Practising what we preach: Teaching teachers about self-directed learning through the integrated use of self-access environments in the teacher training course

Abstract

The author suggests that many teacher training courses merely encourage lip-service to methodological developments because they fail to provide participants with an opportunity to actually experience the methodology—to see it from the inside as it were. By failing to practise what we preach we may be sending a different ‘message’ from the one we think we are sending. The paper illustrates one way of setting up and running a self-access centre, by describing a specific situation, and contains examples of some of the materials used. “Teachers, like parents, need to find a way of fostering independence, but an independence based on the development of internalized criteria, not simply on the rejection of authority...” (Allwright 1978).