Many Possibilities of Friction and TA’s Developmental Process

such as ‘Did you understand?’ or ‘Got it?’ did work and it never occurred to me that implementing these phrases would work to stimulate classroom activity more communicatively. Students said that today’s class was for reading, but it was fun as they had more chances of speaking and listening. (TAN-SR4)

Maybe this activity could not come to me by myself. We need to talk [dialogue with other teachers]. (TAN-SR6)

Well through the conversations [co-constructed dialogue], we could expect what students could do, what students could achieve through the activity, what skills could be improved and what questions would be expected. (TAN-SR6)

The SR data suggest that seeing some success in her classes has triggered her ROP as we further see below:

I would like to make a copy of framework of lesson plan and I will use it as a reference of planning the lesson. Teaching is not forcing students to receive knowledge from teachers but trying to help students get knowledge and use the knowledge. And knowledge should not be only for getting good scores on the test but for adapting them in the real world. (TAN-SR6)

The above comments show that TA is developing a professional discourse leading to ROP that better will better inform her teaching. It is hard to say that TA has perfectly conceived more effective ways in her teaching; continuing effort for teaching is also required.

Nonetheless, the interventions of putting her through the LSCs have encouraged her to keep working with aspirations. Next, a view of TA’s developmental progress resulting from data presented in the ROP as well as HPM and EPD categories are presented.

must be realized in students’ outcomes, which further lead to the change of the practitioner’s beliefs and attitudes.

Though the process of praxis involving TA in interviews, SR sessions and the LSC interventions, TA was able to evolve from being a passive follower of the lesson plan to a reflective teacher. By going through the praxis process, she began to question what she had been doing and why she was doing it. Friction in her instruction emerged and once revealed mobilized her to make changes in teaching. In other words, the desire to activate her teacher development has commenced.

The frictional forces in TA’s developmental progress can be located in the data by first mapping it in a static HPM state. Most of that data were taken from the early stages of the study and are reflected in the HPM category, which show her reluctance to make changes in her teaching. First of all, her learning experiences both as a student and as a pre-service teacher student have positioned her to continue her instruction in the traditional yakudoku style. She mentions that she received little if any training on communicative approaches and how to conduct classes with TETE. Having no training in these areas, she mentions early on in the study that grammar needs to be a priority, and it needs to be done in Japanese through explanations and translations. The English she does use is limited to CRE type of classroom management phrases. Lack of teaching skills also underpins why she resorts to following the yearly pre-planned lesson plan handed to her by the previous teachers who taught her grade. An indication of HPM is that she believes following the yearly detailed plan is a convenience for her, a sort of defensive teaching approach, even though “there is some weird atmosphere in the class.” This is further substantiated when she discusses the use of following PowerPoint slides given to her to explain grammar points. She believes that she resorts to following it because she is not confident in teaching grammar.

The HPM areas of TA’s instruction also have been analyzed to contribute to an over-routinized teaching behavior. A heavy reliance of following the pre-planned lesson plan has created a scripted, recitation teaching style (Tharp and Gallimore, 1989) for TA, such as asking comprehension questions that require limited responses citing the correct answers. Although TA’s instruction at this stage is in a HPM state, she feels something is out of sync in her teaching. There is friction. She notices that there is a gap in engagement between her students and her instruction. This awareness from TA as a result of participating in the study is an early indication for possibilities of exploiting friction in her teaching for teacher development.

The data under the EPD category also reveals friction in the teaching of TA. A sign for friction comes when she starts talking about following the textbook. At a first glance one would imagine that following it would harmoniously allow TA to move along in the textbook, efficiently covering each page. It would make her job easier and convenient as

the onus would be on the students to learn the material in it as presented on the pages and transmitted by her. However, data indicate that TA shows awareness and discomfort about merely following the textbook. For TA, EPD surrounds its use. She feels the topics are not relative or meaningful to the students, and the dialogs are unrealistic. As she becomes involved in the study, she expresses a desire to “wake up” the students with activities that could engage them more with materials in the textbook. This friction creates a ripe opportunity to introduce, through co-construction, planning of engagement activities for students during the interventions, which occurs as we will see later in the ROP category below.

In addition to friction over the textbook, TA begins to experience EPD during an interactive questioning session with the students. Having been used to using scripted, and controlled recitation type questions, TA ventured out to engage students’ questions beyond checking for comprehension of the reading about the ability of a skier to asking questions about the abilities of her students. The students became lively over asking questions relative to their lives and TA was pleasantly surprised with the interactions between her and the students. However, friction over changing her style was evident in relation to the classroom environment when she worried whether a lively interactions and class noise was good or not. On the other hand, after a SR session of her class, she was quite affected by the fact that even learners that she identified as passive learners became active. In teacher development, following Guskey (2002), ‘seeing is believing’. That is, seeing the success from changing the way she interacted with students had a percolating effect on TA, and it demonstrates how EPD can lead to ROP. After observing the success of her interacting with students beyond scripted instruction, she started to begin thinking about making changes in her instruction.

The data on TA reveal a teacher who is now engaged in trying to improve on her instruction. She was able to recognize the need for more subject matter and pedagogical knowledge. She has been awakened to the need for more professional development. She positively states that she would like to continue with her teacher development in a collaborative manner with colleagues, but there is friction over whether or not the realities of her colleagues are similar to hers. However, a ROP outcome that emerges in this study is that the co-constructed LSC has had positive effects on TA. If teachers join together in collaboration, friction can mobilize development; they might realize they can help each other more than they think. The results found in the ROP of TA demonstrate the effectiveness of collaborating in teacher development as well as observing the transformative effects of seeing teaching applications in action as powerful influencers on practice and teacher change. For example, she was able to articulate what it means to allow her students to become more active through implementing interactive activities. She saw that if she avoided a lot of deductive explanations of grammar and gave students more

opportunities to use the target structures inductively that they would become less bored and more energized and creative to use them in meaningful ways. As she said, “And best of all I don’t have to explain a lot.” Her comments show that she is developing a professional discourse to better describe and conceptualize her teaching, which can better inform her practice to use less L1 and more TETE resulting in more English in the classroom.