Limitations of the Study and Directions for Future Research

CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUDING REMARKS

The purpose of this study is to investigate the professional development of Taiwanese and foreign teachers as situated in team teaching in the context of elementary schools in Taiwan. Using qualitative methods, I immersed myself in three elementary schools in Hsinchu City, Taiwan over the course of the 2006 academic year. My research was guided by the following three research questions:

1. How do foreign and local English teachers that are novices in team teaching describe and perceive their experience in team teaching? How and why do their description and perception change over time?

2. What skills and knowledge do foreign and local English teachers learn from team teaching? How do they contribute to each other’s learning?

3. What are the facilitating and debilitating factors for professional growth in a team-teaching relationship and in the larger teaching context?

In this chapter, I will first offer a summary of the findings to the three research questions and a discussion of the implications for theory and the practice of team teaching. Next, I will discuss the limitations of the current study as well as possible future directions to further the research on team teaching. To conclude this chapter, I will provide my personal reflection on the study.

Summary of Findings

Teachers’ Description and Perception of Team Teaching

The 2006 school year was the first year that the three local teachers participated in team teaching. When the school year began, they all expected that their foreign partners would facilitate students’ English learning if they could provide abundant authentic language input and cultural stimulation. They perceived their role mainly as the assistants of their partners, responsible for duties like classroom management

and providing extra instruction to slower learners. However, soon after the semester began, they found that they needed to shoulder other responsibilities to make the daily team teaching run smoothly. For example, Joyce found that her first partner Ivy had an introverted personality and weak teaching skills; Joyce started to step up and did some teaching in their co-teaching lessons.

Among the four foreign teachers participating in this study, May was the only second-year teacher in the Hsinchu Program. Amy, Ivy, and Rachel all came to Taiwan to teach for the first time. Among the three, Ivy had taught EFL in Japan for two years, and the other two teachers were completely new to EFL teaching when they arrived in Taiwan. May, Amy, and Rachel expected themselves to be the main teachers of their co-teaching classes, although they acknowledged the importance of working with their co-teachers as a team. In the case of Ivy, because of her previous experience of teaching in the JET program, where she mainly worked as the Japanese teacher’s assistant, she did not realize she needed to lead her co-teaching lessons when she first began to teach at School C.

Because I followed Ivy and Rachel for only one semester, I could not really trace their change of perception of team teaching for the entire school year. On the other hand, among the other five participants, May, Angie, Joyce, and Amy’s perception of team teaching did not change after practicing team teaching for one year—May, Joyce, and Amy continued to endorse this form of teaching arrangement, while Angie still hoped that she could teach by herself. In the case of Nancy, she began the year as a strong supporter of the team-teaching policy. However, she soon became frustrated with having to work with incompatible teammates (Amy and Mike) and serving as the go-between for the foreign and local teachers at her school.

Her support for team teaching quickly vanished.

It was found in this study that many of the metaphors provided by teachers at

the end of each semester reflected their team-teaching experiences. Among the four foreign teachers, May and Ivy compared team teaching to an intercultural marriage, an oft-mentioned analogy to this teaching model. While Amy did not really provide a metaphor in the two interviews, Rachel stated that teaching her sixth graders was full of surprises, like facing a time bomb which might explode at any time. Indeed, this metaphor genuinely reflected her trying experience with the restless sixth graders in her school.

In the case of the three local teachers, their metaphors also provide a window to understand their perception of having to team up with foreign teachers. Angie compared team teaching to having two women in a small kitchen while Nancy resented the fact that she was not given the right to choose whether to participate in team teaching or which foreign teacher she wanted to work with, just like how she had to take the medicine the doctor prescribed when she had a cold. In Joyce’s case, she felt helpless when her teammates could not teach a good lesson and compared this situation to getting stuck in the middle of a lake. Indeed, the metaphors the local teachers provided show their ongoing struggle or concern with team teaching in the past year.

