The Joy of Becoming Redundant

man and happy woman greeting each other with fist bump — Photo by Andres Ayrton on Pexels.com

Even though the financial rewards that you can expect as a teacher are dismally (and often abysmally) low, most teachers, perhaps partly in an effort to protect their sanity, would insist that they love their job nevertheless, claiming that teaching is rewarding in other ways; when asked about the rewards of teaching as a career, they will typically mention things like the appreciation they get from students and former students, the fact that they can help improve their students’ lives, the sense of accomplishment that they get from watching students succeed and overcome difficulties and even, for the idealists, the impact that their actions have on society at large.

And yet, essentially, teaching is a thankless activity. The whole point of teaching anyone anything is to make yourself redundant: ultimately, you are only successful as a teacher if your students can reach a stage in their learning where they no longer need you, not only because they have learnt everything that you were able to teach them, but also, more importantly, because they have developed the ability to continue learning independently of you and thus are learning more than you could ever teach them and, hopefully, much more than you, their teacher, actually know.

When their students surpass them, many teachers begin to doubt their skills, talents and accomplishments and experience feelings of frustration, self-doubt or even envy. This is, however, the only way in which human knowledge can advance: students have to surpass their teachers, otherwise knowledge will inevitably deteriorate from one generation to the next. This realization may initially be a difficult one, but it is clearly essential that as teachers we should come to terms with it and act accordingly.

When I started training teachers thirty years ago, I must admit that I used to take pride in the fact that most of the teachers I trained thought I was so much better a teacher than they were and some of them even said they didn’t think they would ever be as good as they believed I was. So insecure (and so clueless!) was I at the time, that I actually felt good when my students essentially said that the best they could hope I could teach them was less than what I had learnt at the age of twenty-five! It was not just my young age, however, that had led me up that particularly treacherous garden path; it was my ignorance of the true nature of teaching and learning, i.e. of what I was supposed to be teaching those teachers about, of the very thing that they sang my praises about! In short, I really did not know enough, and had not reflected enough, about the nature of teaching and learning to realise that there are very few easy answers and even fewer irrefutable conclusions when it comes to good educational practices and that teacher education is not about transmitting the knowledge you (think you) have, but rather should focus on the critical appraisal and re-appraisal of pedagogic principles and practice.

To this day, I think the most embarrassing incidents in my teacher training career involve a failure on my part to help teachers develop the ability for such critical appraisal and re-appraisal. There have been experienced teachers, for example, on courses such as the Cambridge DELTA, who even after months of training will ask questions like “ok, so what is the correct way to teach the present perfect?” or who will simply imitate in their lessons behaviours and practices that they have seen demonstrated by their trainers, without considering the possibility that these may be ineffective or inappropriate for their particular classes. And there are still teachers who take it for granted that the way I do something in class is the best and only way and that they will, “of course”, never manage to do it the same way, as if it was even desirable, let alone useful, to do anything “my way”.

On the other hand, I have been lucky enough to teach teachers who have doubted me, questioned my beliefs, brought things to my attention that I was not aware of, experimented with new techniques I was not familiar with, and reached their own conclusions about teaching and learning, which sometimes contradicted mine. A lot of them have developed into much better teachers than I have ever been and I have had the pleasure of learning from them by observing their classes, but also by attending presentations that they have given in conferences, reading articles that they have published in teachers’ magazines, including the ELT News, and discussing matters of educational theory, language analysis and professional practice with them, in some cases years after they successfully completed their teacher training course.

Some of the teachers I have had the pleasure of training over the decades have pursued careers in teacher training or academic careers in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. Most recently, a past DELTA student successfully completed her training as a CELTA tutor with me. I observed her deliver a training session and noticed that she had made quite a few changes to the training material we used at ACE TEFL. She also used activity types during her session, some of which I had never thought of using in training. The session was one of the most successful and engaging training sessions I have observed in my life. Even so, she was eager to critically examine every detail of her session plan and of her delivery afterwards, offering alternatives and discussing how she could improve the session further. I asked her permission to use her version of the training material. And I told her, and really meant it, that I wished I had video-recorded her session to use as an example of good training practice on future trainer training courses.

For me, this is the most rewarding experience you can hope for as an educator: when you can honestly say “I could never have done that as well as my student did it!”.

[first published in ELT News, May 2023]

George Vassilakis

George Vassilakis (BA Education, MA ELT, Dip.RSA, Dip.Trans, Dip Lit.) is an ELT teacher, author, trainer and manager. Over the last thirty years, he has taught English in a variety of contexts and trained teachers of English on courses such as the Cambridge DELTA and CELTA as well as a variety of short courses and workshops, both face to face and online.
As an ELT materials author, George has written coursebooks, teacher’s books and supplementary materials for young learners, adults and young adults, while he also has extensive experience of academic management in language teaching, teacher training and language testing organisations.
Teacher education, however, remains his main professional interest. George is the co-founder and director of ACE TEFL, a teacher development centre in Athens Greece, where he continues to train teachers on a daily basis.

When teachers plan, fate guffaws!

notebook — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

Planning lessons

Lesson planning is an essential part of a teacher’s professional life. In some cases, it consists of merely having a quick look at the syllabus and/or coursebook material a few minutes before the lesson and making rough decisions about what to do during the lesson. In others, lesson planning can be a tedious process involving thinking about the learners, their progress and their needs, the learning objectives that would be most appropriate at this point in time, the activities and materials which would help achieve those objectives, the problems that might crop up and possible ways of dealing with them – the list can go on!

