Sources of professional development

The analysis of variance carried out in order to find out if the respondents’ educational background had an effect on the extent to which they found the bottom five domains of knowledge important showed that it had virtually none.

On the other hand, an analysis of variance showed that the respondents’ major teaching environment (primary, secondary or higher education) had a significant effect on the importance they attached to teachers’ knowledge about the language p_(kaL) = .020. A post hoc Sheffe test confirmed that there was a significant difference between the way respondents with primary and higher education experience, respectively, viewed the importance of knowledge about the language: F_(2,223) = 3.959 where p = .020. The mean for this statement for respondents with primary experience was 2.98 while the mean for respondents with experience in higher education was 3.42. The post hoc Sheffe test showed that the difference was significant at the .03 level.

No significant differences were found in terms of the effect of the teacher’s mother tongue on the importance attached to the bottom five teacher domains, but there were too few non-Hungarian speakers in the sample to be able to draw conclusions from the data.

29 T’s own experience 4,45 22 Reflection (If an idea doesn’t work...) 4,16

17 Visiting classes 4,14

20 Relationship with Ss 4,07

The importance of experiential learning originally surfaced from the interview studies and was markedly reinforced by the statement score it received in the questionnaire study. As an experienced participant of the interview study put it: “I have learnt the most at my own cost” (P3).

A remark that perhaps best summarises the most important sources of development a novice teacher experienced during her years of teacher training is the following: “We had theory, we had practice, observation, I learnt from others, I learnt from my own mistakes. So, we looked at teaching from a lot of different angles.”(P5)

Reflective learning, advocated by Schön (1986) and defined by Moon as a “purposeful framing and reframing of material in internal experience with the intention of learning” (2004, p. 99.), was mentioned literally by only one participant in the interview study. It was, however, frequently referred to, as in the above quotation from the interview with Participant 3. Moon’s view that reflective learning does not necessarily include an input of new material (Moon, 2004) is reiterated by one of the experienced interview participants (P1): “All my books are full of notes to myself, you know, ‘do this next time’, or ‘didn’t work, so try something else next time’, so I always sort of had that attitude”. Both statements referring to reflection in the questionnaire, Statements 21 and 22, received very high ratings, the score for Reflection 1 (If an idea works...) is 4.54 whereas the score for Reflection 2 (If an idea doesn’t work...) is 4.16.

In the in-depth interviews, class visits and the relationship with students were also rated as important sources of PD for EL teachers; as one teacher remarked, “You will pick up a lot more if you visit a colleague’s lesson than at a conference” (P2). It is interesting, however, that learning from colleagues or mentors was given a significantly lower score in

the online questionnaire (see Table 16), although observing colleagues and learning from them are activities that nicely complement each other.

The respondents of the online questionnaire believed that the least characteristic forms of learning for them were cooperative forms of learning including their colleagues, mentors and students, and external sources of learning such as the findings of research and the teachings of resource books.

Table 16 Bottom five sources of PD

Q No. Source Mean Score

30 Research 3,63

25 Resource Books 3,59

28 New knowledge through Ss 3,45 19 Learning from mentors 3,44 15 Learning from colleagues 3,38

The list including the least characteristic sources of PD for English teachers is quite surprising (see details in Table 16 above). Even though they may be instrumental in shaping a trainee teacher’s development, mentors and colleagues received the lowest score, 3.44 and 3.38. One explanation for this phenomenon could be the solitary nature of teaching inherent in Hungarian culture. Teachers are hardly ever expected to collaborate or work in a team, their main task being to supervise their students’ learning. The relatively low importance attributed to the influence of mentors may be the fact that few trainees in Hungary are exposed to a long practicum whereas, for example, in Germany the minimum for teachers is around 200 contact hours (Bikics, 2002, p. 139). Both systems, however, definitely set higher requirements for prospective teachers than some teacher training institutions in other regions of the world. It is possible, for instance, to get a degree in teaching English in eight months in Singapore (Medgyes, 2011, p. 152) or a CELTA qualification right after a four-week full time course with six hours of teaching at two levels (CELTA Brochure, p.4). In Hungary, Deschmanné Pálos writes that the teaching practice at a provincial university lasts merely eight weeks (2002, p. 598). Since the average age of the respondents in the online questionnaire study was