The incidents which teachers described as most memorable were often the paramount issues in teachers’ daily teaching, and they provide another window to understand teachers’ feelings. For example, for the first semester, both Angie and May described the discipline problems with the sixth graders as most memorable, and without any doubt, May’s conflicts with these students greatly affected her mood and performance and created extra stress for her co-teachers during the second half of the first semester. These most memorable incidents do not have to be negative ones, as illustrated by the events described by Joyce and Rachel. Ivy gave a nice surprise to Joyce in the first semester when she led a game called “crisscross”

which successfully attracted students’ attention. On the other hand, Joyce’s new partner Rachel liked the fact that Joyce stepped in and offered her idea in the middle of a lesson, turning an ordinary activity into a creative and fun one.

Skills and Knowledge Learned From Team Teaching

In the background interview, the participants commented on a wide array of skills and knowledge they would like to improve on while joining the team teaching program. Generally speaking, the foreign teachers hoped to gain more knowledge about the Taiwanese children and culture and learn different classroom management techniques while the Taiwanese teachers would like to learn about the western culture and teaching ideas from their partners. Findings of this study suggest that both Angie and Joyce who had not lived or studied overseas previously felt that they gained a greater awareness of the foreign culture after teaming up with their foreign partners for one year. Joyce also felt that her view of what the English language represents is no longer so narrow. Both Nancy and Joyce acknowledged that they learned some useful teaching ideas from team teaching. Angie felt she learned some useful classroom English expressions from May while Nancy stated that with the help of foreign teachers, she could provide the most appropriate English usage to her students. In Joyce’s case, she was hoping that working side by side with a foreign teacher would help her improve on the knowledge of the English language.

However, this expectation was not fulfilled in the first semester because Ivy was not a talkative person and provided little naturalistic language input inside and outside the classroom.

In the case of May, Amy, and Ivy, they felt that watching their Taiwanese partners teach helped them gain some teaching ideas and discipline approaches.

However, it is doubtful whether they could apply what they claimed they had learned to improve their teaching. A vivid example is the teaching of phonics.

May, Amy, and Ivy all commented that they learned how to teach phonics from watching their Taiwanese partners teach. However, in my one-year-long fieldwork, Amy was the only foreign teacher who tried to teach phonics (because she was required to do so in the second semester), and she often ended up misleading her students with her accent and improper techniques.

Learning From Other Sources

Their team-teaching partners were not the only source for teachers’ learning.

From teaching in their respective schools, many participants also gained more knowledge about students’ characteristics, the school culture, and the larger societal context. Take May for example. She learned that her EFL learners probably need more time to learn English than she previously thought and that taking care of student problems is mainly the class teacher’s responsibility, not that of the administrators. She also became aware of the gaps between the strong and weak learners and contemplated how her teaching could cater to the weaker ones. In Rachel’s case, leading the dancing club gave her an opportunity to gain more knowledge about the characteristics of the sixth graders and get to know her partner Joyce better.

During the many interviews I conducted throughout the year, the participants often mentioned their learning from interacting with other colleagues. For example, Amy felt that talking to other foreign teachers in the program helped her adapt to teaching in Taiwan. As for the local teachers, they all described the other Taiwanese English teachers in their schools as a great source for support and ideas.

In fact, these people were the ones whom Angie, Nancy, and Joyce often turned to when they wanted to discuss ideas and other issues related to their teaching.

Besides engaging in their daily team teaching, the participants were also involved in various professional development activities outside their schools. For

the foreign teachers, these activities usually took the form of the monthly training organized by the foreign-teacher company. Attending these sessions seem to have the strongest impact on Ivy, who was often found applying those ideas she learned from her company training to her teaching. Like the foreign teachers, the Taiwanese teachers also participated in various workshops during the school year.

Although they found some of the ideas presented there might not be readily applicable to their classrooms, they generally felt that such venues provided them with opportunities to learn about other people’s viewpoints and experiences.

