Secondary teacher trajectories

Let us start with secondary school teachers since five out of the 12 teachers interviewed work in secondary schools and two out of the remaining teachers had some secondary experience. First, the trajectories of experienced secondary school teachers will be described. All three experienced teachers below come from elite backgrounds in the sense that they all work in reputable secondary schools in the capital and a provincial town.

Phase 1

Phase 2

7 years of maternity leave

Graduation: MEd in Russian and English (insufficient methodology training)

Facts Perceptions

Special elitist school Able students

in specialized dual language section of the school

Homogeneous classes

Normal, ordinary classes Mixed level students preparing for

B2 level exams New coursebooks

New technology

Routinization, stabilization, disappointment Not the level we had earlier Looking for challenges (higher level

groups, civilization classes) The need adapt to new coursebooks, new technology

The wish to study abroad?

Lack of time Wish to keep job Struggling and tiring Sense of achievement Students getting thorough

grammatical background High demand on inexperienced

teacher

Influential Teacher of German

Doubts as to ability to adapt later

Future Phase 0

16 years of experience

One year in England

Diagram 8Secondary school teacher, Participant 7

Stability. The professional career of this 47-year-old Participant 7 can be described with the following words: Stability, strength, calmness. As it can be seen in Diagram 8, she has worked in the same provincial town ever since she graduated, which provides her with a

secure and reliable working environment. She knows her colleagues very well, as she says,

“we are stable people in this school, most of the teachers were taken on when I was, and we have been working here together ever since”. She would like to keep working in the same institution in the future, and feels comfortable working there: “I am not willing to work elsewhere, others, however, would love to come and work here”. She considered the survival period after graduation easy and difficult at the same time. Working with the pupils was easier then than today, because her homogeneous groups were made up of carefully selected, hardworking students. As this is an elitist dual language school, all students undergo a thorough selection procedure before they enter the specialised English class where some of the subjects are taught in English. More than 20 years ago, students had had no English classes before they entered secondary education, so they were all beginners in her groups. She is still proud of the progress they used to make those days. However, she had to face difficulties, too. She aimed to give students a thorough grammar foundation, so prepared the material in great detail and this took hours, sometimes whole afternoons, which was “terribly tiring”. Having put a lot of work into preparation, she later achieved what Huberman calls the stabilization or routinization phase. “One knows how to efficiently prepare students for the Matura examination, … what sort of tasks there are in the exam … and with the years one comes to know what to expect from students, what they can do and how to harmonise all this,” she describes her present teaching self. Together with consolidation, signs of disappointment are also detectable alongside nostalgia about the good old days. Unlike before maternity leave, she now has ordinary classes preparing for matura “only”. These classes are heterogeneous with learners who need more extensive practice. The gains appear to be less considerable than earlier. She thinks she may be sinking into routine and that her current tasks do not present intellectual challenges. Therefore, she has already worked out a self-motivating strategy, namely that she would like to teach a subject called English speaking civilisation and

wishes to rejoin the dual language section of the school where she could teach specialised groups. Although she says higher level or specialised groups give teachers a better sense of achievement and results they can boast about, she admits that “I need this for myself, we are talking about self development here, I need to climb higher.” Even though she has already decided to produce higher quality and more demanding work and thereby present a challenge to her own self, she feels uneasy about some new developments in education: “It’s a problem now, we can’t handle these gadgets… like the interactive board,” or about the introduction of new coursebooks: “You need a complete new set of vocabulary for these new books, the old ones we started with just look ridiculous now,” “there are new words I have to look up myself”. All in all, the interview with Participant 7 suggests that she has learnt the most from tasks she had to accomplish so far in her career and that she is aware that she will have to strike a balance between routinisation and innovation to prevent her from burn-out. (See Appendix L for the complete interview with Participant 7)

Burn-out is not a theme touched upon by Participant 8 but the interview with him convinced me that he was the only participant whose present state of mind can be best characterised by the word “Disillusionment”.

