Edge (1996) has brilliant things to say about Professional Development through reflective teaching in a module 5 EKT reading:
“…one aspect of becoming a teacher is the growth of a commitment to continuing self-development”
“How and what am I learning from my practice, and how does what I am learning get reinvested in my practice, with what outcomes?”
DEVELOPMENT = AWARENESS + DIRECTION
“we are not short of…suggestions for how we should teach in ways which are more functional, or communicative, or lexical, or collocational, or task-based… What we are short of is an awareness of how we as individuals, or as groups of colleagues, actually do teach.”
“…how many of us have a clear and coherent view of ourselves as teachers? And if we do, how many of us have checked that self-image with the image that others have of us, either our students or our colleagues.”
“What we have to take seriously is not other people’s ideas about how we should teach, but a deeper, continuing exploration of how we do teach. We have to pay serious attention to ourselves.”
“…there are few more liberating rites of passage than that of ‘becoming theoretical.’”
“The most appropriate way for each one of us to work is exactly the way that we do work—provided only that we are committed to an ongoing investigation of just what it is that we do, with a view to enhancing the processes and outcomes, for our students, for our colleagues and for ourselves.
“…to be a teacher is to remain in a state of becoming, and that our goal is to remain on that path. In fact the path is the goal.
Wells, G. (1999) hits the nail on the head, talking about collaboration:
‘A further significant feature of the growing practice of teacher research is the emphasis on community and collaboration with other teachers. As with peer groups solving problems in the classroom, teachers providing “horizontal” support for each other often construct novel solutions to the problems they face that are more appropriate to their particular circumstances than the standard practices recommended by experts outside the classroom; in this way, they both challenge the traditional, “vertical,” model of teacher development, and enlarge and diversify the repertoire of strategies for supporting learning. Equally important, they transform their own identities as teachers, as they take greater responsibility for their learning and for the learning opportunities they provide for their students. (Chang-Wells and Wells, 1997)
Wells p. 329 - for the most part, however, ‘teacher development’ has meant teacher training, that is to say, something that is done to teachers. Only recently has this begun to give way to a more agentive view of development: teachers learning in their zones of proximal development, constructing their understanding of the art of teaching through reflective practice, and drawing for guidance and assistance upon the same range of sources that is available to other learners (Tharpe and Gallimore, 1988, in Wells 1999, p. 329).
References
Edge, J. (1996) Crossing Borders, The Language Teacher, Vol.20, (10). JALT
Wells, G. (1999) Dialogic Inquiry. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.
Wells, G., and Chang-Wells, G.L. (1992) Constructing knowledge together: Classrooms
as centers of inquiry and literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.