“We teach according to how we were taught” is an adage we have seen in action in many English language classrooms, including mine. Because I learned the English language through its structures—nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs—I taught my first English class that way. After 25 years of teaching, I am still looking for the most effective ways to teach English. I realized that I am still a learner, and that some of my best teachers are my students. I understood this even more because of my research on teacher cognition.
In the 1970s, teaching was viewed from a behaviorist perspective which regards learning as mastering what were considered effective teaching practices (Richards, 1998). Effective teaching was therefore understood as imitating the skills that were passed on by a mentor (i.e., expert teacher) to the novice teacher (Wallace, 1991). This all changed in the 1980s when teaching began to be seen as a thinking activity. Good teaching is now defined as developing one’s personal and practical theory of teaching (Richards, 1998). Teachers are seen to have the capacity to make decisions about their teaching and understand the processes and underlying principles that inform these decisions. This shift in perspective of teaching from a behaviorist to a cognitivist lens changed the way teaching was researched. From describing teaching through recording and measuring publicly observable behaviors, research on teaching moved to unearthing the underlying motivations of teaching, concept formation, and knowledge acquisition (Brown, 1993).
This is the core of teacher cognition— “the unobservable dimension of teachers’ professional lives” (Borg, 2019, p. 1). Teacher cognition is an umbrella term that includes, among others, teachers’ beliefs, knowledge, theories, attitudes, assumptions, motivation, commitment, resilience, and identity (Borg, 2006, 2019; Burns et al., 2015). Initial research on teacher cognition focused mostly on these aspects of teacher cognition devoid of the teachers’ context but later considered the sociocultural contexts of teaching and learning (Burns et al., 2015). As Borg (2019, p. 6) asserts, “individual teacher cognition does not originate or operate in a vacuum and it is influenced in powerful ways by a range of personal, physical, sociocultural, and historical milieus which interact, in both remote and immediate ways, to shape who teachers are and what they do.” In fact, Borg’s (2006) language teacher cognition framework identifies the following factors that shape and are shaped by teacher cognition: schooling, professional course work, contextual factors, and classroom practice.
It is from the lens of teacher cognition that I have always viewed what we do as teachers in the classroom. As teachers, we do not come into the classroom tabula rasa. We bring with us our experiences as learners, as well as our beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge. In fact, we probably would have noticed that in our first few years of teaching, we were teaching the way we were taught by our teachers. However, through the years, as we gain more experience, attend more teacher preparation and education courses, and participate in conferences, our teaching and knowledge repertoire expands. Our beliefs and assumptions also change, eventually shaping our instructional practice. Similarly, what happens in the classroom eventually becomes part of our belief system that influences our instructional practice.
From this perspective, then, we can argue that our learners are also our teachers. What our students do in our English class may challenge what we know about language teaching. Why are my students not interested in the language activities I give? Why are my students not motivated to read the texts I give? Such questions make us rethink how we understand student engagement and learning, for example.
Perhaps, we need to consider gamification in our activities since most of our students are into gaming. Games have many features that make them “powerful vehicles for human learning” (Shaff & Quinn, 2017). The games our students play teach them to solve problems, entice them to communicate, cooperate and compete with their peers, and promote creative thinking—skills necessary in the 21st century (Shaff & Quinn, 2017). Thus, the games they play may teach us a thing or two about how we can design our activities.
Similarly, maybe we need to consider what our students read now. They do not just read written texts. Our students are exposed to and are engaged with different types of multimodal and digital texts that entail a different set of knowledge, skills, and competences that will help them cope and responsibly deal with these texts. Therefore, we learn from our students that we may have to expand our definition of literacies and rethink the kinds of texts we give in class.
Clearly, our students may help us develop classroom techniques and approaches suitable to our own contexts and situations. What we need to remember, though, is that teacher cognition presupposes that we engage in reflective teaching. It is important that we critically “self-observe, self-analyze and self-evaluate their [our] teaching practice with a view to effecting desired changes.” (Kumaravadivelu, 2003, p. 33). Without critical reflection, we may not recognize the teaching moments our classes afford us.
References
Borg, S. (2006). Teacher cognition and language education: Research and practice. Continuum.
Borg, S. (2019). Language teacher cognition: Perspectives and debates. In X. Gao (Ed.), Second handbook of English language teaching. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58542-0_59-2
Brown, D. H. (1993). Principles of language learning and teaching (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall Regents.
Burns, A., Freeman, D., & Edwards, E. (2015). Theorizing and studying the language-teaching mind: Mapping research on language teacher cognition. The Modern Language Journal, 99(3), 585–601. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12245
Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003). Beyond methods: Macrostrategies for language teaching. Yale University Press.
Richards, J. (1998). Beyond training: Perspectives in language teacher education. Cambridge University Press.
Shaff, R., & Quinn, J. (2017, April 25). 12 examples gamification in the classroom. TeachThought. https://www.teachthought.com/the-future-of-learning/examples-gamification/
Wallace, M. (1991). Training foreign language teachers: A reflective approach. Cambridge University Press.
