Teacher Education

Professor: Dr. Tajeddin

Prepared by: Mozhgan SoleimaniAghchay

The Curriculum of SLTE

By

Kathleen Graves

The Scope of Curriculum Planning for SLTE

The focus of planning an educational program:

• Who will be taught?

• What will be taught?

• How it will be taught?

• How what is learned will be evaluated?

A Framework for Curriculum Planning

A

Understanding

teacher-

learners: What

they know

D

Designing a program

What How

they will they will

be taught be taught

instructional

What how practices

to teach

D1 D2

B

Determining

goals: what

teachers

should know

and be able

to doC

Understanding

content

E

Planning ways to evaluate how effectively D achieves B

Overview of Changes in Conceptualizing the Knowledge Base of Lang. Teaching

Conceptions of the knowledge base of language teaching:

• Content/ Pedagogy

• Theory/ Practice

• knowledge/ Skills

until the 1970s little attention was paid to the contexts in which teacher-learners would teach

Teachers’ Prior Knowledge and How Teachers Learn

In the 1980s

• Attention shifted from what teachers should know to who they are, what they already know, and what they actually do when they teach.

• Attention focused on how teacher-learners’ prior knowledge and histories affect what and how they learn and how they make sense of experience.

• The role of prior knowledge changed thinking about the knowledge base of teaching.

The Role of PracticeEngaging in practice can be understood in

two related ways

• First, as classroom practice: opportunities to observe teaching, to prepare for teaching, to teach, to reflect on it, to analyze it, and thus to learn it / from it.

• Second, participating in communities of practice, communities of people, entrenched in social systems that operate according to tacit and explicit norms, hierarchies, and values. Teachers need to understand why they are the way they are, how they are positioned in those contexts, and how to develop power to negotiate and change them.

LEARNING AS A

DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS• Learning to teach is an ongoing,

developmental process. • The knowledge base of teaching is not a

fixed set of knowledge, skills, and understanding, but an evolving one for each teacher.

• For the SLTE curriculum this means that • content needs to be tailored to learners’

needs• one aim of the curriculum is to help

teacher-learners develop tools to continue their learning once the program ends

DEFINING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE OF TEACHING: ASYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE BASES

Richards (1998) Domains of content

Roberts (1998)

Types of Language teacher knowledge

1) Content knowledge (of target language systems, text types)

2) Pedagogical content knowledge (how to teach / adapt content to learners)

3) General pedagogic knowledge (classroom management, repertoire of ELT activities, assessment)

4) Curricular knowledge (of the official curriculum and resources)

5) Contextual knowledge (of learners, school, and community)

6) Process knowledge (interpersonal and team skills, observation and inquiry skills, language analysis skills)

1) Theories of teaching (that guide SLTE program, teacher’s personal theories)

2) Teaching skills (essential general repertoire, LT specific repertoire)

3) Communication skills (general communication skills, target language proficiency)

4) Subject matter knowledge(specialized concepts, theories, and disciplinary knowledge)

5) Pedagogical reasoning and decision-making skills (both when preparing and during teaching)

6) Contextual knowledge (how society, community, and institution affect and shape teaching)

LANGUAGE TEACHING SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE

From a curriculum perspective, three issues are salient

1) There is no clear consensus around what teachers need to know about language in order to teach it

2) There is consensus that proficiency (however it is defined) in the target language is part of the knowledge base of teaching a language

3) A common rationale for inclusion of content such as sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, second language acquisition, or literature in the SLTE curriculum is its relevance to language teaching.

Instructional Practices in the SLTE Curriculum

For effective teaching:

• Help teacher-learners understand, examine, and challenge their previously unexamined conceptions and beliefs about teaching

• Provide them with concepts, frameworks, and theories to understand, talk about, and organize their thinking about language teaching and learning

• Support their development of a repertoire of both general and language teaching-specific teaching skills

• Help them develop intercultural awareness and communication skills

• Contextualize their learning by providing opportunities to observe teaching, to practice teaching, and to develop skills in preparing, teaching, and evaluating lessons and curricula for real contexts

• Scaffold their development of skills to inquire into and critically reflect on experience

• Help them develop skills in becoming not only knowledge consumers and evaluators, but also knowledge-generators

Instructional Practices in the SLTE Curriculum(cont.)

To be effective, sustained opportunities for practice require ongoing planning and collaboration. Collaborations involve reciprocal learning among teacher-learners, teachers, and teacher educators. Such partnerships are important for three reasons:

1) They apprentice teacher-learners into the discourses and norms of schooling

2) They provide a “reality check” for teacher educators on the relevance of what they teach in the SLTE context

3) They provide fresh perspectives for practicing teachers

Collaborations and Partnerships

Evaluation and CurriculumEvaluation in curricular terms has two focuses:1) Participant learning: based on the goals of

the program2) Program effectiveness: looks at how effective

the program is or was in helping participants learn

• Some key considerations for curriculum designers are how to integrate the parts and the whole: assessment of individual skills and courses and assessment of the participant’s overall ability to teach, e.g., what is the relationship between a teacher’s linguistic knowledge as assessed on a linguistics test and her ability to teach language?

• A final consideration is how to balance external criteria such as state licensing standards with internal criteria

ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS

Three issues that require further exploration and research:

1) whether the teacher education curriculum is educating teachers to replicate practice or to challenge and change it. Recent research suggests that it is imperative to educate teachers not as “servants of the system” (Shohamy 2005) or as “helpless subjects” (Lin 2004), but as professionals who are “responsible and involved leaders” (Shohamy 2005) so that they can have an impact on practices (such as testing) that de-skill teachers and are unhelpful to learners.

2) Teacher educators themselves must guard against becoming “servants of the system,” particularly in the area of evaluation. Teacher education has not been immune to the standards movement that currently dominates education. Standards, as products of bureaucracies, are neither locally created nor easily changed, thus forcing teacher educators to adhere to - or adapt to - ways of describing teaching that may not fit their teacher-learners.

ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS(CONT.)

3) The knowledge base of SLTE is also a system of knowledge bases. Teacher educators must “practice what they preach” and hold themselves accountable to the same criteria to which they hold teacher-learners, for example adapting content to learners and inquiring critically and reflectively into their own practice.

ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS(CONT.)