Abstract
‘Collaborative teacher development is an increasingly common kind of teacher development found in a wide range of language teaching contexts’. Teachers can collaborate with other teachers in writing materials, books, doing research, and analysing observed lessons. Even the format and the content of a teaching journal can be developed in cooperation with other colleagues. The article reports on collaborative teacher development of English language teachers at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) in Moscow, Russia. The study used a survey to investigate needs for teacher development at NRU HSE. Findings reveal that not all teachers practise self-observation; many teachers believe that feedback must be personal; the majority of teachers find peer observation subjective; almost all teachers have teaching journals but their understanding of what a teaching journal is seems to be erroneous. These results indicate that without a clear understanding of the listed above issues and their implementation in a given context professional development can hardly be possible. The author analyses the results of this research and makes suggestions about teacher development as a continuous and collaborative process.
Highlights
‘Collaborative teacher development is an increasingly common kind of teacher development found in a wide range of language teaching contexts’
Ongoing teacher education in English language teaching circles at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) has been given a new focus as a result of the introduction of a new concept of teaching English at the university (HSE, 2010) and new requirements for teacher professional assessment
One teacher answered that keeping a teaching journal can seriously add to a teacher’s success, and another teacher was sure that it enables teachers to make comparative analysis of their work and seek ways of professional development on a regular basis
Summary
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Elena Velikaya, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Malaya Pionerskaya, 12, Moscow, Russian Federation, 115054. Language teacher development has been looked at as attendance of teacher training courses and seminars (inside and outside the university) which offered (luckily for the teacher) 72 hours of training and a certificate of attendance This has always served as a proof that the knowledge was updated. In the worldwide teaching communities teacher professional development has made a significant step forward: more self-directed, more collaborative, and more inquiry-based forms begin to emerge. They are ‘teachers’ informal social and professional networks, including their own classrooms’, which function as ‘powerful sites for professional learning; teacher inquiry seminars, peer coaching, cooperative development, teacher study groups, and critical friends group ‘Self-reflection provides a window on the relationship between the individual and the social world, highlighting both constraints on and possibilities for social change’ (Hawkins & Norton, 2009, p. 34)
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