SELF –MONITORING AS A REFLECTIVE TOOL: IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT TO PROMOTE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

YANSITICI BİR ARAÇ OLARAK ÖZ-İZLEME: ÖĞRETMEN EĞİTİM PROGRAMLARINDA MESLEKİ GELİŞİMİ ARTIRMAYA YÖNELİK ÖNERİLER

Abstract

Rapidly changing educational demands of today’s society require skillful, well-equipped teachers to serve in educational contexts. To keep up with the developments in education and best meet needs of the learners in learning contexts the emphasis on teachers professional development is inevitable. Today’s modern educational systems require teachers to continuously monitor their practice through a critical lense and improve their teaching practices. In order to teach better, there is a need for teachers to go into reflective thinking and become aware of their strenghts and weaknesses in teaching practices. Teacher training programs need to be designed and shaped in such a way that they should encourage reflective thinking in the teacher candidates and provide them learning environments where they can go into reflective practices. It is believed that with the help of such learning environments, teacher candidates can gain awareness in the need for becoming a lifelong learner. It is also believed that reflective thinking practices can enable teacher candidates experience permanent learning procedures.Within this framework, this study set out to explore the conceptions and preferences of a group of four inexperienced EFL MA students particularly about self-monitoring procedures with the help of classroom vignettes. For this purpose, semi structured interviews were employed. The findings indicated that written narrative and video recording were preferred self- monitoring procedures. The participants also indicated that they benefitted from the learning program in which constructivist model of teacher learning was adopted There is a need for teachers to continue learning in order to teach effectively since the demands of today’s modern society are changing rapidly. With this regard, teachers are expected to engage themselves into reflective processes to better see and become self-aware of their teaching practices for the purpose of personal professional development. However, in the existing teacher training programmes in Northern Cyprus teachers are more likely to learn theoretical knowledge regarding learning and teaching during initial teacher education. Practical knowledge about teaching and learning are learned once they start to have field experience and start inservice teaching. Therefore, some new graduates who want to gain more expertise in learning and teaching and develop professionally prefer to enroll into MA programmes with a limited practical knowledge. Therefore, there is a need for MA programmes to provide tools for reflection in order to help learners contruct their own learning and develop teaching knowledge that can address more practical issues in teaching. Reflective thinking is believed to help teachers develop such knowledge. For this reason, reflecting on teaching is of paramount importance. Especially for the EFL teachers who enroll into an MA programme without having any teaching experience except teaching practicum and micro teaching experiences, experience difficulty in developing practical theories of teaching. It needs to be considered how they can develop practical theories of teaching without going into real teaching environments. Keeping this in mind, in this study a constructivist model of teacher learning through the use self-monitoring techniques for EFL teaching is proposed. Method In this study, the views of four inexperienced EFL MA students regarding the most prefered and and the least prefered self-monitoring procedures, the reasons of their preferences about self-monitoring procedures as a professional development tool and sharing were investigated. The following research questions were adopted for this investigation: 1) What is the most preferred self-monitoring procedure? Why? 2) What is the least preferred self monitoring procedure? Why? 3) What are the participant teachers’ views on sharing? 4) What are the views of the participant teachers regarding the learning process they have gone through during 12 weeks? In this investigation, case study method, which is a method of phenomonological paradigm, was utilized in order to investigate the participants’ views because the researcher was interested in reaching learners’ subjective realities. According to Baxter and Jack (2008) case study method “provides tools for researchers to study phenomena within their contexts” (p. 544). The research instrument for collecting data was semi-structured interviews. The participants of this study were four inexperienced EFL teachers who enrolled into TEFL MA programme as soon as they graduated from EFL BA programme. The participants had no prior experience in teaching, except teaching practicum and micro-teaching experiences during their initial training in the four year Teaching English as a Foreign Language education program. They were from different countries: Libya, England, Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Three of the participants were female and one participant was male. The participants were selected by employing criterion sampling strategy where they were selected purposively. Discussion and Conclusions The findings of this study revealed that choosing a self-monitoring method seems to be an individual preference. For instance, two teachers openly articulated that they would feel threatened by the video recording and would not teach naturally while the other two participant teachers particularly prefered video recording thinking that it could capture the details of the teaching. These differences might be due to the personality differences among the participants or they can be attributed to cultural differences since the participants were from different cultural backgrounds. Further research is needed to explore the source of the influence of such a thought. It is an interesting finding that the female participant teachers rejected sharing their narrative reports or video recording with other colleagues because of their worries about uncovering their weaknesses

Özet

Günümüz toplumunun hızla değişen eğitimsel talepleri eğitim ortamlarında yetenekli ve tam donanımlı öğretmenlere gereksinim olduğunu göstermişdir. Öğretmenin mesleki gelişimi, öğrenme ortamlarındaki öğrencilerin ihtiyaçlarına yanıt verebilmek ve eğitim alanındaki gelişmeleri yakalayabilmek için kaçınılmazdır. Günümüzün gelişmiş eğitim sistemleri, öğretmenin sürekli olarak kendi uygulamalarını eleştirisel bir bakış açısıyla izlemelerini ve öğretimsel uygulamalarını geliştirmeleri gerektiğini vurgulamaktadırlar. Daha iyi öğretebilmek için, öğretmenlerde yansıtıcı düşünme yoluyla kendi öğretme süreçleriyle ilgili başarılı oldukları uygulamalarının yanısıra eksiklikleri hakkında da farkındalığın yaratılması gerekir. Öğretmen yetiştirme programlarının da, öğretmen adaylarında yansıtıcı düşünmeyi teşvik edecek uygulamalar ve süreçlerden geçmelerini sağlayacak öğrenme ortamları yaratacak şekilde düzenlenmesine gereksinim olduğu bir gerçektir. Bu tür öğrenme ortamalarının aracılığıyla öğretmen adaylarında yaşam boyu öğrenenler olmaları gerektiği bilincinin yaratılabileceğine de inanılmaktadır. Öğretmen adaylarının yansıtıcı düşünme vasıtasıyla bilgiyi yapılandırma sürecinden geçerek kalıcı öğrenme süreçlerini tecrübe edecekleri düşünülmektedir. Bu çerçevede, bu çalışma İngilizce Öğretmenliği Bölümü'nde okuyan dört, iş tecrübesi bulunmayan, yüksek lisans öğrencisiyle gerçekleştirilmiştir. Söz konusu öğrencilerin öz-izleme uygulamalarıyla ilgili algıları ve tercihleri, sınıfiçi durumları betimleyen kısa hikayeler (vignettes) yardımıyla araştırılmıştır. Bu amaçla, yarı yapılandırılmış mülakat aracıyla araştırmanın verileri toplanmıştır. Çalışmanın bulguları, en çok tercih edilen öz-izleme uygulamalarının yazılı anlatı (written narrative) ve video kaydı (videorecording) olduğunu göstermiştir. Çalışmanın katılımcıları ayrıca yapılandırmacı yaklaşıma dayalı öğretmen öğrenme programının yararlandıklarını belirtmişlerdir.