An important professional development activity for May, Angie, and Joyce (three of the seven participants of this study that participated in this event) was the co-teaching conference held in April, 2007. In one of the teaching demo sessions, May learned that when teaching her younger learners, it is important to provide them with abundant gestures and actions. Meanwhile, Angie got a sense of comfort from the conference, as she realized that many teachers were also trying hard to make team teaching work, and she was not alone. For Joyce, listening to the honest account of one of the speakers was a shocking experience. She also felt an urgent need for the city government to reevaluate its team teaching policy so that the mistakes made elsewhere would not be repeated in Hsinchu.

Facilitating and Debilitating Factors for Teachers’ Professional Growth

In this study, many individual or social/interpersonal factors were found to contribute to or inhibit the participants’ professional development. In particular, a positive attitude toward their jobs and willingness to try different teaching ideas are conducive to teachers’ learning on the job. The participants also benefited from a harmonious relationship with their colleagues and participating in professional development activities. On the other hand, lack of effective communication between teachers and teachers’ lack of passion for teaching are likely to be

detrimental for teachers’ growth.

Findings of this study suggest that it may sometimes take a special arrangement or event to trigger teacher learning. For example, Rachel led a dancing club at School C to fulfill the requirement of providing an extracurricular activity, and from this experience, she felt she had learned important knowledge about her students and co-teacher. The special event might involve the intervention of an authority, as in the case of Dr. Lee’s visit of Ivy and Joyce’s class in the first semester. This event triggered a change in the classroom dynamics, as Joyce tried to complement her partner’s weaknesses by shouldering some teaching responsibility.

Especially from School A, we can see how teachers’ professional development is often shaped by factors beyond individual teachers’ control. Angie and May’s decision to implement differentiation instruction came to a halt as a result of the top-down educational policy to ban any form of ability grouping. The opportunity to experiment with a different teaching idea could have been a great learning experience for both teachers.

Theoretical Implications

Under the guidance of the sociocultural perspective, this study not only provides a detailed account of teachers’ descriptions and perceptions of team teaching, but also depicts their professional development journeys. This investigation is in concordance with the current conceptualization of teacher image and teacher learning, and it also illuminates the many dimensions encompassing teachers’ learning (see Chapter 2 for more details). Another important contribution of this study is the length of time devoted to data collection. Teacher learning is a developmental process. To understand the complexity of this process, researchers are required not only to immerse themselves in the research sites and employ multiple data collection methods, but also to spend a long period of time in the sites.

Although my study is nothing compared to awe-inspiring works like Bullough Jr.

and Baughman’s (1997) study in which the first author (a researcher) traces the development of the second author (a classroom practitioner) over the course of a decade, it is the study on team teaching in the Hsinchu context with the longest period of fieldwork so far. I certainly hope that the completion of this study does not mean the end of my friendship and collaboration with my participants, and some time in the future, I can follow the footstep of researchers like Bullough Jr. to continue to investigate the development of the teachers who participated in this study.

In the next few sections, I will discuss the theoretical implications for the concepts related to the sociocultural framework.

Situated Learning

Guided by the spirit of the sociocultural perspective, the current study was set out to investigate teacher learning as situated in team teaching. When investigating any type of human learning, a situated view does not solely focus on what knowledge or skill is gained in the process. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), an essential question to ask is what kinds of social activities are conducive for learning to take place. In this study, team teaching between foreign and local English teachers is shown to be effective for the learning of classroom management skills, teaching ideas, the English language (including useful classroom English, proper English usage, and what the English language represents), and the foreign culture (in this case, the South African culture). However, findings of this study also suggest that the team-teaching mechanism did not reach all its potentials or promises in terms of triggering teacher learning. Many individual or social/interpersonal factors, such as team teachers’ negative personalities and lack of regular lesson planning meetings or communication, were found to prevent teachers

from developing further as professionals in team teaching and English teaching.

The three local teachers also identified different problems of team teaching. For example, in the case of School A, Angie’s expectation that May’s diverse teaching experience might benefit her students was not realized. For Nancy, her dissatisfaction with Amy’s performance and attitude caused her to question the team-teaching policy. At School C, Joyce felt helpless when her partners could not conduct an effective lesson.