around 40, it is the earlier educational programmes they had attended. The number of contact hours a trainee was exposed to in traditional forms of teacher education with a heavy philological emphasis was especially low: as few as 15 contact hours of actual teaching alongside 25 class observations of the school based mentor’s groups used to be sufficient in the traditional model before the political changes of 1989 (Bikics, 2002, p. 136). According to other sources, the length of the practicum varied from two months to a complete school year (Poór & Rádai, 1999) depending on the programme that a trainee attended. A more cooperative model of teaching practice was the scheme at a university in a provincial town around the millennium, in which both a university based and a school-based mentor would be closely involved in the supervision or support of the practicum with a higher number of class visits (30), a higher number of lesson discussions (30), class visits to peers’ classes (30), but still 15 actual contact hours of teaching pupils (Bikics, 2002, p. 137). In Budapest, in an innovative programme which was launched in 1990, teacher trainees were responsible for a group for an entire school-year (Malderez & Bodóczky, 1999; Medgyes & Malderez, 1996), which included over a hundred contact hours. Although the programme was set up at a time when there was an acute shortage of foreign language teachers, the unorthodox length and the supportive nature of the programme could have contributed to many more of the graduates actually becoming teachers than in other programmes (Poór & Rádai, 1999). However, in most institutions, teaching practice nowadays lasts three to six weeks, or a maximum of five months, giving a trainee not more than a dozen lessons’ exposure to real students in a school and few cooperation opportunities with a mentor over a shorter period than an academic term.

Thus, this relatively short teaching practice may not be sufficient for the school-based mentor to substantially influence a trainee’s thinking about teaching. Moreover, some of the more experienced respondents might have already forgotten the extent to which and the ways in which their mentor used to support them. It is very interesting, however, that participants of

the interviews attributed great importance to both their official and unofficial mentors and colleagues. Furthermore, in a provincial English teacher education programme Bankó (2006) revealed that 50 trainee-cum-teachers, when evaluating their programme retrospectively, would have welcomed a longer teaching practice than the 5-month practicum they had; some thought it would have been even better for them to be exposed to different age-groups and several different mentors. That being said, other trainees at another provincial university were mostly satisfied with both the length of the teaching practice, especially prospective German teachers (71%), and the post-lesson discussions (49%) (Bikics, 2002, pp.137-138).

In line with findings of the Hobson study (2005), the interview study showed that people, such as colleagues, mentors, and even students, were a very important source of knowledge. Nevertheless, the results of the questionnaire study, the relatively low scores given to both colleagues and mentors, seem to cast doubt on that finding. The difference between the results of the studies might stem from the fact that the two samples were of a different nature: the 12 interviewees were specifically selected either because they were respected and experienced members of the community or, being inexperienced, enthusiastic about their profession. On average, interviewees probably had a more positive attitude to teaching English than respondents of the questionnaire study, who were essentially self-selected and therefore had more varied attitudes to their profession.

If we compare the findings of this study with one that does not wish to separate the questions of what skills teachers improved in and how they achieved it (Harfitt & Tavares, 2004), we will find that trainees attributed a lot of importance in their development to autonomous activities such as designing their own materials and tasks, while they did not make so many references to and did not rank mentor support as high as these solitary activities. In-service respondents of the same study attributed their growth to improving their sensitivity and self-awareness in class and university tutor support. It must be borne in mind,

nonetheless, that the in-service participants were participants of an ongoing teacher development programme while in this study they were not. In full awareness of the fact, however, that the majority of the respondents of this study (63.3 %) were between the age of 30 and 49, and that they had also attended an average of three teaching related training courses, and half of the sample had attended one to nine courses in their lives, we can assume with confidence that they had, prior to the completion of the questionnaire, experienced various forms of learning and are thus in a position to evaluate them, the courses and their tutors in relation to their own development.

The fact that the respondents of the questionnaire study did not find research an important source of PD reflects the recurrent clashes between theory, research and practice.

However valuable and relevant research findings might be, teachers eventually do not benefit from them, either because they do not have access to them, or the energy or time to read about them, or as one interview participant put it: “The other thing is journals, I mean we get them, these journals, but I wonder how many people actually read them” (P1).

A closer analysis revealed that there was a significant difference between the ratings of male and female respondents as regards the statement on research (p_(res) = .019). The one-way Anova and the post hoc Scheffe analysis showed that respondents’ gender had an effect on the extent to which research was characteristic source of their PD: F(28,218) = 4.007,

p_(res) = .019 for learning from research. An Anova test was used since some of the respondents

did not reveal their gender, thus constituting a third group. Female respondents believed they had learnt more from research than their male colleagues since female respondents’ mean was 0,465 higher than that of males. The subsequent independent t-test confirmed that indeed there was a significant difference between female and male respondents’ attitudes to learning from research. The 28 male respondents’ mean was 3.21 while that of the 218 female respondents was 3.68. The variance between the groups is statistically not significant, t(246) =

-2.755, p = .006, which confirms that there is a significant difference between the importance male and female respondents attributed to learning from research. One reason for this might be that women are regarded as more compliant and the Hawthorne effect, that is their awareness of expectations, influenced their responses. Another reason may be that the number of men in the profession is lower than that of women, and therefore their opinions are listened to to a greater extent. If male respondents’ views are given more attention in schools, they might feel encouraged to give more honest responses in a survey. Providing the above reasons do not explain the phenomenon, evidence was found that women do perceive learning from research articles to be more useful than men.