Phase 1

Graduation: MEd in Russian and English (insufficient methodology training and English language instruction)

Facts Perceptions

Special elitist secondary school

Teaching and trainee supervision A few training opportunities Pre-lesson discussions with trainees

Reflecting on practice Self-development Still no methodology training at university but trainees have better

language skills

Not speaking the same language as fellow mentors or trainees Wish to have cooperative relationship with university A few guiding principles in

methodology Lack of knowledge in English Commitment in first few years Intensive preparation for classes Sometimes one lesson ahead of the

students

Stabilization and learning on the job One or two Influential teachers as

regards attitude to children

Disillusionment about in-service training opportunities

Future Phase 0

28 years of experience

Phase 2

Old enough to become a school-based mentor. Not trained.

Diagram 9Secondary school teacher, Participant 8

Autonomy and isolation. These two terms describe the same phenomenon.

Participant 8 has had to learn everything the hardest way: on his own. Being a self-made teacher, Participant 8, one of the two men in this study, is a reserved and apparently unemotional person, or perhaps I did not manage to conduct the interview so that it would reveal his real emotional dispositions. The interview was mainly focussed on professional matters and the interaction was not as smooth as it usually was with other participants.

Nevertheless, one thing definitely became clear: this participant is not satisfied with the way education is managed around him. He was dissatisfied with the quality of education he himself received:

Researcher: So, are you saying you had little methodology training?

Participant 8: Not little, none at all.

As it appears from the interview, he did not receive sufficient English language instruction either, and the situation was the same as regards his other major, Russian. He considers his younger self “poor at English with some methodological principles and better at Russian but with no knowledge of methodology whatsoever”. The survival period for

Participant 8 thus meant ample preparation for two or three years: “this is what I have to teach in the next lesson and this is what I myself don’t understand”. The self-educated teacher, who became a committed professional after a couple of years, is actually regarded as a very effective teacher in his town, so it was really shocking to hear that he was just one lesson ahead of his students language-wise at the beginning of his career.

He is also dissatisfied with the way he himself teaches. He is critical with himself:

“Sometimes it’s boring to listen to myself, always the same thing with the same example”.

“What do I do if let’s say 25 % of my students do not buy the methods I am using and I wouldn’t like to comply with what they are proposing?” he asks. He says he has acquired most of the knowledge he has today by himself, but he learnt a smaller proportion at various training courses. During his career some in-service training courses have inspired him but not to a great extent. As he remarks, “it’s not worth travelling 200 km for a workshop that is useless”. It is in this relation that disillusionment comes to the surface the most saliently: “The trouble with training courses is that the point [for participants] is to get the certificate, or the documents, and for the training centre to get the money”. Still, the overall impression is that, although forced by external circumstances to do most of the work autonomously, this teacher of 53 is a reflective practitioner after all. “These tiny thrusts, the workshops, they have pushed me along and I keep meditating along those lines,” he says. Or elsewhere: “I tried to analyse my classes, if I dared to, because if the lesson was abominable, I quickly forgot it”. However, this teacher apparently has a low opinion of fads that from time to time excite the English language teaching community, as it can be seen from a remark he made on the popularity of the word ‘reflection’:

Researcher: What forms of education or who have you learnt the most from in your career up to now?

Participant 8: The most characteristic form of learning for me was, to use a fashionable word, self-reflection.

His slightly unorthodox views about teaching competencies are also reflected in the following response:

Researcher: What kind of competencies does a teacher need?

Participant 8: I am not interested in these competencies at the level of naming them. Human relationships, emotional relations are important in terms of conflict resolution or conflict evasion, but these courses exist on paper only, not in reality.

