Overall evaluation of the third cycle based on interview comments

In addition to the reflective assignment above, I conducted few informal interviews and a formal interview in cycle three. The comments showed noticeable

engagement and positive attitude towards the content of the reading sessions, as noted below by one of the participants in an interview in cycle three:

I personally believe that graphic organisers are a very important and fun way to help students think critically, as they are often daunted by the various texts they are required to read throughout any given semester. This makes reading tasks less challenging and more manageable.

Selecting reading was based on participants’ ranking in the needs analysis stage. This experience confirmed my conclusion from the needs analysis results that readiness is key success factor. Attitude and awareness of one’s needs can significantly impact on both effectiveness of INSET (Maliki, 2013) and teacher reflection in INSET (Farrell, 2014). It is important that trainers capitalise on any prior willingness of a participant to learn and his/her preparedness to engage in certain themes. The quote below from the third cycle interview shows how teachers’ unpreparedness may impede their implementation of INSET content:

Unfortunately… As some people were bogged down with work, they did not yet have the opportunity to try these out, but said they would in the future. I am one of these.

In addition to readiness, teachers generally liked the training techniques, which were employed to introduce some strategies to teach reading (e.g. line-ups, exit tickets, paired reading, jigsaw reading, etc.). ‘[Reading games] were extremely engaging. The teachers became very competitive, so, it was clear [that] they were really enjoying themselves. People love games!’ The data from the first and third cycles showed that these techniques resulted in a generally positive atmosphere, which was conducive to learning, as seen in the quote below on Jigsaw reading from the third cycle interview:

It was a very effective way to cut up large amounts of text into digestible sections. It makes it less stressful for students, especially local students who are often very reluctant to read lengthy texts. A jigsaw reading task is far more interactive and enables student to decipher meaning and report on what they’ve read. This type of information-sharing works very well with students in this culture.

The quote above illustrates how interactive and stress-free activities could foster engagement. The participants also complimented the competitive activities and

deemed that these are suitable for the local culture, as seen in the quote below from the third cycle interview:

We played charades as well. Another extremely popular and very engaging activity… Competition has been strongly promoted in this culture in the past 15 years as Qatar wants worldwide recognition for its sports events. This culture of competition has filtered down into the educational system. This activity clearly showed us that games and interactive activities work well.

The quote above shows how the local context can influence small classroom activities, such as competitions. In the second cycle, traditional techniques resulted in a rather passive atmosphere. Towards the end, my research seemed to have achieved the objectives related to reading INSET, as described in the quote below in an interview after the last workshop in the third cycle and in this study:

The presenter himself was very engaging: positive, dynamic, and always encouraging. He made everyone feel at home and welcomed. This sort of warm friendly atmosphere is something we all need to strive for and we had a great role model for that. Basically, I found all of these workshops really worthwhile. Some of the workshops here in our department are pretty boring, but this series on reading was both valuable and stimulating. I think all the participants came away with some useful ideas and best practices. I certainly did.

Teachers work in a larger sociocultural context and ‘no model of good teaching can be framed in terms of an individual teacher abstracted from social context’

(Roberts, 2016, p. 163). Understanding the social context is pivotal for the success of the programme (Oliver & Dempster, 2003). Teachers’ sense of needs is

influenced by the social, political, and economic climate. INSET effectiveness ‘often depends on this following wind of change’ in these contexts (Roberts, 2016, pp. 225-226). In this study, contextual influence, either positive or negative, was felt by the participants in all stages. Often, students were reported to ‘have had a lot of inconsistencies in their schooling’, as seen in the quote below form an interview after cycle three:

Contextual factors influence INSET and teacher attitudes. Most of us felt that because of the constantly changing educational policies, Qatari students have

not benefitted from these educational transitions. They’ve (policies) resulted in a lot of problems, particularly language issues.

Similarly, within a bigger picture, reading was viewed by the participants as: ‘students don’t read in their own language, so, reading in a second language is seen as a burden’. They also perceived reading as an outcome of societal factors where ‘traditional practices based on conversation and discussion leave little time for reading [and] young people prefer to communicate via social media’. Therefore, the participants believed that the solution to reading issues must be addressed on the cultural level, as seen in the quote below from an interview in the third cycle:

In groups, we discussed the need for reading to become a bigger part of the local culture and how reading needs to be encouraged, especially by parents reading to their children from the time they are very young. This is something new to the local culture.

I conducted the reading INSET sessions with different cohorts of teachers over the four years of implementation. Every group of teachers had its own needs related to reading INSET. For instance, the group in the first cycle wanted to learn how to teach reading, whereas those in the third cycle wanted to learn the design of reading assessment. I found it necessary to adjust my methods and content according to the needs of my trainees to facilitate the effectiveness and sustain their buy-in.

Online communication, such as that occurring in an online forum, was used to promote a sense of community among participants and to discuss the classroom impact (see section 8.2.1), as seen in the quote below from the third cycle:

We were shown how to post threads and share our views on teaching reading. It was interesting to learn what other people thought. Some views were quite surprising. The discussion that followed was also stimulating.

In retrospect, ICT served the targets that I set in my study. The participants reported their appreciation of its educational potential, as seen in the quote below from the third cycle interview:

We talked about interactive web-based learning tools, such as Kahoot.it and Socrative, which can be accessed by students from their mobile phones. Most

teachers were familiar with these applications and commented positively on their usefulness.

However, on certain occasions, ICT was partially embraced by the participants. For example, the interactive online forum was used to encourage communication in the third cycle, but I struggled to promote it among teachers who preferred other forms of communication. This is consistent with what participants themselves reported about the local context: ‘young people prefer to communicate via social media websites like Snapchat and WhatsApp’.

At the outset of the study, ICT was expected to be the top preferred training topic. However, the participants voted for reading. After one of the workshops in the second cycle, one of the participants reported that ‘the trainer failed to incorporate technology’. Despite common beliefs in the value of ICT, it was not clear for the trainer and teachers when to integrate ICT and how to capitalise on its value. Another comment from the second cycle stated: ‘Finally, she did not integrate any smart classroom features into her lesson’. Anecdotal data from my experience with teachers in the local context involves counter-productive outcomes, owing to technical issues or the lack of proper infrastructure. In fact, combining new technologies with effective pedagogy has become ‘a daunting task for both initial teacher training and in-service training institutions’ (Jung, 2005, p. 94). Moreover, ICT confusion seemed part of a bigger educational confusion during the early stages of the national reform, as seen in the quote below from the third cycle interviews:

Qatar has been undergoing great educational changes, from an Arabic-medium educational system to the incorporate[ion of] an English-based CLIL

curriculum in some subjects. This started around 2001… Then, after the Arab Spring of 2011, many nationals clamoured for the reintroduction of Arabic as the primary language of instruction [that] the educational system reverted back to Arabic. This has caused confusion in schools and among educators… It sort of came [into] full circle. As a result of all these changes, [the] Qatari students have had a lot of inconsistencies in their schooling.

To conclude, despite the research-evidenced potential of ICT, such potential cannot be realised easily (Dawes, 2001; Ghavifekr et al., 2016). Balanskat et al. (2006)

argued that although teachers appear to acknowledge the value of ICT in schools, they continue encountering obstacles during the processes of adopting these technologies into their teaching and learning. The pedagogical use of ICT in education, i.e. training teachers on how to integrate technologies in their teaching (Jung, 2005), was outside the core scope of the study.