ANTECEDENTES HISTÓRICOS EN EL SIGLO

Very often, when judging a lesson, one judges from one’s perspective and preferred teaching styles but overlooks the benefits of other teaching styles and methods. This kind of judgment would be unfair to teachers who teach in a different way. One common phenomenon in Hong Kong is that good teaching is usually judged according to the criteria and the latest teaching trends stipulated in the curriculum guide. This can be shown in the Excellence Indicators in the Chief Executive’s Award for Teaching Excellence (Education Bureau, 2016). Self-directed learning and co-operative learning have become the norms in teaching performance. Teachers are deemed effective if they organize group work and use information technology to facilitate learning, but ineffective if they just use chalk and talk. Nevertheless, a ‘good’ teacher is defined by students in various ways, as Palmer (2007, p.72) argues:

…from years of asking students to tell me about their good teachers. As I listen to those stories, it becomes impossible to claim that all good teachers use similar techniques: some lecture non-stop and others speak very little, some stay close to their material and others loose the imagination, some teach with the carrot and others

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Thus, SBCD is not just about methods. As Fullan (2008) mentions, the school-based curriculum should not be too prescriptive. Teachers should add a personal touch to the curriculum, and they should be given room to do so, just as Palmer (2007, p.72) mentions, “The connections made by good teachers are held not in their methods but in their hearts meaning heart in its ancient sense, the place where intellect and emotion and spirit and will converge in the human self”.

The key responsibility of a curriculum developer is therefore to provide a freedom of choice but not a specification of methods. Pajak, Stotko and Masci (2007, p.134) offer a practical way of helping new teachers develop their teaching methods, and I think curriculum developers may use that as their framework to fine-tune their curriculum planning:

[Curriculum developers] should make a deliberate effort to honor and legitimate perspectives and practices that differ from their own preferred styles of perceiving and judging reality. The starting point for helping [the subject] teachers succeed, in other words, should be the development of the teacher’s preferred style. Once that style has been successfully developed, of course, the teacher should be encouraged to expand his or her repertoire of strategies and perspectives.

Following the above suggestion would be what McIntyre and Jones (2014, p.38) describe as “development of critically engaged teachers and pupils”, which means teachers should be given the opportunities “to articulate their passions, values and beliefs about what English could and should be within safe spaces in which open discussion and negotiation of emerging beliefs can take place”. What they are emphasising is that teaching is not a technical practice but a reflective one, and I think this can be equally applied to school-based curriculum implementation.

Freeman (1998) uses an analogy that likens curriculum to cooking. A school-based curriculum is like a recipe. How it is delivered would depend on the teachers themselves, whose job is to transform the abstractions of curriculum, materials, and pedagogy into actual practice (ibid). Teachers may have their own secret recipe. They may cook according to their preferred methods, experiences and beliefs, but in the end, the taste of each lesson is different and personalized. This contrasts sharply to the government-led SBCD programmes in which teachers had to follow all the

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‘official’ procedures in order to achieve standardised learning outputs (Law, 1999). In the latter case, the experience of studying in school is no different to eating in a worldwide fast-food chain restaurant where you have no choice but have to order and eat the same food that everybody eats even though it may not be too salty or too bland for you.

Just as a menu planner who provides tailor-made ingredients for the cooks and lets them transform the ingredients to the taste desired by the diner, a curriculum developer should take the role of providing tailor-made materials for teachers, who will then apply their craft knowledge to cater for pupils’ needs.

Further research

This study focuses on only one aspect of influence on SBCD, namely teaching styles. However, further research is suggested as to what extent other personal and external factors could have affected the delivery of the SBC at the classroom level. Such unknown factors may include teachers’ beliefs and experiences (Nespor, 1987; Richardson, 1996; Richards, Gallo & Renandya, 2001;Sahin, Bullock & Stables, 2002), the washback effects of Hong Kong’s public examinations (Pong & Chow, 2002; Choi, 1999), the school appraisal (Walker & Dimmock, 2000) and school inspections (Whitby, 2010). In addition, as mentioned in the section concerning the limitation of observation, the impact of my mind style on the study’s design and analysis is in dispute, and there is a need for further research about the related impact. Likewise, the decision not to involve the participants in discussion of the lesson observation running logs could be perceived as a limitation to the study. Although I argued that post-observation discussion might not be worthwhile in the Chinese context (Walker & Dimmock, 2000), a further study is recommended in the area of post-observation discussion in Hong Kong. Finally, a longitudinal study with numerous points of observation or with more participants involved is recommended. Although, as argued earlier in this chapter, it may continue to create snapshots of the lessons, the longitudinal study will enlarge the base of knowledge by teachers, and subsequently unearth more issues that may have otherwise overlooked in this research.

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Appendix 1 – Outline of the School-Based Curriculum on Workplace Communication