An important finding of the current study is that the participants’ learning was not limited to team teaching. In addition to team teaching, their interactions with other people and events inside and outside their schools were also found to influence their professional development. For example, in the case of the three local teachers, they all acknowledged their Chinese colleagues in the English departments as helpful and resourceful in their learning of how to teach English either by themselves or with their respective foreign co-teacher. However, the people who have impact on teachers’ development are not restricted to those in their respective schools. As seen in the case of Joyce and Ivy, they learned ways to improve their co-teaching lessons from Dr. Lee’s visit. Over the course of one school year, different social activities which triggered teacher learning also took place in the participants’ lives. These activities include daily conversations with colleagues, observation of other teachers’ teaching, workshops, and the co-teaching conference.

Instead of just taking in a body of factual knowledge (i.e., as passive receivers of knowledge), the participants were also found to constantly evaluate the ideas they learned from these different social events to see if they could apply them to their teaching contexts.

In summary, this study was set out to investigate teachers’ professional development as situated in team teaching. However, it was found out that teachers’

learning went beyond team teaching practices. This finding suggests that to fully understand teachers’ development, it is essential to pay meticulous attention to the wide array of activities which teachers engaged inside and outside their classroom or even school. Take my experience of attending teacher meetings at the three schools for example. These meetings took place outside the participants’

classrooms and were, as aforementioned, a routine at School A and B. If I had not attended these meetings, it would have been impossible to learn about how, for example, teachers at School A exchanged their opinions and ideas during their meetings, and how Amy did not seize the opportunity of having those meetings to carry out productive conversations with her colleagues. In other words, to understand teacher learning from a situated perspective, it is imperative for researchers to consider all the contexts which teacher learning may occur.

Community of Practice

This study depicts teacher learning as embedded in social activities and occurring as teachers interact with people, objects, and events in the social environment. An important notion which conceptualizes learning as a social activity is that of community of practice (COP). To become seasoned members of a community, Lave and Wenger (1991) contend that learners must be fully engaged in the activities of the community, and learning will proceed from doing. The participants of this study all started as complete novices in the team-teaching community in Hsinchu City (except May who had had one year of experience). As shown in previous chapters, they all grew in different aspects as they practiced and experienced team teaching on the daily basis.

In the COP perspective, learning is often described as a process from

“legitimate peripheral participation” (LPP) to full participation, in which novices in a community are seen as performing simple tasks before moving on to the core

activities essential for the well-being of the community. This process deserves more discussions here. One of the professions Lave and Wenger (1991) use to illustrate this process is the midwives in the Yucatec Maya community, where a girl learns to become a midwife by working side by side with her midwife mother or grandmother from a young age. Before she becomes a true midwife, she assists from the side by performing simple tasks such as running errands or getting the needed supplies.

In this study, novice team teachers needed to start performing the core tasks involved in team teaching from their first day at work. In other words, unlike the typical apprentices (e.g., the young midwives in the Yucatec Maya community) described by the COP concept, the participants immediately started from full participation, instead of LPP, once they entered the team teaching community. In the case of Angie and Nancy, they even had the extra duty of working as the English head teachers for their schools. As for three of the foreign teachers, Amy, Ivy, and Rachel, they did not even have time to settle down in the foreign land before they began their teaching assignments. May once described this learning process as a

“sink or swim” experience—“We are just being thrown to the deep sea and we are just left to sink or swim” (interview, 2007/06/11).

Therefore, one important feature of the team-teaching arrangement in Hsinchu City is the lack of opportunity for novice team teachers to slowly progress from the peripheral to the core. An underlying assumption of the Hsinchu program seems to be that it is easy for people from related communities (for example, English-speaking foreigners who are certified special education teachers in their home countries or Taiwanese teachers of English who have little or no knowledge and training on team teaching) to quickly socialize into the local team teaching community, performing the core tasks from the first day of their teaching

assignments. Such mistaken assumption appears to support Hornbeger’s (2006) argument that “educational policies more often than not treat them as unproblematic and straightforward” despite the fact that “collaborative pedagogical relationships are interactionally and epistemologically complex” (p. 495).

