Chapter 6 - The Professional Development of the ESL Teachers

Summary

In this chapter I shall examine the professional development of the expert teacher, Marina, the two experienced teachers, Eva and Ching, and the novice teacher, Genie. In particular, Marina's development of expertise in teaching will be discussed in detail. In trying to capture the professional development of these four ESL teachers, I drew on studies of the teachers' professional and career development and in particular upon the findings of Huberman's (1993a) study of 160 Swiss teachers. When drawing on Huberman's as well as other researchers' delineation of the phases in teachers' professional life cycle, I adopted an open-minded approach and allowed the rich data to inform me of possible variations of the phases that they outlined. In the following section, I shall outline briefly their delineations before reporting on the four case study teachers.

Teachers' Professional Life Cycle

Studies of teachers' professional and career development have identified phases, sequences, or stages that teachers go through in the course of their careers (see for example Field, 1979; Burden, 1990; Fessler and Christensen, 1992; Huberman, 1993a). Typically, beginning teachers go through a “survival” phase where they are preoccupied with their own survival in the classroom. They feel diffident, inadequate, and illprepared. Some of the well-documented problems and concerns in this phase are those of reconciling educational ideals and realities, maintaining classroom discipline, establishing an appropriate relationship with students, playing the role of a teacher, and having an adequate mastery of knowledge as well as instructional methods (see also Fuller and Brown, 1975; Adams, 1982).