Resource books were viewed differently by respondents with different major teaching experience: p = .023. Respondents with mostly primary teaching experience behind them rated resource books as significantly more important sources of learning than respondents with higher education teaching experience behind them. The mean for primary teachers was 3.75 (whereas for secondary teachers it was 3.63), while the mean for teachers with mostly higher education background was 3.32 with F(2,223) = 3.831, p = .023. The difference was significant between respondents with chiefly primary teaching background and those with mainly higher education background (mean difference 0.427).

An examination of the next statement, which received the third lowest rating, about acquiring new knowledge through the students, will show that almost half of the respondents chose the middle option, i.e. they thought this was only partly true of them. After examining the frequency table concerning the statement about acquiring new knowledge through the students (see Table 17 below), it is clear that even though the modal score and the median are both 3, less than 12% of the respondents thought acquiring new knowledge through the students was a way of learning uncharacteristic of them. On the other hand, 43 % believed it was a way of learning that characterised them.

Therefore, it is only in comparison with more characteristic sources that the relative lower importance of these bottom five sources of learning surfaces in the study.

Table 17 Statement statistics: the acquisition of new knowledge through students

Frequency Percent Valid Percent Cumulative

Percent

1 2 ,8 ,8 ,8

2 27 10,8 10,8 11,6

3 113 45,0 45,2 56,8

4 75 29,9 30,0 86,8

5 33 13,1 13,2 100,0

Valid

Total 250 99,6 100,0

Missing 0 1 ,4

Total 251 100,0

It is worth noting that, similarly to the findings about learning new vocabulary from students presented in Table 44, the respondents from Budapest rated this statement differently from their colleagues in the countryside. The Budapest respondents (n = 96) rated the statement on acquiring new knowledge through their students higher (M = 3.73) than their colleagues from the countryside (n = 149; M = 3.26). The independent t-test confirmed that the difference was significant indeed: t(245) = 4.266, p < .001. Explanations for this result might include that there is a more traditional, more transmissive way of looking at teaching in the countryside on the part of teachers, parents and students, or students in the capital may have easier access to knowledge as a result of better infrastructure.

One interesting finding of the questionnaire study is that the teacher respondents in the sample believe that their previous teachers have had a larger influence on their teaching than their colleagues or mentors. The statement score for being under the influence of earlier teachers, or “ghosts” was 3.75 while the others were 3.44 and 3.38 respectively, so the difference is not large but still significant (p < .0001). It has to be acknowledged, however, that the standard deviation (SD) for the mean score of the statement on mentors was the highest: 1.09 while all the other statements had lower SD figures. This appears to suggest that the individual responses were farther away from the mean than in the case of other statements,

i.e. opinions probably vary greatly depending on the given relationship, school and setup. On the other hand, many of the interview participants cited their form teachers, mentors as role models. Previous teachers seen as counter-models also occurred, as one participant remarked:

“There was a time in my life when I said, yes, I’d like to become a teacher so as not to become a teacher like my form teacher” (P2). Previous teachers were rated as a relatively unimportant source of knowledge in the questionnaire study, tenth out of 16, but were still considered to be more important than mentors or colleagues. This seems to reinforce the observation that other researchers have made (E.g Borg, 2003; Kagan, 1992, Lortie, 1975, Pajares, 1992) that teachers’ beliefs developed during their apprenticeship of observation are static and resistant to change. As Borg (2003) points out, it is the restructuring and relabeling of constructs that might be happening during the development of a teacher. It is therefore not encouraging to see that practicing teachers find the impact of their former teachers relatively more important than that of mentors and colleagues. The professional context, or network, within a school or across schools, which would allow beginner and practising teachers to learn from their mentors and later their colleagues, could in fact prevent teacher attrition or fatigue. The question one immediately asks oneself is why such a valuable source of learning is not considered to be significant. Or, the low ranking may as well indicate that teachers do not receive sufficient professional support and would need more. At a more abstract level, the question arises whether and why for many respondents assimilation of new input into old beliefs might be a much more frequent experience than accommodation, i.e. reorganising previously acquired knowledge or held beliefs. Nevertheless, with reflection-related statements topping the list, one has to be careful about drawing conclusions prematurely.