The process from LPP to full participation seems to be an ideal learning process for apprentices to gradually socialize into a community of practice. However, in the real world, many major educational policies are often implemented hastily, leaving many teachers unprepared for new practices. For example, the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum (NYIC) in Taiwan reorganizes the curriculum of elementary and junior high school into seven major learning areas, each encompassing many subjects.⁴⁸ Under the new guidelines, teachers that used to teach one of the subjects in each major learning area are now expected to teach the contents of the learning area their subject belongs to, many of which they are not familiar with (Wu, 2005). Such a drastic change has caused many veteran teachers difficulties in adopting their new identity and practicing the new curriculum policy.

The make-up of each pair of teachers in this study also deserves further discussions. Unlike the apprentices who are typically led by experts in discussions of the COP concept, all the teachers who made up the four teaching teams in this study were novice teachers in team teaching. Moreover, it was Nancy and Joyce’s first time to work as English subject teachers, and Amy and Rachel’s first time to teach in an EFL environment. In other words, if we limited our examination of teacher learning to the scope of each pair of team teachers, we could say that there was not an expert to guide the novice through her development in team teaching.

48 For example, Social studies includes the learning of history and culture, geographical environment, social institutions, morals and norms, politics, economy, interpersonal interactions, civic

responsibilities, indigenous education, environmental conservation, and the incorporation of the aforementioned learning into one’s daily life (Ministry of Education, Republic of China, Taiwan, n.d.).

The seven learning areas are Language Arts, Health and Physical Education, Social Studies, Arts and Humanities, Science and Technology, Mathematics, and Integrative Activities.

However, the findings of the current study suggest that the participants’ professional development was influenced by people beyond their team and events beyond team-teaching. An important implication of these findings is to look at their learning in a broader context, such as the community of team teaching practice in Hsinchu City.

Viewing teacher learning in this broader sense, the social activities other than team-teaching that the participating teachers engaged in for development as a team teacher can be considered as activities belonging to the boundaries or “the peripheral” of the community, with the core ones being those directly associated with teachers’ daily team teaching. Likewise, all the colleagues of the participants (including homeroom teachers), Dr. Lee, and even the staff at the foreign teacher company can all be considered as members of the community of team teaching practice. Take Dr. Lee for example. Though she might not perform the core tasks of team teaching, she, as discussed in Chapter 6, played a key role in Joyce and Ivy’s development as team teachers. She was also the main organizer of the co-teaching conference which had great impact on those participants who attended the event.

To summarize, the COP theory makes the prediction that newcomers become seasoned members of a community by progressing from LPP to full participation under the condition that they have time to start from the peripheral. However, the unique nature of the team teaching arrangement in Hsinchu City (i.e., team teachers were not given time to start with non-core tasks) makes such developmental path impossible for the participants of this study. The findings of this study also suggest that in some circumstances, teacher learning needs to be understood in a broader context where the core as well as the non-core practices and members of a COP are taken into consideration.

Multiple and Distributed Expertise

This study certainly demonstrates Tsui’s (2003) notion of multiple expertise, in which expertise should not be interpreted as a generic term, but as encompassing different areas of specialization in a profession. For example, the local teachers in this study are all quite skillful with managing their students and detecting their students’ learning difficulties. Take May as another example. Her knowledge of the South African culture is definitely one of her important assets. Also, because of her previous teaching experience, she also possesses knowledge on how the discipline mechanism functions and how team teaching is practiced in the U. S. On the other hand, although she is quite skillful with teaching the lower graders, May does not have effective classroom management skills to handle her misbehaved sixth graders. When conflicts arose between her and these students, her partner Angie’s expertise in managing students had to be pooled in (i.e., distributed expertise).

While teachers’ various strengths need to be recognized and pooled in to solve different problems and enhance the quality of student learning in the teaching site, it is also hoped that teachers will continue to cultivate their knowledge and skills in other areas and develop into well-rounded professionals. To better understand the process of teacher development, researchers need to look into the different areas of expertise that individual teachers process and how expertise is pooled together in their daily teaching.

