An important focus of the current study is to investigate what skills and knowledge teachers learned from engaging in team teaching. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the classroom where teachers spend much of their time is now recognized as a legitimate site for teacher learning to take place (Johnson, 2006). This section will present and discuss the data related to May and Angie’s development in skills and knowledge.
May’s Growth
Areas May wanted to improve on
In the background interview conducted at the beginning of the school year, I asked each teacher to discuss the skills they would like to improve on and the knowledge they hoped to gain (Appendix E). May told me that she would like to learn more about positive discipline approaches (e.g., giving rewards for good behavior). Also, she wanted to gain more knowledge of the Chinese language. In her words, “The fact that I don’t speak any Chinese, to me, that’s a minus. This is an area that I really need to improve. If I can speak the language, I can know the children better” (interview, 2006/09/05). May offered an example to illustrate how her limited knowledge of Chinese had helped her in the daily teaching. She said in the same interview, “Yesterday I noticed that when I was teaching them Monday, Tuesday, and I used my fingers to count. Maybe they didn’t really understand, so I said ‘Monday sing1 ci2 yi1, Tuesday sing1 ci2 er4.’” May continued, “They were like ‘Oh~ A-ha!’ That was a fun moment for them. That made them understand Monday is day one.”
May’s gains
At the end of the first semester, I asked May if she had had opportunities to learn about positive discipline approaches and the Chinese language. For the former, she mentioned that she had observed some approaches from the homeroom teachers she worked with. She remarked, “They normally reward the kids. They got their own reward system. They also give candy. Well, we don’t give candy here simply because they are a little bit bigger now. Maybe I should give them candy sometimes” (interview, 2006/12/28). In the last few classes of the second semester, May did give candy to students.
In one of the interviews, I also asked her if she had learned anything from
Angie, and she said, “Ya, just her manner of conducting her own classes. While I am sitting here, she does almost the same. But I don’t know if it’s because she speaks Chinese. The children seem to behave better.” She continued, “I don’t understand Chinese, but I see them behave better. I must ask her what she is doing to them. It must be a positive thing. They behave quite well” (interview, 2006/12/28). She also stated that from Angie, she learned some games and ways of teaching pronunciation to children. In her words, “I have learned some games from her. What it comes to phonics and teaching children the sounds, she always emphasizes that. I think it’s very good for EFL students. I am learning that a lot.”
She provided an example—“Like when she says “cat,” she would say [k] [k] [k], [æ]
[æ] [æ], [t] [t] [t]. So I wait for these opportunities to learn from her” (interview, 2006/12/28).
With regard to her knowledge in Chinese, she commented at the end of the first semester that she had not formally learned Chinese, though she did pick up a few words when she was at the church every Sunday. She told me that it was difficult to pick up words from teaching with Angie because Angie would speak Chinese to the students in a very rapid manner. However, if she noticed a word that she thought was helping students to understand, she would later ask Angie what that word is and tried to learn it. At the end of the second semester, she also told me that she planned to take Chinese lessons at the language center of a local university in the next school year.
Meanwhile, May’s conflicts with some of the sixth graders during the first semester provided her with opportunities to learn more about her co-teachers and the local school culture. With regard to her co-teachers, May wrote in the questionnaire, “I learned that every co-teacher is unique and that I should try to work with each co-teacher’s confines. Some co-teachers are experienced,
professional, and do their best to maximize instruction time. Others do the direct opposite.” As mentioned in the last section, May was quite unsatisfied with how one of her co-teachers Ellen handled the problem students; she thought that Ellen was too soft and inexperienced to control the students. On the other hand, she often praised Angie as professional and experienced.
Regarding the school culture, May certainly had some knowledge about how schools function in Taiwan because she had worked here for more than a year. For example, she once asked Angie in the first teacher meeting of the first semester if she could move one of her classes from the afternoon to morning. Angie first made sure that she understood May’s request correctly and said that she would have to check with Eric (since every teacher’s teaching schedule had been finalized). May then told Angie that she would just follow the current schedule because she understood that a small change would turn the whole school’s schedule up-side-down (fieldnote, 2006/08/29). During the first semester, from her conflicts with students, one additional dimension of knowledge which May gained was that taking care of student problems was mainly the class teacher’s responsibility.
Although she disagreed with the fact that the administrators would not step in to offer more help, she felt that she needed to try to resolve conflicts either by herself or with the help of her co-teachers.
After practicing team teaching at School A for two years, May wondered how she could motivate her weaker learners to learn English. According to her observation, these were usually the ones whose parents could not afford to send them to after-school classes, or bushiban. She told me about a talk she had with Angie:
Another thing we were discussing was as I understand, this project
got started because there are parents who cannot afford to send their kids to bushiban. So apparently, the children who are still gaining are still the bushiban kids. Those who are meant to be gaining a lot from this program are not because they are not benefiting. First, they don’t have the confidence, and secondly, they just have English once a week. Maybe because their first experience with English was not that good. They are really demotivated. We find ourselves AGAIN teaching those children who are benefiting from bushiban. I don’t know how we can do it. I just don’t know (interview, 2007/06/11).
