Primary school teachers’ trajectories

In the next section the trajectories of the primary school teachers in the sample will be presented.

Phase 1

Graduation: BEd in teaching English

(good methodology training and English language instruction)

Facts Perceptions

Primary school teaching

Ordinary and special classes with an increased number of hours

Teaching primary school English from Grade 1 to Grade 8 Narrowing exchange programme

with British school New coursebooks

Compulsory training opportunity considered intensive, serious and

valuable

Close and supportive relationship with one colleague Consolidation and hardening Learning by working with children One teacher as counterexample

The omnipresent need to learn The wish to have more competitions

organised for children

Future Phase 0

10 years of experience

Phase 2

Maternity leave: motherhood as learning opportunity

Statled

Difficulties of facing 8th graders Overtrained by college

Diagram 14Primary school teacher, Participant 10

Hard-earned confidence. Participant 10 is a teacher that has such a good reputation in her school that all the parents would like her to teach their children. At the age of 40, with ten years of experience, she thinks she “has become strong enough spiritually” to stand in front of the pupils whereas, when she started, she was “startled” and felt uneasy in front of especially the eighth graders. Like participant 2, she has also found the golden mean between being strict and getting on with the children:

I used to be a lot more lenient, my main purpose was to make them love the English class and make them like me, too. It is still one of the most important things for me, but I am not ready to give up everything for this cause. Because this ruined discipline, the fact that I wasn’t strict enough. And I had to regret it afterwards. So, over the years, I have had to become harder, even though I am not that type, I am not a merciless teacher, but you have to…, I had to conclude that you have to….

This participant experienced both general teacher training college preparing lower primary school teachers and English teacher training (see Diagram 14). She has a positive opinion of both, although in retrospect she finds some of the subjects irrelevant and useless, for example literature: “The problem, really, is not the fact that I can’t use it here but the fact

job she is doing now, citing the example of the passive voice that she never teaches because they never get to that point in the eighth grade. She had ample hands-on methodology training, many class observations and teaching practice opportunities to test herself as well, since there was a teacher training primary school closely collaborating with the college in the city where she studied. “What I missed in my education I couldn’t get at the college,” she remarked at one point, meaning the programmes she had attended were excellent, but a teacher needs practical experience as well. Since graduation she has worked at the school where she is working at present, but was away on maternity leave for a couple of years.

Becoming a mother, she says, was a turning point, an influential experience as regards her teaching as well. She looks at children differently now, “I am much more understanding, but as a mother I have to be a lot stricter than before, so I am able to be stronger here at the school with the children. Tears or scenes or something like that won’t have an impact on me”.

Apart from motherhood, the other turning point she considered important was the exchange opportunity with a British primary school, which meant a lot to her and to her pupils in terms of contact with an English-speaking culture, real English speakers and real English. She regrets that the exchange programme has now been transformed into a correspondence programme, in which children swap letters and emails but no actual visits are realised.

Participant 10 does not have many English language teaching related training opportunities at her school, but she attended an in-house training session on how to use the interactive board before the interview and a partly online compulsory training course at the British Council the previous spring, which gave her abundant input and sharing opportunities with colleagues from other schools. She is also working in close collaboration with a colleague in her school, with whom they exchange ideas, activities, even “flashcards”. (See Appendix O for the complete interview with Participant 10)

Phase 1

Phase 2

Graduation: MEd in teaching Russian and English ( three lecturers with great impact)

Facts Perceptions

Special primary school Teaching English Selected students No discipline problems

Teaching all boys classes in a vocational secondary school

Routinization, stabilization Disappointment of not being able to

use techniques learnt at conferences Learning a lot from own practical

experience Enthusiastic Enjoyed teaching English seen as special subject

compared to Russian Teacher of English as role model

Teaching for fun Facilitating access to knowledge in library: a new mission or withdrawal Aware of continuous need to have both language and methodology

training

Phase 4 Phase 0

21 years of experience

English becoming a compulsory subject

Phase 3 Teaching and trainee supervision in primary school

Trainees’ lack of knowledge in methodology and English

Library support teacher Teaching primary schoolchildren

The need for more time, more consultation

Diagram 15Primary school teacher, Participant 3

Four in one. Participant 3 was 55 years old and worked at the time of the interview both as a teacher and a librarian in the library of a well-known primary and secondary school in Budapest. Most of her working life was spent in a primary school, although she had the opportunity to work in a vocational secondary school as well (see Diagram 15). She now has some nostalgic feelings about the beginnings of her career since she started to teach English in an era when English was seen as a subject for the privileged as the compulsory foreign language was Russian: “There were practically no discipline questions in these classes, we worked under laboratory circumstances”. She felt fully prepared, was enthusiastic and felt she was making progress. “I enjoyed teaching,” she says. Her university education thoroughly prepared her for the realities of the Hungarian context, which meant “a tape recorder, a piece of chalk and the textbook” at the time. She considers the impact of her secondary grammar school English teacher really important in her apprenticeship of observation. As she says: “I see myself using some of his techniques, they haunt me”. One methodology trainer in the Russian programme and some lecturers in the English programme provided her with the input

and motivation she needed. The turning point, she says, came with the abolition of Russian as a compulsory foreign language and the opening up of the coursebook market. First, students were fascinated with the new colourful coursebooks and the possibility to learn English instead of Russian, then motivation dropped, especially when English became an unavoidable

‘quasi compulsory’ foreign language to learn.