Practical Implications

It was found in this study that an important facilitating factor for teacher’s growth is a good relationship among team teachers and other colleagues. The development of such a relationship requires conscious and continuous efforts from both local and foreign teachers to maintain an open mind to differences and a committed attitude to their jobs. The channels of communication also need to be

open for teachers to discuss ideas and concerns. As aforementioned, one such important venue is the regular lesson planning meetings where all the team teachers have an opportunity to sit down and discuss the lesson plans the foreign teachers have drafted. Since team teaching should also involve post-evaluation (Richards &

Farrell, 2005), teachers can also discuss and evaluate their teaching in these meetings.

Findings of this study also suggest that team teachers should be encouraged to reflect on their teaching regularly so that teaching is guided by more informed decisions. Such reflection can take many forms, such as engaging in casual conversations about the lesson team teachers taught together the other day, writing a reflective journal and exchange it with their partners, and conducting action research to investigate a certain aspect of team teaching. It is especially important for foreign teachers to critically reflect on whether their teaching techniques are suitable for the local children and whether they continue to improve themselves. They also need to take their teaching jobs in the foreign land seriously and believe that what they do in the classroom is influential for children’s learning.

It was also found in this study that the other professional development activities which teachers attended outside school played an important role in teachers’

development. The most attended in-service training event was the workshops organized by the foreign-teacher company (in the case of foreign teachers) and the city government (for Taiwanese teachers). To better cater the interest of teachers, perhaps a needs survey can be distributed to teachers at the beginning of the school year to inquire teachers about the themes they hope the workshops will be designed around. If possible, more training should be designed as joint sessions attended by both local and foreign teachers to facilitate more direct communication between the two parties.

The conference on co-teaching also provided much stimulation and encouragement to the teachers who participated in this event. However, Nancy told me that she could not attend the event because it was held on a Friday and she could not find a substitute teacher to cover her duties. In a casual conversation with Dr.

Lee, the foreign-teacher teaching consultant and main organizer of the conference, I was told that the Education Bureau of Hsinchu City insisted that the conference be held on a regular work day so that the officials who needed to show up at the conference did not have to sacrifice their weekend for the event. Considering the impact it had on the teachers who participated in the event in 2007, it is hoped that the co-teaching conference will continue to be held and the future organizer can consider hosting it at a more suitable time to encourage wider participation.

Although homeroom teachers are not the focus of this study, it was found that they actually played an important part in foreign teachers’ daily teaching because the latter typically have to work with many homeroom teachers in their assigned schools.

For example, in the case of Rachel, her co-teachers included three English subject teachers and 13 homeroom teachers. At School B, Amy worked with Nancy only for two periods a week and had 16 homeroom co-teachers for the rest of the week.⁴⁹ One important implication is that to facilitate the efficacy of the team-teaching mechanism, homeroom teachers also need to be professionalized. The first step is to help them develop their English ability so that they have the tool and confidence to communicate directly with the foreign teachers who come to their homerooms to teach their students. In the 2006 school year, the Hsinchu City government organized a series of English courses for those elementary school teachers who were interested in upgrading their English ability. Most of the attendees were homeroom

49 Amy went to work at another school every Thursday where she worked with four more homeroom teachers.

teachers. It is hoped that such programs will continue to receive funding from the government in the future, and more teachers can benefit from these courses.

It is perhaps redundant to state that without qualified teachers, students’

learning is likely to suffer. This study asserts the importance of having qualified teachers. As shown in the case of Ivy, students’ learning interest quickly waned as she struggled to teach effectively. How to recruit a strong teaching force of foreign teachers has been a recurring issue in the Hsinchu Program and other similar programs. Although the foreign-teacher company tried to impose some standards in their recruitment (e.g., the applicants need to be certified teachers in their home country; see Appendix B for the recruitment guidelines), the foreign teachers who worked in the Hsinchu program, as shown in this study, typically lacked knowledge and skills in team teaching and English teaching when they began their teaching assignments.

