COVID: A Disruption to Reflect on Our Wisdom of Practice in Language Teaching
I’m very much looking forward to leading my workshop on Wisdom of Practice in Language Teaching at the JALT international conference. The workshop is based on the research I have carried out in the area of language teacher cognition. Allow me to provide you with some background to that research project and then entice you to join my workshop so that you can start (or continue) your journey in interrogating your wisdom of practice to improve your classroom practices.
Every teacher implicitly or explicitly develops a set of conceptual principles upon which their theoretical and practical teacher knowledge is based (Chappell, 2014). These philosophical stances inform how a teacher will identify and evaluate what is going on in the classroom, in order to make pedagogical decisions. For second language teachers, these philosophical stances are related to the nature of language, how languages are learnt, and how language should best be taught. Taken together, they form the basis of a second language teacher’s developing wisdom of practice (Shulman 2004), or WoP in short. WoP is an important factor to consider in language teacher education, as well as teacher-driven professional learning and development. Indeed, finding ways to support teachers in articulating, interrogating, and developing their WoP is a powerful way to assist them in better understanding and developing their teaching practices. That’s what I want to introduce in the workshop.
In my work with language teachers I have found that some can articulate their WoP quite clearly and in a well-defined way. Yet others find this a difficult exercise to undertake. However, I argue that it is essential for teachers to learn to do this well so that they can understand what underlying principles are affecting how they respond to immediate events in the classroom. These principles also affect what and how we decide to teach in the language classroom, and how we interpret, or negotiate, set curriculum and syllabi.
Further, while it is clearly the case that teachers’ WoP and their classroom practices often align, it can often be the case that they do not (Chappell & Bodis, 2015; Farrell 2007). Among other opportunities, this suggests that teachers may benefit from reflecting on their WoP with a view to enhancing their ability to articulate it clearly and specifically, which will hopefully lead to sustained innovations in their classroom practice. The lack of a heuristic to address this opportunity is the main motivation behind my work. I will present this heuristic at the workshop.
Finally, COVID-19 has forced us into rooms on our own, doing our teaching through computer screens. The disembodying of our teaching practice has left many pondering best practices for the multimodal, virtual, online language classroom. Do our students learn differently now? Is language still the same “thing” that it was before, when we were together in classrooms? Is our pre-COVID-19 pedagogy still appropriate now, and will it be appropriate when we hit the “new normal”? Let’s think about these questions in November!
References
Chappell, P. J. (2017). Interrogating your wisdom of practice to improve your classroom practices. ELT Journal, 71(4). pp. 433-444.
Chappell, P. J., & Bodis, A. (2015). The impact of teacher cognition and classroom practices on IELTS test preparation courses in the Australian ELICOS sector. IELTS Research Report Series Ref: 2015/6
Farrell T. S. C. (2007). Reflective language teaching: From research to practice. New York, NY: Continuum.
Shulman L. S. (2004). The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
