a close, reciprocal relationship” with received knowledge (p. 52). This is depicted in his diagram through a reciprocal arrow that connects the experiential knowledge and relevant theory. The idea is that reflection works two ways: reflecting on received knowledge in association with classroom experience, and reflection on classroom experiences which is fed back into the received knowledge (p. 55). His model aims at providing a framework to accommodate the connection between theory and practice through a reflective process. During this process teachers develop their pedagogical content knowledge which is one of the essential competences my teacher education project aims to develop. It will therefore subscribe to this idea on the role of relevant theory in the reflective development process as the teachers will need to reflect on why they do what they do and for this purpose, they need to appreciate the theory that informs practice. In my model, received knowledge covers relevant theory that relates to the teaching of English to children. It involves the principles of the task approach and related research to understand the ways in which children learn foreign languages and may be best supported in this process. To support the reciprocal process of reflecting practice, relevant theory is integrated after or in between teaching practice phases if clarification and in-depth understanding of a practical incident is required. Wallace emphasizes that these two related elements of a teacher’s knowledge base, “the practice element … on the one hand and the reflective process on the other hand” (p. 56) need to be the core of what effective teacher education is about.
Before I turn my attention to the central components of the preschool teacher education model (→ chapter 5.6), which involve participatory demonstration lessons for preschool teachers to observe and take part in and also involves teaching the children cooperatively, the following chapter will first focus on the resulting complex roles of the teacher educator who, through this model, shares the responsibility to teach the children.
5.5 The complexity of roles of the teacher educator and researcher
The role of the teacher educator has been widely discussed in connection with approaches of professional development through action research. In their research Savoie-Zajc and Descamps-Bednarz (2007) describe the “composite role” of teacher educator and researcher as follows:
She was first of all an external resource who provided participants with the conceptual and practical frameworks to help them pinpoint the professional concerns upon which they wished to work and to reflect upon. She also organised the context where participants could share their experiences … with group members. The resource role extended to suggesting reading materials or websites when participants were seeking information on specific topics. … She was, finally, a researcher. (p. 582)
In the context of the preschool teacher education process, s/he also has to adopt a comprehensive number of roles. S/he is responsible to provide the content of the teacher education (such as the pedagogy of teaching English to children), to support teachers to re-write existing teaching materials to suit their children’s language learning needs (or to develop completely new teaching materials), to design preschool tasks and demonstrate in what ways they address children’s needs (which involves managing the processes resulting from putting the tasks to practice), s/he needs to acknowledge and aptly react to contextual constraints, s/he takes