Another important finding of this study is related to the thorny issue of hiring the so-called “native speakers” of English. Although many South African teachers (like May, Amy and Ivy) feel defensive about their accents, the data from this study suggest that the varying accents of these teachers are indeed the source of many problems at the three schools. These teachers are recruited as native speakers of English on the basis that they come from a country where English has the status as one of the 11 official languages. However, as mentioned earlier, Ivy and May did not start learning English until they went to primary school, and I found that Rachel usually communicates with her South African friends in Afrikaans. With their diverse linguistic and family backgrounds, perhaps it is not surprising to find that many South African teachers speak English with different accents, some of which sound quite unfamiliar to the general public in Taiwan. If the purpose of hiring native speakers is to provide students with language models who we hope they will

imitate, then perhaps a stricter screening on the foreign teachers’ linguistic background needs to be imposed. The hiring agency can require the applicants to supply more detailed information about their linguistic background (for example, by asking them to write an autobiography which explains their language-learning history) and a sample recording of their oral language if they cannot attend the face-to-face interview. However, these procedures need to be handled in a professional and sensitive manner to avoid any feeling of discrimination or unfair treatment.

In addition, once foreign teachers are recruited, how to manage them professionally is an issue worth considering (Park, 2007). As shown in the case of Ivy and Joyce, the observation made by Dr. Lee and the subsequent teacher conference actually had a catalytic effect on the improvement of classroom dynamics and teaching quality in the two teachers’ co-teaching lessons. In other words, having an authority figure who has a high level of professionalism in team teaching and EFL teaching to supervise foreign teachers is one mechanism to ensure the quality of the program.

As mentioned in the first chapter, in the new 2007 school year, each elementary school needs to take over the responsibility of recruiting and managing their own foreign teachers. More uncertainties are now cast over the quality of team teaching and the future of the program in Hsinchu City. There is an urgent need for the city government to evaluate the team-teaching policy to see if millions of dollars have been spent wisely and to discuss the future of the program. Perhaps open discussions like public hearings need to take place so that more voices can be heard.

The program should not just be a showcase to promote the image of the administration. Various issues such as a high attrition rate of local English teachers (as in School A) and higher graders’ loss of motivation to learn English need to be

treated seriously.

Limitations of the Study and Directions for Future Research

One obvious limitation of this study is that Ivy dropped out of the program in the middle of the school year. I was not able to continue to observe how she evolved at School C in the second semester. Although I was fortunate to continue my fieldwork at School C with Rachel, I only followed her for one semester. The

“Ivy Incident” is an illuminating example to illustrate the unpredictability and uncertainty involved in qualitative studies (especially longitudinal ones). As Ivy’s partner Joyce once commented in an interview, it is a shocking experience to see someone disappear all of a sudden.

All the participants in this study are female, and all the foreign teachers come from South Africa. It is possible that with different demographic combinations, the interaction between teachers may vary. Also, all the three schools can be categorized as large-size, each with over 1,200 students. I did not succeed in finding small schools to join my study. As mentioned in Chapter 3, due to the low birth rate and anticipated shortage of students in the future, elementary schools in Hsinchu City, especially those smaller ones, are quite careful with their recruitment.

The opportunity to conduct research in smaller schools would probably have provided different perspectives to the practice of team teaching and how team teachers can grow from their collaboration.

One possible future direction to further the research on teacher learning as situated in team teaching is to investigate how team teachers will respond to and grow from engaging in classroom-based professional development activities together, such as conducting action research, organizing a teaching portfolio, and watching and reflecting on a videotaped lesson (see Richards & Farrell, 2005 for more details). Other qualitative approaches such as life history (Kouritzin, 2000;

Li, 2001) and narrative inquiry (Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Johnson & Golombek, 2002) can also be adopted to examine teachers’ personal histories and lived experiences in great depth.

To my knowledge, no study on the foreign teachers recruited by the MOE has been conducted so far. These teachers are often placed in the remote areas of the island, and studies on their adaptation and experiences in Taiwan are worth conducting. Because of the location of their teaching sites, such studies would probably require more time and energy from the investigators. Nonetheless, the findings from these studies shall provide valuable insights to the intercultural team-teaching mechanism.

