The role of practical teaching experience

Practical teaching experience is undeniably a crucial element in the life of teachers.

Maintaining Kwo's (2010) comparison between teachers and trees in her edited collection Teachers as Learners²⁹, practice is to teachers, then, what soil is to trees. In this section I will first mention some of the relevant functions that language teaching practice has for teachers³⁰,

29The cover of this collection shows trees. This image is used as a metaphor for teachers as "a form of vital energy" and is accompanied by the Chinese proverb: “It takes ten years for growing trees, but a hundred years for growing people".

30 Many of the following studies had not been set up to investigate the specific meaning of practice, therefore I will be reading between the lines of research accounts on teacher development.

and then go on to the limitations that have been proved in research.

In a paper concerned about the role of the teacher in classroom language learning, Breen (1991) looks specifically at the teaching processes of 106 experienced teachers and aims at discovering teachers' understandings of classroom work. The teachers were asked to write down what specific techniques they used to help the learners during the lessons and to explain why they adopted each technique. From the hundreds of justifications given by the teachers and clustered within seven major pedagogic areas of concern (Breen 1991: 222-227), the focus on the learner accounted for half of all the reasons for the techniques that teachers employed. From Breen's report we can draw the relevant insights that while teaching, teachers learn to make sense of the situations at hand: they become skilled at attuning to learners' reactions and needs, involving the learners, taking into consideration their background knowledge and their cognitive processes, and reflecting on the appropriate ways to deliver the subject matter to the learners. Despite the inconsistencies between the techniques employed and the reasons teachers gave, as Breen notes, through their practical experience in the classroom teachers create their own meanings, and develop their implicit theories as well as their own conceptualisations of their roles as teachers.

The scope of the teaching experience is also evident in Denscombe's (1982: 257-260) analysis, according to which classroom experience is the salient factor that shapes teachers' attitudes and activities. Moreover, Denscombe (ibid. 260) adds that teaching practice fosters teachers "practical competence" which enables teachers to give pragmatic responses to a variety of classroom pressures. Furthermore, Richards (1996) points to another function of practical teaching experience for teachers: from the experience of teaching they develop operating principles, that Richards calls "maxims". They represent “working principles” (ibid.

282) and are, as such, vital for teachers to manage their classroom work. That teachers' expertise is inconceivable without practical teaching experience is confirmed by other scholars. Tsui (2003: 11-12) argues that experts' know-how is experiential and the tacit knowledge that experienced teachers develop is an essential part of their "effortless and fluid"

performance.

Finally, the pervasiveness of teachers’ propensity to rely on their practical teaching experience (Day 1999: 50-52) is reflected in the widespread endorsement that professional inquiry as well as teacher development programmes should be centred in practical experience.

Many scholars (Loewenberg Ball & Cohen 1999: 23-4; Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin 1999: 378; Gruber & Rehrl 2005) maintain that a crucial feature of development programs is to allow teachers to learn about practice during practical programmes and to develop their experience-based knowledge.

So far, practical teaching experience has been proved to be a valuable source of ideas and reflections as well as the time when teachers form and test their own hypotheses, learn to make fast and appropriate decisions to the teaching situations, and above all recognise, react and adapt to learners' needs in flexible ways. At the same time it is also agreed that the experiences gained from practical teaching experience alone are not a sufficient basis for professional development (Richard & Lockhart 1994: 4). The research suggests that many experienced teachers develop routines and strategies that become almost automatic and do not involve a great deal of conscious thought or reflection (cf. Parker 1984, quoted in Richards and Lockhart 1994: 4). Furthermore, practical teaching experience can indeed render teachers, as practitioners, blind:

[…] as a practice becomes more repetitive and routine, and as knowing in practice becomes increasingly tacit and spontaneous, the practitioner may miss important opportunities to think about what he is doing. […] And if he learns, as often happens, to be selectively inattentive to phenomena that do not fit the categories of his knowing in action, then he may suffer from boredom or “burn-out” and afflict his clients with the consequences of his narrowness and rigidity. When this happens, the practitioner has “overlearned” what he knows.

A practitioner’s reflection can serve as a corrective to overlearning. (Schön 1983:

61; emphasis in bold added)

In his seminal work, Schön points out that the knowledge gained in the classroom through practical experience alone may not lead the practitioners to challenge assumptions and routines: teachers may develop frameworks of taken-for-granted assumptions which create order and continuity and enable them to survive. In this way their learning may be limited to

‘single loop learning’³¹, which is a way of responding to new situations without changing the framework of assumptions (cf. also Myers & Clark 2002). Although this learning mechanism allows teachers to control new situations with minimal effort, it also reduces the teachers’

motivation to review their practice. Day’s (1999: 24) suggestion is therefore that teachers

“engage in ‘double loop learning’ in which tacit assumptions are made explicit, challenged and reassessed”. However, he also makes clear that this approach to learning is difficult to achieve on one’s own. Woods (1996: 252), too, points out the same limitations and explains that this may be the case when “some unit of behaviour has become an unconscious routine and [is] carried out as [an] unanalyzed chunk”. Similar arguments resonate also by Rudduck (1988: 206-8) who notes that routines make it difficult to step back. He adds that 'blind habit' is a strategy for avoiding deliberation, after which practitioners may lose their capacity for 'constructive discontent'.