He is far more dissatisfied with the way teacher training is organised and managed around him than his own teaching or development. He thinks he was appointed to be a school-based mentor because he was old enough, and he had to start working with trainees without any training to prepare him. According to him, school based mentors, university-based trainers and trainees do not share the terminology to talk to each other. “As long as we don’t share the language, we won’t understand each other. If I say ‘brown’, she says ‘tree’, we can’t even talk. If we mutually identify it as brown plywood, then we will be able to talk.” He admits that the command of English recent trainees have is higher than it was 10 or 15 years ago, but believes their knowledge of professional terminology is practically non-existent. “All a trainee of mine could say about the communicative approach was that it was used with soldiers in the war”. He thinks trainees are not familiar with such terms as “aim, task, or steps”. Thus, it is not a surprise that he would like to see cooperation between universities and schools. (See Appendix M for the reconstructed interview with Participant 8)

Phase 1

Phase 2

Graduation: MEd In Russian and English (insufficient preparation, two teachers with great impact)

Facts Perceptions

Special elitist secondary school Specialized classes with 10 hours

of English a week alongside normal ones

Able students Homogeneous classes

Specialized and normal, ordinary classes

Visiting each other’s classes

Routinization, stabilization Not on the lookout for new

techniques In-house sharing of tricks

Rigid and precise Keeping a distance Two classes and one colleague with

great impact

I learnt a lot about myself from that class

Formteacher and teacher of English as counterexamples

Doubts as to usefulness of conferences Importance of consulting one’s

colleagues

Future Phase 0

21 years of experience

4 years of teaching a specialized class: Transformation

Diagram 10 Secondary school teacher, Participant 2

Under control. The third secondary teacher’s career and development revolves around different interpretations of control, feedback and results (see Diagram 10). After hesitating a little whether to embark on a teaching career or not, under the impact of a university lecturer and a school-based mentor, she finally concluded that “teaching is of value”. This teacher in her 40s began her teaching career by focussing very much on the subject matter, her lesson plans and her own self. Gradually, she managed to give up some of that control and today she can concentrate on her students and her students’ results.

At first, I was unbelievably rigid. I wanted things to go smoothly, I wanted the kids to be silent, I wanted them to answer only if I asked them. Everybody let me teach my way, I am the one who knows what is good for them anyway.

“I liked to keep a distance,” she says about her aloof and reserved personality. In the first half of her career, she kept criticising her students. There was one class where she says she did nothing other than “scourging”, that is, criticizing for two years. She described her previous self using the words “cruel” and “inhuman”. With the very same class she came to a turning point. “I started praising them. I began to see that they were good.” This teacher sees her teaching on the strictness-leniency continuum and believes she is continuously moving to

and fro along that continuum. “This somewhat military style is something I still believe in,”

she says and thereby reveals that her core values have not changed fundamentally since the beginning of her career. On the other hand, the importance she attaches to the relationship she developed with two of her classes shows that her focus did in fact shift from short-term lesson plans to long-term effect, from herself to students, from the subject matter to the quality of the relationship with the students.

There was a class reunion to which they invited no other teacher but me and their formteacher. And this [her being the bane of their lives] always comes up in anecdotes. ‘Do you remember when you said… That was horrible but good at the same time because we were getting ahead with the language and we are so grateful for all that’… It is interesting they do not remember … all this is good for is that we get on so well now and they feel free to tell me all about this, you know.

She says she has learnt a lot from that class about herself, “I got to know myself better through them,” while admitting she also had to cope with external problems at the time.

As regards her teacher education, this teacher thinks she was equipped with all the necessary skills when she started her career. In her view, more class visits would have prepared her better, however. On the other hand, she also believes “it is only when one is already a practising teacher that it turns out what kind of teacher one will become”. At present, too, Participant 2 prefers and values class observation and sharing ideas in the staffroom more than going to conferences. As she says, “I am unable to regularly accomplish the majority of those colourful and sweet-smelling demonstration lessons that I see at conferences” whereas “when I am planning to teach a topic or grammatical area, we always discuss it among ourselves and give each other ideas”. She refers to one of her colleagues as being “an influential and interesting character” and believes she can enrich her teaching repertoire exclusively “bit by bit”, by using new materials as building blocks to diversify her teaching: “There is a good recording, I’d need it, there is a good text, I’d need it”. Although Participant 2 appears to be working most of the time on her own, she is not as isolated from her colleagues as Participant 8. There is a lot more in-house sharing at her school in Budapest

than at his school in the countryside. (See Appendix G for the complete interview with Participant 2)

