The nature of teacher education

The nature of teacher education

1. Teacher training

   • Short term and inmediate goals
   • Refers to activities directly focused on a teacher's present responsabilities
   • Goals from a deveploment perspective
     • adapting the texbook to match the class
     • Techniques for giving learners feedback on performance
     • Learning how to use effective strategies to open a lesson
   • New strategies in the classroom

2. Teacher deveploment

   • Longer-term goals
   • Seeks to facilitate growth of the teachers´understanding of teaching and of themselves as teacher
   • Involves examining different dimensions of a teacher´s practice as a basis for reflective
   • Goals from a deveploment perspective
     • understanding how our roles change according to the kind of learners we are teaching
     • Understanding the kinds of desicion making that occur during lessons
     • Developing an unsderstanding of different styles of teaching

3. Professional development for language teachers

   • What cognitive processes do we employ while teaching and while learning to teach?
   • What is the nature of teacher knowledge and how is it acquired?
   • How do experienced and novice teachers differ?

4. Conceptualizations of a teacher learning

   • Teacher learning as skill learning
     • This view sees teacher learning as de deveploment of a range of different skills or competencies, mastery of which underlies succesful teaching
   • Teacher learning as a cognitive process
     • In teacher education it encourages teachers to explore their own beliefs and thinking processes and to examine how these influence their classroom practice.
   • Teacher learning as personal construction
     • This educational philophy is based on the belief that knowledge is actively constructed by learners and not passively received
   • Teacher learning as reflective practice
     • Reflection is viewed as the procces of critical examination of experiences, a procces that can lead toa better understanding of one´s teaching practices and routines

5. Novices and experts

   • Some of the differences between noviced and experienced language teachers seem to lie in the different ways in which they relate to their contexts of work
     • Advantages experienced teacher to the novice
       • A richer and more elaborate knowledge base
       • Better understanding and use of language learning strategies
       • greater fluidty and automaticity in teaching

6. Personal and institutional perspective

   • Personal perspective
     • Areas of professional deveploment
       • Subject matter knowledge
       • Pedagogical experience
       • understading of learners
       • understanding of curriculum and materials
   • Institutional prespective
     • Goals
       • Career deveploment
       • Enhanced levels of students learning

7. Collaborative Learning

   • Most succesful organizations depend on people working effectively together in teams

8. Self-directed learning

   • Inquiry asking questions about one´s own teaching practices
   • Self-appraisal Assesing one´s teaching and deveploment on the basis of evidence from oneself
   • Experience, Personal experience becomes the basis and stimulus for learning

9. Implementing professional deveploment

   • identify a strategy to explore the topic you are interested
   • Decide what kind of support you will need
   • select a colleague or colleagues to work

10. Implementing a professional development: the institutional perspective

    • Determining the needs of both the institution and its teacher
    • Setting goals for professional deveploment
    • Selecting the participants