Journal on Efficiency and Responsibility in Education and Science

1-11

Authors: Rachel Ginsberg

This article analyzes the ways in which action research during preservice teacher education influences the development of a critical inquiry stance. By following eight preservice teachers as they conducted action research in their final semester of student teaching, this article demonstrates how action research created the space for preservice teachers to engage in practical and critical inquiry, which allowed participants the opportunity to develop a critical inquiry stance, to varying degrees. Discussed are the disparate ways participants thought about the meaning they made and the knowledge they generated during their action research assignment. The freedom action research granted preservice teacher to make meaning of their classroom instruction, generate knowledge, and bridge the gap between theory and practice, instruction and learning, and their students and themselves, allowed for the development of a critical inquiry stance. Findings suggest that through inquiry, preservice teachers disrupted the hierarchy of knowledge generation in teaching, as they theorized instruction, problematized pedagogy, and improved their teaching practices.

26-35

Authors: Sabire Pınar Acar, Eda Akgün Özpolat, İrem Çomoğlu

Contemporary approaches to professional development (PD) involve investigating ways of bottom-up, self-directed practices while addressing various needs of teachers. Yet, utilized as a tool in such practices, classroom observation (CO) is not considered to promote teacher professional learning since it is generally regarded as part of the appraisal process. Thus, this exploratory case study aims to explore the insights of four EFL teachers about CO tailored by teachers themselves for their professional growth in a higher education context in Türkiye. Focusing on a bottom-up practice, the teachers pursued a collaborative act on their PD in this specific context. Based on the participants’ previous and current experiences of CO, the data were collected through semi-structured interviews and teacher educator notes. The inductive thematic analysis of the data revealed three major interconnected themes providing pathways toward CO as a PD tool with special emphasis on the generic features of the teacher-tailored CO process. The discussion of findings highlights the importance of empowering, collaborative, and sustainable practices in teachers’ professional growth. Implications are included for English language teacher development programs.

46-54

Authors: Kenan Dikilitas, Asli Lidice Gokturk Saglam

Practitioner research has been gaining prominence as a means for professional development (PD) since it provides teachers with opportunities to reflect on, comprehend, and transform their practices. However, there is a dearth of research that examines how teachers learn in online communities established to mentor teachers across the world to learn how to do research for PD. This study explores teacher researchers’ use and integration of their research experiences in their teaching as well as uncovering how they develop professionally. To this end, we contacted and interviewed 5 international teacher researchers who participated in our 5-week online training in 2021 within the scope of TESOL’s Electronic Village Online (EVO) and shared the preliminary findings. Interviews lasted around 50 minutes during which teachers reflected on their research experience in retrospect and self-reported how this influenced and informed teaching. Transcripts are analyzed thematically through the NVivo software. Findings indicate that our participants reported practical improvement in their instructions not only during but also after the research. They also highlighted how research implementation with their students created opportunities to revisit their own beliefs and the corresponding practices. The study has implications for in-service teacher educators and research mentors who provide online research-driven PD.

65-80

Authors: Hanh Dinh, Lan Nguyen Thi Huong

This qualitative study reports the results of sensemaking when teacher-practitioner inquiry in professional development (PD) is carried out for 120 Vietnamese K-12 and college teachers. The PD was designed to prepare teachers to teach with different newly-approved English language coursebooks using a genre-based systemic functional linguistic approach (SFL). During scaffolds in workshops, teaching staff guided teachers in cooperating and drafting lessons using genre-based SFL, examining the lessons’ impacts on students’ responses. Teachers also journaled to unravel the knitted instructional complexities and express their willingness to adapt to emerging teaching practices. Data were collected via the video recordings, teachers’ interviews, and content analysis of their inquiry products. Four themes representing the complexities in teachers’ sensemaking of scaffolded collaborative PD were: 1. Improved teacher agency in terms of planning and instruction; 2. Research-based experiential learning creating a venue for intrinsic motivation to innovate in instruction; 3. An overwhelming feeling of inequity between high and low-resourced instructional situations; 4. The mismatch between teachers’ advocacy for desired deep-learning approach and the traditional ideology of rote learning for exams.

83-84

Authors: Raúl Enrique García López

Published in 2019, Inquiry and Research Skills for Language Teachers is written to assist teacher educators in the design of research methodology courses in English teacher education programs. Conceived in the authors’ conviction that most research courses do not succeed in empowering teachers’ professional practices, the book resorts to Exploratory Practice to configure an approach that appeals to the interrogation of pre-service teachers’ attitudes and beliefs toward research to increase engagement and foster inquiry skills. In the book, Kenan Dikilitaş and Ali Bostancioğlu lay out a step-by-step guide for teacher educators to design research courses that are more connected to the realities of future teachers, in the hopes of achieving a long-lasting effect on teachers’ professional identities. The book addresses an audience that is familiar with the challenges teachers face when trying to bridge the gap between theory and practice and implement evidence-based teaching.