In the next section, the trajectories of two younger, less experienced secondary teachers will be examined. The two teachers are around 30, one of them works in a prestigious secondary school in the capital while the other works in a vocational secondary school in a provincial town.

Phase 1

Phase 2

Graduation: MEd in English

Facts Perceptions

Secondary school teacher

Secondary school teacher being a form teacher Working in a school where trainees

observe classes

Inexperienced Struggling with teacher role

Tiring

Trying to be consistent and strict Advice from colleagues Difficulties with multi-tasking Discrepancies between practice and

theory

Anger and frustration concerning teacher education Many counterexamples

One primary teacher and one school-based mentor role-models

Development in language, methodology Lack of time but need to visit each other’s

classes

Need for sharing opportunities

Future Phase 0

5 years of experience

Year 2

Comfortable in teacher role One group and a visitor Earlier mentor and colleagues

Lesson observations Conferences/training sessions not

very useful

Diagram 11Secondary teacher, Participant 4

Ambivalence. The trajectories of these teachers are shorter but both teachers divided their careers into two phases. Participant 4 thinks her first year of teaching brought her a year of both anxiety and great satisfaction. Her weekly number of lessons was 21 and she had to start teaching sociology as well. Both the high number of contact hours and having to teach a new subject were exhausting. Still, she felt she was on the right track and found she was “cut out for this job”, which meant she was enjoying her new challenges. In class, she found it particularly hard to manage several tasks at the same time, or multitask, for example, to discipline a student and continue the discussion as well. As she describes her difficulties:

It was terribly hard to learn to pay attention to the unbelievably many things that are going on in a lesson. You are communicating with someone, let’s say, and what the other 17 people are doing in the meantime and what you would like to say next, and there is something you need to react to, and Steve needs to be disciplined and … the need to remember what I have agreed on with someone, what I have promised, what sort of punishment I have promised.

For her, things began to be easier in the second year (see Diagram 11), when she began to feel comfortable in her role as a teacher. She felt she was more in control after the first crucial year. She also developed her identity as a teacher; she no longer needed to boost her confidence before she went into class.

Yes, the second year was a turning point. I felt things were going more easily and more naturally. So, it’s no longer going into class and saying it to myself before class that I am a teacher. So, I don’t need to put this role onto myself, I am wearing it naturally.

Her different identities became more integrated after the first year of teaching. Her private self and her classroom, or public self, merged into one or perhaps she found a way in which her real self and her teaching self could coexist harmoniously and peacefully. This role-search must have been a stressful time for her. The fact that she became a form teacher also constituted a major shift. “It was a real shock… it goes with so many responsibilities,”

she says. As regards her development, she is a dissatisfied graduate, who believes that what she was taught at university is not useful and is far from the realities of the classroom. This is all the more surprising as her school is an elitist one and is in theory supposed to be closely cooperating with her university, which regularly sends its trainees to do their practice teaching in classes of the school. Starting her career was a critical period for her university training had not prepared her at all. Her dissatisfaction and disappointment are vividly described in the next two excerpts:

And really, they [university lecturers] paint the world of teaching pink, where a lot of things are pink, but you have to work hard for them to turn pink. So, there was a lot of anger in me concerning my university education. I am not sure it would be easy to manage it differently, it probably would not […]

[…] if you start teaching the way that they taught to you at the university, you won’t stay alive, or …. (pause) You won’t achieve any effectiveness and you will be laughed

In document DOKTORI (PHD) DISSZERTÁCIÓ (Pldal 173-189)