As regards her own development, experiential learning is the kind of learning she has benefited the most from. Although she regularly attended conferences during her career, she felt that the games colleagues played with one another at training courses or at conferences could not be used in her own all-boys classes, for example. “The same thing cannot be done with a group of teenage boys the same way,” as she put it. She says she also benefited from dealing with trainees as she works at an institution where trainees do their practice teaching and visit classes: “I had to meet the expectations I set them, the ones I expected them to meet, I myself had to perform just as well”.

If we examine the trajectory of this teacher, we will see that she had four careers in one, which is a rather rare phenomenon. After working as a primary school teacher, she went to work in a secondary school, then returned to the primary sector and became a mentor and she is now gradually leaving teaching and becoming a library support teacher. This appears to be quite unique in the Hungarian educational context and presupposes at least four stages of intensive adjustment and adaptation. (See Appendix H for the complete interview with Participant 3)

Phase 1

Graduation: MEd in teaching English (lack of teaching practice, abundant theory

Facts Perceptions

Primary and secondary school teaching

Inexperienced Lack of confidence

Full of ideas Creative Sense of achievement

Attached to one class Lots of support from a quasi mentor

and close collaboration with a colleague Observing each other’s classes

Some good teachers who she looks up to

The need for seeing alternatives

Future Phase 0

3 years of experience

Some years elsewhere

Diagram 16 Primary and secondary school teacher, Participant 6

Second thoughts. Participant 6 is the second least experienced teacher in the sample (see Diagram 16). She appears to be at the beginning of the stabilization phase with a lot of uncertainties and doubts but all the more enthusiasm and creativity. She is aware of the impact that her previous teachers had on her teaching even though she is a re-starter in the sense that she previously worked elsewhere, not in education, for some years. She says she needed a great deal of courage and determination to enter the profession. She heavily relies on colleagues and especially a quasi mentor, actually the head of the English teachers, who later was appointed the vice-principle of the school, and tries to counterbalance her inexperience.

She pointed out that she had learnt a lot of tricks not from books but from her colleagues, their best practices, which she now considers her own. In her interpretation, she is now beginning to “feel equal” to experienced colleagues, like the teachers in the Huberman study (1993, p. 224). She also works closely with a teaching partner, with whom they teach the two sub-groups of the same class in the same time slot, a relationship that again contributes to the alleviation of her self-doubt. She says she has learnt the most from more experienced

colleagues because there is a class observation scheme in operation at the school and teachers are in the habit of “knocking on the door and asking if they could just come in and observe a lesson in an empty slot”. She believes she can benefit from observing teacher colleagues as well as observing groups and classes “at different stages of the learning process”. She even says visiting classes in another institution might be of value, since “seeing alternatives” is essential.

Regarding her initial teacher training, she says the following:

Participant 6: I found the practical training too little. There were too few opportunities to see classes and too few occasions to put into practice the theoretical knowledge we had. They tried to convey a lot of methodological information, in theory. I found the practicum too little.

Researcher: So, you met too few children?

Participant 6: Yes, they allowed too few children close to us.

This graduate working in Budapest thinks she had little chance to experience what it is like to work with children in real classrooms, unlike the graduate from a provincial teacher training college, Participant 10, who works in a provincial city.

In the life of this participant, colleagues and relationships with her pupils play a far more important role than formal organised training courses. For her, working with a group for two years and seeing the outcome was a very important lesson, one from which she concluded that teaching was the right profession for her. She had a sense of achievement as well as a close attachment to the pupils, which she found enriching and convincing as regards whether to stay in the profession or not. “We spent two years together … I saw where we started from and where we got … From the feedback I received from the children, the results we achieved together, I concluded that those two years were successful,” she explains. (See Appendix K for the complete interview with Participant 6)

If we attempt to identify some common threads in the development of these primary school teachers, we see a similar pattern to the one that emerged from the secondary teacher interviews (see Diagram 17). Autonomous learning is not present in these career cycles but

another self-initiated kind of learning merits attention: experiential or reflective learning. The reasons for less self-study are unclear; one reason may be that there happened to be no autonomous respondent in this sub-sample. There seems to be more interaction between the experience and development of primary teachers in this sub-sample than in the case of secondary teachers. Cooperative ways of learning are also given more attention, and while formal education is also present, it does not seem to have such a great importance as at secondary level. Another notable difference is that problems are rather seen as changes in external factors, new tasks or events in personal life.

Career Entry

Experiential learning

Changes Teacher education

Cooperative learning

Professional Development

Formal learning opportunities Apprenticeship

of Observation

Diagram 17Primary teacher itineraries

One such external factor may be the changing role of English as a subject in Hungary in the 90s, or an event, such as when one of the participants was becoming a mother. It is very difficult to place the third participant on this diagram since she has very little experience, however, in her career up till now, the role of relationships and cooperation, be it with colleagues or pupils, is of greater importance, too.

In document DOKTORI (PHD) DISSZERTÁCIÓ (Pldal 189-197)