A case study on the professional development of local and foreign English teachers in team teaching

[[abstract]]Framed in the sociocultural theory, this case study was designed to investigate teachers’ professional growth as situated in team teaching. The participants were four pairs of Taiwanese and foreign English teachers who were in their first or second year of practicing team teaching in elementary schools in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. Data were collected via multiple qualitative methods in three schools over the course of the 2006-2007 school year. Findings of this study suggest that teachers’ description and perception of their experience in team teaching varied. The metaphors they provided for team teaching and the teaching incidents they described as most memorable provide a window to understand their experience. With regard to teachers’ learning, team teachers benefited from collaborating with their partners in different aspects, including teaching ideas, classroom management approaches, and knowledge about the foreign culture and English language. From their daily teaching, many participants also gained more knowledge about the characteristics of their students, the school culture, and the societal context. They also grew from interacting with other colleagues and participating in professional development activities, such as workshops and conferences. In this study, many factors were found to facilitate or inhibit the participants’ growth. Evidence suggests that a close collegial relationship is essential for fostering a healthy climate for professional development. Willingness to try different ideas and a positive attitude toward their jobs are conducive to teachers’ learning on the job. On the other hand, lack of effective communication between teachers, introverted personality, and lack of passion for teaching were found to hinder teachers’ growth. Results of this study support the situated and social nature of teacher learning, although the team-teaching mechanism did not reach all its potential or promises in terms of triggering teacher learning. They also endorse the concept of distributed expertise and Tsui’s (2003) view that the term “expertise” is best interpreted as encompassing different areas of specialization in a profession. The community of practice (COP) theory predicts that newcomers become seasoned members of a community by progressing from legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) to full participation. However, the socialization of the participants in this study did not follow this predicted process because they were not given the time to start from the peripheral. The findings of this study also suggest that to understand the complex and dynamic nature of teacher learning, the core as well as the non-core practices and members of a COP need to be taken into consideration. To conclude this study, practical implications and directions for future research are offered, along with my personal reflections on the completion of this research project.