Paulina Sepulveda Escobar
Discipline: Graduate School of Education
Project Summary
Regarding teachers’ PD, research has advocated a new perspective rejecting the individual and traditional top-town approaches and favouring a more collaborative and reflective model. In fact, reflection has been claimed as a fundamental feature of PD initiatives and one of the key principles underlying the preparation of teachers-to-be as it is believed that teachers will become better teachers through reflection (Calderhead & Gates, 1993).
As teacher educators are the ones who primarily encourage reflection among pre-service and in-service teachers, it is assumed that they are equally afforded opportunities to reflect on their teaching practices. However, based on my own experience as an EFL teacher educator in Chile, little is done towards promoting collaborative ways of reflecting on teaching practices as a vehicle for PD. The few initiatives that teacher educators partake in are of an individual nature and seem to be constrained by institutional forces. There is also a dearth of local research that examines the dynamics of reflective dialogue considering the relevance that the questioning of teaching practices and beliefs in collaboration with others plays within teacher education programmes.
Korthagen and Vasalos (2005) claim that in order to support pre-service teachers’ PD, teacher educators have to get involved in deep reflection processes to inspect and clarify their own beliefs, practices and values. Therefore, bearing in mind how these practitioners and their continuous professional learning have been overlooked in Chile and the relevance of reflection processes, this critical research project attempts to fill this gap by bringing to light their fundamental role in teacher education. It also aims to provide opportunities for EFL teacher educators working in a private university to engage in reflective dialogue practices as a means for PD within a Professional Learning Community (PLC).
Wider Research Interests
My research interests include professional development through bottom-up initiatives, establishing professional learning communities and pre-service teachers' cognition.
