Teacher Learning in Action: Reflection on Responses to an Evidence-Based Task on Teaching English to Young Learners

Abstract

This paper presents a response to the call for teacher educators to make their pedagogy explicit and offer their practice up for scrutiny (Johnson & Golombek, 2018). The teacher-educator author (TEA) conducted an action research study of the processes taking place during a postgraduate language teacher education course. A guided observation task was designed with a focus on early reading in English as a foreign language in primary school, which required teacher-learners to produce ethnographic notes that they subsequently wrote up as lesson descriptions. They then presented these in a seminar class which was recorded, transcribed and analyzed for critical incidents (Tripp, 1993) by the TEA. A rigorous analysis of critical moments from the class is conducted, with the aim of evaluating the role played by the observation sheet. In addition, extracts from lesson descriptions and reflective questions are studied for corroboration. The observation task, in combination with the wider series of activities, is found to offer affordances for teacher learning.