Researchers can also consider involving homeroom teachers in their studies.

Although I visited a few homerooms and had informal contacts with many homeroom teachers during the school year, I did not formally involve any of the homeroom teachers in my study. In her study, Luo (2005) found that it is often quite challenging for foreign teachers to collaborate with homeroom teachers in the classroom because the latter often do not have the English ability to communicate with the former; they also lack professional training in English teaching to help conduct the lesson. However, as stated earlier, these homeroom teachers actually play an important role in foreign teachers’ daily teaching. Therefore, to further the research on team teaching and its relationship with teacher learning, a logical step is to examine the collaboration between these two groups of teachers.

Personal Reflection

For a novice qualitative researcher like me, the process of completing this project has been a challenging experience from the beginning to the end. When I was in my research sites, I paid close attention to participants’ interaction as well as those “behind-the-scene” stories. As I tried to gather as much information as

possible, I constantly reminded myself not to be too intrusive. During the writing process, I tried to provide a holistic account which is based on thick descriptions of the individuals, events, and contexts. There are plenty of decisions I needed to make during the research and writing process, and I hope I have made wise ones in return for all the participants’ gratitude for sharing their lives with me.

In March, 2007, I had a long conversation with my advisor outside a conference meeting room. One of the topics we talked about was the difficulty of gaining permission to conduct classroom-based research in Taiwan. Many teachers in Taiwan now refuse to open their classrooms to researchers. One of the reasons is that many unpleasant stories between the researcher and the researched have been circulating around the educational circle. I am aware of one such unpleasant incident which took place in one of my research sites. In the first semester of my fieldwork, a master student was also conducting her thesis study with a local teacher and her foreign partner in one of the schools. One day in this school, I happened to run into this local teacher on the hallway. She told me that they really regretted participating in this student’s project because they did not know she would follow them around the classroom to videotape their teaching (i.e., instead of fixing her digital camcorder on a certain spot in the classroom, the researcher carried it to follow the teacher in the classroom to take footage). She felt she was greatly offended and the “mobile videotaping” really interfered their teaching. Some parents also complained that this student researcher did not gain their permission to videotape their children. After coming home on that day, I tried to recall all those talks I had with my participants about how they needed to assist me with my study.

I also retrieved and read all the emails I had written to explain to them the purpose and procedures of my study. At the end of the day, I felt a sense of assurance that my participants should be quite well-informed about my data collection methods.

During the past year, I also had several opportunities to observe how some researchers presented their studies on the Hsinchu Program when their participants and the colleagues of these researched teachers were also present as audiences on the same occasions. Although these researchers seemed to feel they were just presenting what really went on in their research site(s) and their “objective”

interpretations, I could not help but feel extremely uneasy, especially when it was often quite easy to tell the real identities of these teachers. On these occasions, I sat quietly on the corner and observed the reaction of those teachers whose lives were being openly discussed by someone whom they welcomed into their classrooms. It seems that from the position of the researchers/presenters, they were just doing what is appropriate for them—sharing their findings with a group of interested audiences. However, whom they openly talked about are teachers who will need to go back to their classrooms to earn their living no matter what was said about them. I can never forget how some faces flushed as the researcher enthusiastically talked about her findings and how their colleagues turned to them and said, “Participant A is you, right?” Miles and Huberman (1994) contend that ethical research should not impose any harm and/or risk on the participants, in which harm and risk are defined as ranging from “blows to self-esteem or ‘looking bad’ to others, to threats to one’s interests, position, or advancement in the organization, to loss of funding for a program, or up to being sued or arrested” (p. 292). I believe that it is the responsibility of qualitative researchers to try their best to protect their participants from any harm or risk. This would require some extra sensitivity and thoughtfulness from the researchers who may have more power than they have realized.

I truly feel that the end of my project is the beginning of more inquiry for me.

This project gave me a learning opportunity which I have never experienced before.

I look forward to the challenges which lie ahead of me.