Aviva Ueno, Meiji Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan

I intend to go on teaching as long as I feel I can learn from my students and those around me. If I feel too self-confident . . . that there is nothing for me to learn, this will be my last moment as a teacher. (R, an expert teacher)

These words resonate deeply with me because I believe that teachers who want to do their best for their students must be lifelong learners and continue to grow and develop professionally. According to Lange (1990), "Teacher development is a term used in the literature to describe a process of continual intellectual, experiential, and attitudinal growth of teachers" (p. 250). Bailey, Curtis, and Nunan (2001) suggest that Lange's definition is helpful to work from because it does not confine teacher development to a certain point in a teacher's career, but that development can continue throughout the teacher's career.

Bailey, Curtis, and Nunan (2001) mention several ways to pursue professional development, including attending conferences, keeping a teaching journal, and engaging in chat groups with colleagues. Additionally, they suggest that there are multiple reasons to engage in professional development, including acquiring knowledge and skills and keeping up with changes in our field and the world around us.

I have engaged in professional development throughout my teaching career, particularly using different forms of reflective practice, such as keeping a teaching journal and reflecting with colleagues. However, the sudden change to online learning, with minimal institutional support, caused by the global pandemic, which started in 2019, prompted me to reflect on my practice through self-observation using my Zoom class videos. My primary motivation was to develop strategies to cope with and adapt to what I found to be a challenging transition to the mode of online instruction so that I could provide meaningful lessons for my students during the trying times of the pandemic.

Self-observation is one way to reflect critically on one's practices as a form of reflective practice. Richards and Farrell (2005) describe reflection as "the process of critical examination of experiences, a process that can lead to a better understanding of one's teaching practices and routines." (p.7). Richards and Farrell (2005) suggest that using self-observation to objectively collect information about one's teaching behavior and practices through lesson reports and audio or video recordings can be a basis for making decisions about possible behavioral and other changes. In addition, self-observation can reveal many areas teachers are unaware of, including how they attend to their learners, their meta-language, timing and pacing, and delivery of instructions (Wajnryb, 1992).

I decided to self-observe after reviewing a Zoom class video before posting it for students who had not attended the online session. I was reluctant to watch the video as watching oneself on video is generally an uncomfortable experience. Still, after getting over the embarrassment of seeing myself on screen, I was amazed at how differently I remembered the lesson compared to what I saw in the video. When I returned to my teaching journal to check what I had written for that particular lesson, it became clear that the perceptions I wrote in my journal differed at times from the reality I saw in the videos. I was not satisfied with what the video revealed regarding my performance. This realization that I was not living up to my standards of teaching, combined with my overall anxiety about teaching online, prompted me to conduct action research using my Zoom class videos for reflection and professional development.

The Context

I teach academic English classes at a university in eastern Japan. For this project, I chose to focus my research on a third-year-required academic English course that focused on the global issue of migration and followed the CLIL methodology. I chose this course because it was my most challenging course, partially because of the difficult content but also because it met during the first period on Monday mornings, which seemed to be a particularly unpopular time slot for my third-year students. The class had 25 students (24 female, one male), with 16-18 attending regularly. (Note: Some students had received permission to be excused from the online synchronous classes due to health or technical issues.) Their TOEFL ITP scores ranged from 367-457 points with an average score of 423 points, equivalent to TOEFL iBT 36-37 and CEFR A2-B1.

What observing my class videos revealed

Observing my class videos was an emotional experience. While I was able to observe many positive moments, there were also a lot of moments that made me doubt myself and all my years of training. One of the most surprising observations was moments that I had "teaching amnesia," when I seemed to have completely forgotten everything I knew about delivering a clear, organized lesson. For example, as a trained TESOL professional, with decades of experience, I take pride in my ability to give clear explanations, model tasks effectively, and provide scaffolding for my students before they perform the assigned tasks in groups. These were areas that I was confident in when teaching in the classroom. Still, somehow, on Zoom, I was so anxious that I seemingly forgot how to support my students in these obvious ways. This lack of support led to students being sent off to breakout rooms without a clear idea of what they were supposed to be doing once they got there and coming back to the main room, having accomplished very little in their group work.

Another observation that dismayed me was the realization that my students were not internalizing the content of the class materials as deeply as I had thought they were. Although my students were diligent about doing their homework, which usually consisted of either reading an article or watching a video and answering comprehension questions they reported on in class, on Zoom, they could only produce answers verbatim from the text. Moreover, they could not expand on the content or respond to additional questions because they had not fully understood the materials. I recognized this pattern as linguistic productivity without linguistic creativity, defined by Curtis (2017) as"The production of language that has been memorized by learners who may not fully understand the meaning of the language they are producing." (p.48). In the classroom, I avoided this situation by monitoring groups to identify which questions were problematic, and by having students respond to questions with notebooks closed so they would not be able to read the responses directly from the text, but on Zoom, this was much more challenging.

Other issues, including time management and excessive teacher talk, also emerged. It was clear that I needed to make significant changes to my practice to do better for my students, so after a great deal of reflection, reading of literature, and consulting with colleagues, I began experimenting with modifications to my teaching.

Some successful modifications to my teaching

I began trying out different strategies, some more successful than others, to address the issues I had observed in my class videos. For example, to address my "teaching amnesia," I created live documents that could be edited by myself and my students in real-time. These documents included clear instructions, models, and useful expressions for classroom tasks, which I reviewed carefully with students before sending them to breakout rooms. Each group member was assigned a role for the breakout room discussion (facilitator, reporter, note-taker, contributor) and was given specific instructions on what to do to have a successful discussion. Once students were in breakout rooms, I monitored their progress by checking the notes as the note-taker wrote them into the live document and could comment and support the groups via the document and by visiting their rooms as they worked. These documents helped keep the lessons focused and on track and gave students valuable notes to take away from the class to review later.

Creating live documents also helped me tackle the aforementioned linguistic productivity without linguistic creativity issues. Rather than having students share their answers to the comprehension questions they had answered for homework, I created live documents with the answers to the questions taken directly from the text or video. Then I provided a space underneath the answer where students had to work together to either paraphrase or summarize the answer to the question. In addition, I added follow-up questions that were designed to elicit linguistic creativity. The live document allowed groups to read and learn from the responses written into the document by the other groups, and I could use their response to engage the class in discussion once they returned to the main room.

With each successful modification, I began to regain my confidence in teaching. I tried out additional strategies, including more effective use of the chat box and the Zoom polling function to make my online lessons more interactive and impactful for my students.

The benefits of self-observation

The benefits of self-observation using Zoom class videos for professional development are numerous. Not only was I able to identify issues that I could take steps to resolve, but I could observe many positive aspects of my teaching, particularly in how I interact with my learners. In addition, although watching myself on video was often painfully self-embarrassing, I discovered that stepping out of my comfort zone through this process was an effective form of professional development that helped me learn about myself and grow as a teacher and a researcher.

References

Bailey, K.M., Curtis, A., & Nunan, D. (2001). Pursuing professional development: The self as source. Heinle / Cengage Learning.

Curtis, A. (2017). Methods and Methodologies for Language Teaching: The Centrality of Context (Applied Linguistics for the Language Classroom). Red Globe Press

Lange, D. (1990). A blueprint for teacher development. In J. C. Richards & D. Nunan (Eds.), Second language teacher education (pp. 245–68). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. C., & Farrell, Thomas S. C. (2005). Professional development for language teachers: Strategies for teacher learning. Cambridge University Press.

Wajnryb, R. (1992). Classroom observation tasks: A resource book for language teachers and trainers. Cambridge University Press.