Further limitations have been put forward with respect to teaching practice as insufficient for

31 This definition is derived from Argyris & Schön 1974, quoted in Day 1999: 23-5.

teachers' growth. Tsui (2003: 13, drawing on Dreyfus & Dreyfus' 1997 model of expertise) for example, indicates that whereas practical teaching experience is undoubtedly a crucial factor in teacher development, however, "it does not necessarily result in the development of expertise". Some teachers never seem to improve despite their long experience. According to Tsui, practical teaching experience will only contribute to expertise if practitioners are capable of learning from it. To learn from it teachers are required to constantly reflect on their practices³². In line with Tsui, some researchers, for example Berliner (1993: 121), warn us not to confound teaching experience and teachers’ expertise. Similarly, in his analysis of the limits of experience, Day (1999: 50-52) warns about an over-reliance upon learning from direct experience, because this ignores that ‘experienced’ teachers, despite their expertise, are often “imprisoned” by familiar situations. This leads Day (ibid. 52) to conclude that “learning from direct experience of practice alone indicates at best limited growth”.

Lipwosky (2010: 53) also seems aware of these limits when he emphasises the relevance of outside impulses for teachers in order to build on their own professional knowledge. He relies on findings from studies which show that the absence of external input hinders the growth of professional knowledge. The risk, he warns, is that teachers are actually strengthened in their beliefs and continue their practical teaching experience without questioning their own convictions. Brumfit (1995: 35) reiterates these positions when he claims that “[t]here are limits too to practical activity as a basis for development” and argues for the necessity of

“cross-breeding of ideas” as “the basic requirement for any individual, who is concerned with true professionalism”.

Further caveats are mentioned by Appel (2000), who engaged in an in-depth analysis of everyday language teaching experience of English teachers in German secondary schools with the main aim of discovering what they experience during their everyday teaching, how they process it and what kind of knowledge it generates. Appel's investigation uncovers that practice is not neutral (ibid. 15), it affects teachers' personalities, perceptions, emotions and biographies³³, which then serve as a basis for its evaluation³⁴. Among the relevant results by Appel (ibid. 278-9), a fundamental feature of practice and its management stand out: the immediate character of the teaching situations leads teachers to think in terms of tasks that

32 This will be elaborated on in the subchapter 2.4.4.

33 Not dissimilarly, Woods (1996: 69) points out that teachers interpret a teaching situation in the light of their beliefs about learning and teaching.

34 This dynamic interaction between action and event is highlighted also by Woods (1996: 63) who draws on the role of schemata in cognition (Rumelhart 1980) to explain how the schema influences the perception of the event; and the perception of the event influences the evolution of the schema.

solve problems and to bypass the theoretical knowledge acquired in teaching and methodology courses. As a consequence, practical teaching experience is not monodimensional but rather compex and constantly facing dilemmas. "Erfahrungswissen", the specific knowledge that according to Appel teachers develop in practice, is highly contextual and situative. Appel points to the risk that this "Knowledge-through-experience"

may become inert and that the development task of teachers consists exactly in avoiding this.

And even in this very delicate task, as Woods (1996: 285) indicates, experience plays a vital role.

Therefore, some researchers advocate "reflective practice" (Kelly & Grenfell 2001: 29;

Gruber & Rehrl 2005: 11) which connects knowledge, reflection and practical teaching experience. In this sense, the concept of practical teaching experience is extended and includes the teachers' active processes in the construction of their professional competence³⁵.

SUMMARY

To sum up, practical teaching experience serves many vital functions in the development of teachers. From the perspective of teachers as learning professionals, the research findings presented in this section indicate that teaching practice represents a key component, from which teachers learn enormously and develop the ability to cope with their professional task.

Research emphasises some tendencies, such as the teachers’ propensity to over-rely on their teaching experience and to focus on the learners. Although teachers' expertise seems inconceivable without the indispensable role that practical teaching experience plays for their professional growth, many researchers argue that practical experience is not enough to be a productive source of change and represents only a starting point in helping teachers to grow.

Because of automatised routines, teachers may not be prompted to review and challenge their behaviour, which hinders their professional self-renewal and consequently innovations in practice. In addition, practice may also imply teachers’ isolation, not only in the classroom but also isolation from professional discourse (Braslavsky 2002). Therefore, sustained opportunities for continuing development are thought to be fundamental and the necessity of

“cross-breeding of ideas” (Brumfit 1995) has been advanced. Research addressing this issue will be the focus of the next section, which examines the effects of teachers’ programmes on the teachers‘ development processes.

35 Similarly, Allwright (2003) sees practical teaching experience as exploratory and proposes "Exploratory Practice" as a blend of theory and action in practice, whereby teachers “practisise theory and theorise practice”

(cf. also Kane 2002 and Tsui 2003). The role of theoretical knowledge in teacher professional development will be elaborated further in the Chapter 2.4.5.