COSTUMBRES Y TRADICIONES DE LAS COMUNIDADES

In this section the emphasis will be on exploring whether and how the teachers differ with respect to their need for support in professional development, and to their perceptions of that development.

4.4.2.1 Need for support in professional development

When asked whether they think they have needed to be supported over the years in their professional development as language teachers, all of them in both subgroups responded affirmatively. They did not differ in this respect and seemed to recognise that teachers’ support is necessary.

The reasons for continual support are diverse, two of them are quoted below, one sounding more obvious than the other. Both, however, were observed across the subgroups. The first more obvious aspect resonates in the teachers’ yearning to keep abreast of innovations, as teacher A54 clearly states:

[Interview A54: 236] professionalism for language teachers means for me, yeah, keeping up with changes, in what the clients need, keeping up with changes in society, not just in teaching methodology but also in society.

The second aspect that the teachers mention regarding their need to be supported in their professional developmentis represented by the tendency to forget, with expressions such as “man vergisst es einfach”. The teachers thus articulate the difficulty of retaining so much information or knowledge:

[Interview I312: 62] when you attend seminars for a while you tend to forget that you have incorporated something new

Interestingly, this problem is not discussed in the literature on teacher development, although it even seems to affect basic things like the timing, i.e. the way the teachers break down and sequence the materials in short segments in order to keep the level of attention and motivation high:

[Interview A54: 107-108] Q.: Do you think teachers need support or training in professional development training over the years?

Yes, I do, I think we need it. And the interesting thing is that we need to review things, I’m sure, because many things we forget. For example that you need to break things down into blocks of five minutes and ten minutes, and you know, … you forget it! Because you grow comfortable with the learning group, and they feel comfortable with the way things are going, and you get a little lax, yeah? [laughs]

One of her expectations attending the KommUNIkation workshops was to help herself bringing basics back to mind:

[Interview A54: 71] I'd have to go back and remember the lessons that I learned, … I might have forgotten some of the very valuable things that I learned. I'd have to get back into it and reactivate them. Overall, the teachers do not vary with regard to this aspect of professionalism: they want to nurture their professional selves and be protected it against “forgetting”. Attending teachers’ workshops seems to represent one possible way of combatting this tendency, and this result also implicitly attests to the teachers’ attempts to monitor themselves. The need for support that the teachers feel equals the help needed which we commonly refer to as ‘scaffolding’ (Vygotsky 1978) and which is regarded as “notwendige Hilfe zum Weiterkommen” (Klippel & Doff 2009: 182).

In the next section, another aspect of development will be addressed in order to explore whether the teachers vary in their perceptions of it.

4.4.2.2 Perceptions of development in teaching

As far as the teachers’ awareness of their own development is concerned, almost all the teachers seem to perceive changes in their teaching. Almost all of them can see their own

development very clearly.

The clearest change that emerges from their accounts consists primarily in an increase in confidence. Teacher P73 reports being able to deviate from her lesson plan in contrast to the past, both because she can react better to unplanned situations at hand (the faces of the students) and because she has developed more sense of what is appropriate in each situation:

[Interview P73: 155-6] Q.: Is there any development you have noticed in your teaching over the years? Ja… also z.B. kann ich besser improvisieren. Es ist auch manchmal wichtig, improvisieren zu können. Nicht weil du die Fotokopie vergessen hast, ich meine es in dem Sinn, dass ich … früher hatte ich meinen Plan für den Unterricht, und jetzt habe ich ein besseres Gefühl, ob etwas nicht geht. …weil ich die Gesichter von den Leute sehe und denke „ok, heute lassen wir die Grammatik“ Das kann ich viel besser. Früher war ich mehr… weil ich selber nicht so sicher war und dann habe ich mich an das gehalten, was ich gehabt habe. Jetzt kann ich besser … Improvisation – dieses Wort klingt manchmal nicht so schön, aber man muss auch manchmal improvisieren können, oder verändern, oder sich an die Situation anpassen.

As a result of increased confidence, she is able to anticipate learners’ needs or problems or not to panic when she experiences a clash of opinions, for example when learners’ have demands that are “inappropriate” in her opinion because they are counterproductive for learning:

[Interview P73: 161-4] Q.: Also, inwiefern hast du dich verändert?

Sehr viel, muss ich sagen… und auch vom Unterrichten her… wenn ich an den Anfang und an jetzt denke, dann ist alles anders.