May went on to talk about that she and her co-teachers always tried to involve these weaker students in their daily teaching, but she felt that these students had developed a kind of “mental block” toward learning English. Despite her feeling of helplessness, May seemed to have learned important contextual knowledge about teaching English in elementary schools in Taiwan, i.e., those who excel in English classes at school may often be the ones who receive extra instruction after school.
For her, it is important that she keeps trying to narrow the gap in the English ability between the haves and have nots.
Angie’s Growth
Areas Angie wanted to improve on
In the background interview, Angie mentioned that she would like to learn “the teaching ideas and concepts from the western world” from May (interview, 2006/09/04). As mentioned earlier, she also hoped that her students would benefit from May’s diverse teaching experience in different parts of the world.
Furthermore, she expressed her desire to participate in professional development activities to learn more about team teaching. In her words, “My learning with May may be one-dimensional. It would be even better if I can learn from other teachers’
experience in team teaching, like in workshops, and know what they have to say
about team teaching” (interview, 2006/09/04).
May and Angie’s plan to launch group differentiation instruction
Right after the first semester began, May proposed to try what she called
“group differentiation instruction” with the fifth and sixth graders at School A.
Although these students were placed into three different levels according to how well they did on the placement test in the first class of the semester, May felt that there were still different levels within an ability group. Therefore, she proposed to try group differentiation instruction when everything was more settled in the first semester. Angie explained May’s ideas in the background interview (2006/09/04),
“For example, after teachers have finished the main part of instruction, students’
group work will begin. Some groups may need more help, which will be offered by teachers.” She continued, “Some groups may be more advanced, so they can be given more work to do, for instance, extra worksheets. Different groups will do different things, so that time is not wasted.” Angie thought that what May proposed was something new for her, and she was willing to give it a try. She shared her feelings with me in the same interview, “We talked about group work today, and I told May that in our Chinese culture, we don’t really have something like this. What we usually have is whole-class learning, but I think May’s idea is great and worth trying.”
May and Angie decided to wait until the midterm exam33 was over to start experimenting the group differentiation instruction with the fifth and sixth graders;
they felt that by this time, teachers and students would have been more settled down.
However, at the meeting of October 17, 2006, Angie announced that the Hsinchu
33 For the English subject, students of all grades at School A had to take one midterm and one final exam. Each of the exams consisted of the oral and written component. In the first semester, the oral component of the midterm exam was administered between October 13-27, and the written one between October 30 to November 3. May and Angie were planning to begin the differentiation instruction with the fifth and sixth graders in early November.
City Government just sent a formal notice to School A and the other school which also implemented the same type of ability grouping, informing them that any practice of grouping students according to their abilities is strongly prohibited and should be stopped immediately. After receiving the notice, Eric told Angie to ask about English teachers’ opinions. Upon hearing this news at the meeting, May immediately voiced her opinion. She said that the way they were grouping students now allowed students to learn at their own pace, and the Government should not ban it. She told us that she would be disappointed if ability grouping could not be continued at School A, as she was about to launch group differentiation instruction in each Grades 5 and 6 class.
In the remaining school year, School A did not receive any formal notice about ability grouping from the city government, so the fifth and sixth graders continued to receive instruction according to the original arrangement. However, because of the government’s intervention to terminate ability grouping, May and Angie could not implement group differentiation instruction which May had planned. Angie probably lost a valuable opportunity to learn from May’s experience of implementing differentiation instruction. Likewise, May also did not get to learn about the outcome and feasibility of her ideas which she brought from the United States.
Angie’s learning from May
One of the questions I asked all the participants at the end of the first semester is their perceptions of what they learned from their team-teaching partners (Appendix I). After hearing this question, Angie was silent for a few seconds and then laughed uncomfortably. She finally said:
I need to think about this question (a few seconds of silence). I think
it’s funny that what I learn from her is not teaching techniques or ideas.
Rather, I learn the language because she is a native speaker. For example, when she is teaching or giving some instruction, I can learn the words she uses to express her ideas. We are not native speakers, so sometimes, we cannot express ourselves so well. I listen to the ways she says things. If I find that students can understand her, I will
remember those things. What I learn from her is language. With regard to teaching techniques, I can’t think of anything (interview, 2007/01/04).
