Implications for Professionals

In this penultimate section of the chapter, the discussion turns to the implications of this study for professionals, including: TESOL certificate course designers, teacher trainers, and trainers of trainers, as well as practitioners in other training contexts that employ reflective practice as a model for professional development. The section will discuss several ways in which the findings of this study might inform the practices and procedures of other teacher- training professionals. It will argue, following Richards’ model of “description leading to informed action” (Richards, 2005: 5) that applied CA studies have the potential to transform practice by playing an enabling role in professional development, and in the training of trainers who implement professional development for others. I will discuss how this study

and its findings can potentially play several roles in this process of informing and enabling professional development in this field.

Arguably the most important implication of this study for the teacher-training profession is that it provides a systematic description of processes of reflective practice, as it is

collaboratively enacted through the talk-in-interaction of feedback meetings. The description, explication, and presentation of these practices and procedures have the potential to inform, and impact upon the practices of other teacher-training professionals on other courses, by offering empirical evidence of practice. In my experience one of the problems for teacher- training professionals, particularly those who work on TESOL certificate courses, is that trainers’ experiences of these courses tend to be very insular. Although a trainer will, in the course of their working life, collaborate with and experience the practices and procedures of their immediate colleagues, there are usually very limited, if any, opportunities for trainers to experience, observe, or reflect on the working practices of professionals from other

institutions.

As a trainer on the SIT course in Bangkok, I was lucky enough to be mentored by, and then work with a number of other SIT trainers from other host institutions. And in the course of these processes, observe, experience, and reflect on their practices, with the goal of positively impacting on my own professional development. However, there were no opportunities to engage with trainers from other courses, such as CELTA and CertTESOL, and I suspect for many trainers, opportunities to experience the practices of others are very limited. Providing opportunities for trainers to experience and reflect, on a wider range of experience than their own, has a clear potential to positively impact on the continuing development of their practices; to see how trainers in other institutions, with differing approaches and practices carry out feedback; to see if, and how, they implement reflective practice in their contexts, and to be able draw upon and reflect on a broad range of approaches. The position taken by this study is that the description of professional practices generated through micro-analytic research can be used as a launch pad for practitioners to ‘see’ what their peers are doing in their actual daily practices in other contexts, and then discuss, consider, and reflect upon these practices with the intention of developing their own.

6.4.1 Course design and reflective practice

Let us first consider aspects of the course design and the way they position collaborative reflective practice and experiential learning for the trainees on the course. As discussed (in section 2.4.1) the material that is available to prospective participants on this course explicitly forefronts and describes the notion of reflective practice through experiential learning. In this sense then participants are introduced to these notions and ‘told they are important’ before they even apply for a place on the course. There may be some participants who do not attend to these materials before applying but the majority are likely to engage, to some extent, with the materials presented for a course, before applying.

The strong positioning of the models of reflective practice and experiential learning adopted by the SIT course is further illustrated by the scheduling of workshop sessions. Workshop sessions on the SIT course are similar to a classroom or seminar context. They consist of a combination of trainer talk, which some might describe as ‘input’, talk between the trainees in the form of dyads and small-groups, as well as whole-class interactions. They focus on a whole range of topics from teaching methodology, through language instruction, to group discussions about classrooms and culture. Below is the schedule of workshop sessions for the morning of the first day of the SIT course, reproduced from the trainers’ schedule:

Thursday, March 11 (Day 1) 8:30 – 5:00 7! hrs 8:30 – 8:40 Welcome (10)

8:40 – 9:15 Introductions / Get to know you (35) 9:15 – 9:45 Intro to Reflective Practice (30) 9:45 – 10:00 Break (15)

10:00 – 10:35 Logistics (35) (Binder, Bioblurbs) 10:35 – 11:20 Experiential Learning Cycle (45) 11:20 – 12:00 Pre-Course Task Review

On the first morning of the first day of the course, immediately after introductions to the trainers and other trainees, is the first ‘input’ session of the course: an introduction to

reflective practice. The stated aim of this session on the trainers lesson plan is that by the end of the session the trainees will be able to “develop an understanding of what reflective