As teacher educators, we often wonder how to construct our practices in ways that meaningfully support the growth of the teachers in our classes. One important facet of this work is engaging in reflective practice. Reflective practice involves carefully questioning the assumptions and values embedded in our teaching. The power of reflection is portrayed through its frequent framing in the literature as “an instrument of change” (Avalos, 2011, p. 11). However, most of the research on reflective practice and teacher learning has been done as it relates to the practices of classroom teachers. There is a much smaller but growing body of work that examines the role of reflective practice in how teacher educators learn to teach and how they go about improving their practices. This flourishing area of research emerges from the work of scholars engaged in self-study of teacher education practices (Russell, 2004).

In my own quest to better understand how to engage teachers in meaningful teacher education experiences, I went back to teach secondary language learners full time in 2011–12 and engaged in self-study of my practices, my learning, and my needs as a teacher re-experiencing the demands of the classroom (Peercy, 2014, in press). One of my goals was to attend to how and in what ways I drew upon the research-based knowledge I taught in my teacher education courses in my classroom teaching. I found that once I was teaching secondary learners full time again, my commitments were to the immediate pressures of time—papers needed to be graded, lessons planned, projects created, students helped, and parents responded to.

Findings from my self-study also highlighted that I had infrequent evidence of spending time being reflective about my practices and consciously considering how my practices related to a research or theoretical basis. My data indicate that I realized at the time that I was not being as reflective about my teaching practices or as conscious of theory as I went about planning my teaching as I thought was important and that I also felt pressed by juggling many demands simultaneously. In the second month of the school year (September), I journaled about how I had no idea how teacher candidates, especially those in the 1-year intensive program in which I teach, could possibly keep up with all the demands of being new teachers, teaching full time, and being full-time students. By February, I wrote in my reflective journal about the impact of my secondary teaching experiences, causing me to rethink my approach to my teacher education courses: “I feel like I am really relearning the intensity of teaching every day and it is making me think a lot about the kinds of assignments, and content and quantity of reading that I give teacher candidates, especially [those in the 1-year intensive program].” In my journaling in February, I also began to write down ideas I had regarding the reframing of my teacher education courses to focus much more on classroom routines and practices.

Clearly, then, while in the classroom, I did not have a lot of time or mental energy to be reflective about how I was teaching something or to consider what the research says about how best to teach language learners, given a particular situation. Re-experiencing the daily pace of teaching caused me to attend more carefully and deeply to how little time new teachers had for this. I noted in my journal that

I don’t know how much one thinks about theory when they are just trying to survive as a teacher. . .there has to be some time for reflection. . . [In my life as a teacher educator] I have gotten used to not having to have something ready to teach every single day and to being able to think about things in more peace and quiet rather than the almost constant din of kids.

This experience has transformed my approach to teacher education. I now am more mindful of new teachers’ developmental trajectories and have begun to engage with work in core practices (CPs) to focus much more deliberately on how to engage in CPs with language learners (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2009). CPs make what teachers do (their practice) more central to the endeavors of teacher education. The work in CPs emphasizes identifying a small number of practices that are key for student learning and are possible for novice teachers to enact, such as those identified by teacher educators at the University of Michigan through TeachingWorks. CPs engage teachers in a disciplined cycle of inquiry, in which they examine, rehearse, enact, and reflect upon those CPs across both teacher education courses and field settings. Much work remains to be done in identifying CPs for effectively teaching English language learners, to determine what teachers learn from engaging in CPs cycles of inquiry, to explore how teachers apply CPs to their practicum experiences and their inservice positions, and to explore the academic outcomes of their students. It is going to be up to us to contribute to this conversation and identify how focusing on CPs with teachers of language learners contributes to powerful learning experiences for both teachers and their students.

REFERENCES

Avalos, B. (2011). Teacher professional development in Teaching and Teacher Education over ten years. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27, 10–20.

Ball, D. L., & Forzani, F. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(5), 497–511.

Peercy, M. M. (2014). Challenges in enacting core practices in language teacher education: A self-study. Studying Teacher Education, 10(2). Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17425964.2014.884970

Peercy, M. M. (in press). Do we ‘walk the talk’ in language teacher education? Teacher Education and Practice, 28(1).

Russell, T. (2004). Tracing the development of self-study in teacher education. In J. J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 1191–1210). London, England: Routledge.

Dr. Megan Madigan Peercy received her PhD from the University of Utah and is an assistant professor in Second Language Education & Culture at the University of Maryland. Dr. Peercy has experience as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and Spanish teacher across a variety of ages and contexts, ranging from pre-K through adults.