As she indicated in the background interview (Appendix E), Angie had expected that she would learn some western teaching ideas and concepts from May. However, by the end of the first semester, she commented that what she learned from working with May was her partner’s use of classroom language. As she stated in the interview, if she noticed something which May said seemed to work, she would remember those phrases. Angie is a very proficient speaker of English. Unlike the JTEs in Gorsuch’s (2002) study who gave themselves a higher rating of their general English ability as a result of frequent contact with ALTs, Angie did not perceive such a gain in her general English proficiency. Rather, she felt that she had learned some useful classroom English from May.
Instead of learning new or useful teaching ideas/techniques from May, Angie sometimes found May’s teaching techniques problematic, especially when she taught the older children. Early on in the school year, Angie started to notice that some of May’s teaching techniques were not age-appropriate for the higher graders.
For every teacher meeting, Angie always prepared a brief written summary and distributed a copy to every teacher before the meeting began (see Appendix R for the agenda that Angie prepared for the September 12 meeting). On September 12, 2006, one of the items on the agenda said, “Classroom activities: The activities or games teachers design for students should be based on students’ ages and levels.
Some activities work in the classes with younger students, but they don’t work with November 20, May first taught the keywords for the day by leading students to read them a few times.35 Then she told students that they were going to play a game.
Team members had to take turns going to the stage and writing down the word May read to them. Once a student finished writing his/her word, the next student from the same team must immediately go to the stage and listen to the next word. At that time, I noticed that the three teams whose seats were at the back of the classroom could not get to the stage fast enough. As a result, these three teams did not get to write as many words as the first three teams. In the middle of chaos, the bell rang, and May announced the winning team. The class ended. After I came home on that day, I located May’s lesson plan36 for this particular class (Appendix S;
the real names of teachers and school were removed) to see if she provided any
34 It is a chant invented by May. Students have to first hold their two fists in the air and keep them in front of their chest. As they say a day (e.g., Monday), their two fists will touch each other and one fist will be released to signal a number (e.g., one finger for Monday, two fingers for Tuesday). May often asked students to chant this as a warm up. During my fieldwork, I also observed that May used this chant with students across different grades.
35 Angie later told me that this was the first time that these words were introduced to students; in other words, these were new words for students.
36 At the beginning of the first semester in the 2006 school year, foreign teachers in the Hsinchu Program were required to submit their weekly lesson plans for the next coming month to the foreign-teacher company, the school, and their co-teachers by the last Friday of the month. In December, 2006, the foreign-teacher company changed the policy and asked their teachers to submit the lesson plans on a bi-weekly basis. The format of the lesson plan was given to teachers by the company.
rationale for playing this game. I found that this game was not mentioned at all in her lesson plan. Moreover, she did not tell students to do the homework that she had stated on the lesson plan.
The next week, I happened to observe the same class again. The spelling contest took place again. To my surprise, Angie walked to me when the game just began (I always sat at the back of the classroom) and said that she had told May that it is quite pointless to expect students to be able to write the words they just learned earlier in the same class. She was very upset that May did this activity again. She told me that she had told May that some of the students could spell the words because they had learned them in cram schools, but May disagreed and insisted that students should be able to play the game. Before she joined May again, she told me, in a very frustrated voice, “Our kids are not genius!” (fieldnote, 2006/11/27).
On that day (November 27), I stayed for the next class, which was the Grade 5 Level A class. The spelling contest was also part of the lesson. I noticed that May made the contest a little bit harder for these more capable students. Instead of asking students just to write the new words, she read a couple of full sentences to them as prompts. Students in this class did considerably better than the last class.
After the class was over, I went to talk to May. I asked her if she taught harder things to the Level A class, and she said she always made some modifications for them. I also asked her about the spelling contest, and she told me that she did it to make sure that students got a chance to practice writing the new words. She said quite impatiently, “Some of them think it’s too hard, but I just don’t agree”
(fieldnote, 2006/11/27).
Angie, on the other hand, expressed her frustration with having to go against her own will and follow some of May’s activities in class:
What exhausts me is that there are some activities that I don’t agree with. In other words, if I were her, I wouldn’t do it. But I have to follow her. I have to cooperate with her, help her do it, help her discipline the kids. For example, sometimes, she asks Grade 4 students to read the chants and do the corresponding actions at the same time. This is good because doing the two things together will help students memorize the chants. But students think the chants are stupid and feel embarrassed to do the actions. For me, because the foreign teacher has requested students to do so, I can only ask
What exhausts me is that there are some activities that I don’t agree with. In other words, if I were her, I wouldn’t do it. But I have to follow her. I have to cooperate with her, help her do it, help her discipline the kids. For example, sometimes, she asks Grade 4 students to read the chants and do the corresponding actions at the same time. This is good because doing the two things together will help students memorize the chants. But students think the chants are stupid and feel embarrassed to do the actions. For me, because the foreign teacher has requested students to do so, I can only ask