On most qualifying teacher training courses, teachers are expected to draw up the latter type of lesson plan and produce a document that contains details of every decision the teacher has made and, on an advanced course like the Cambridge DELTA, the reasons why they made those decisions. While this may not be the type of lesson plan the teacher will be expected to produce on a daily basis in their professional career, compiling a detailed lesson plan is seen as an essential part of the teacher learning process and is part of the assessment requirements on many qualifying courses for teachers.

Benefits of lesson planning

The general consensus both among trainers and among teachers is that detailed lesson planning is indeed conducive to the teachers’ professional development, as it forces them to carefully consider all the parameters that can affect learning, the most important of which I would summarise as follows:

the learners themselves and the learning context
the nature of the language and/or skills the lesson is intended to focus on
the methodological principles that constitute good practice in language teaching
the materials, resources and tasks that can aid learning

I asked two groups of teachers who had just completed teacher training courses with quite a heavy lesson planning and teaching practice component whether they thought lesson planning on the course had helped them and how it had helped them. All of them, with no exception, agreed that lesson planning had helped them enormously, while the reasons the novice teachers, who had just completed a CELTA course, gave included the following:

‘I had to think about what was important and what not’
‘It kept me focused while teaching’
‘It helped me organise my time better’

Experienced teachers on the DELTA course also mentioned some of these points, but they also added points like the following:

‘I was forced to think about the learners more: what they would benefit from, what they would appreciate, what they would find helpful.’
‘I found the process of anticipating problems valuable; in spite of having taught for so many years, I still find it difficult to think on my feet and racking my brain to anticipate in advance what might go wrong in each lesson has meant not only that less goes wrong in the actual lesson but even when it does go wrong I instantly know what to do about it.’
‘The best thing about planning as meticulously as we had to on the DELTA is that the learners can tell! They knowwhen you have prepared, they can sense it, and they show their appreciation in so many ways.’
‘For the first time I realized that I am not a slave to the coursebook, that I can actually select what to pay attention to.’

Planning vs. teaching

And yet, during the course, the very same teachers often complained about having to plan their lessons in so much detail. And all of them were extremely reluctant, especially the first couple of times that they were observed teaching, to make any changes to the lesson plans they had prepared, but stubbornly followed the lesson plan even when it was very clear that the activity they had proudly planned was not working. In a few cases, when an activity absolutely had to be abandoned because there was no time left to do it, the teachers had a meltdown after the lesson, experiencing very deep frustration that they had invested so much time and effort in preparing materials and activities which were then not used.

This is understandable, of course; and fair. Nobody wants to spend hours preparing for something that never happens. But then, lesson plans are just plans: sometimes they can be implemented, sometimes they have to be abandoned. More often than not, they need to be adjusted. You can anticipate what may happen, but you can never know, unless you decide to teach the lesson plan rather than the learners, i.e. to ignore the learners and just stick with your lesson plan in spite of everything. Teaching an observed (and even assessed) lesson is not really that different from teaching any lesson: the important things are that the learners should learn and that the learners should have a good time, not that the teacher should showcase all of the materials they have prepared and not that the teacher should execute every iota in their lesson plan just to prove that they planned well. In fact, willingness to adapt and adjust your lesson plan to the learners’ emerging needs during the lesson is a characteristic of a professional, experienced teacher; it even forms one of the criteria for assessing lessons on the Cambridge DELTA course.

modern train departing from train station — Photo by Kaique Rocha on Pexels.com

In fact, each and every one of the following is, for me, reason enough to depart from your lesson plan:

the learners don’t understand
the learners are not interested
the learners are tired, anxious about something else or in a bad mood; their ‘affective filter’ is up
the learners demonstrate that they can already produce what the lesson was intended to help them learn

What would I advise a teacher? In very simple words, I’d tell them to teach the learners, not the lesson plan, the material, or the book. It is the indirect object of the verb ‘teach’ that carries the weight, the fact that you teach someone something. What you teach them can in fact only be evaluated after you have made sure that you have understood what they need. So even though lesson planning is a valuable learning process for us teachers, it is the learners in the classroom that will ultimately dictate our final decisions as to how much of the lesson plan we have prepared is relevant and useful and how much will have to be abandoned or changed.

[first published in OUP’s newsletter ELT World in July 2022]

George Vassilakis

Speaking your mind?

Speaking in an exam

“I don’t mind talking to you or my classmates in English; in fact, I quite enjoy it. But it’s different when I have to have a conversation with a stranger whose job is to look for mistakes in what I say and how I say it – the examiner is not there to support me, but to judge me. And they’re not interested in talking to me, they just want to do their job, pass or fail me, and then go home!”

This is how a learner preparing for a public exam described his attitude to the speaking test. And he’s actually quite right. His words capture two salient characteristics of speaking tests, which both teachers and learners need to remember:

A speaking test is not a normal communicative interaction. The main purpose is neither to exchange information, nor to exchange opinions, nor to express feelings. The main purpose is for the learner to demonstrate what they know and what they can do in English and for the examiner to judge the learner’s performance.
The examiner’s job is, indeed, to make decisions about the learner’s level based on the evidence the learner provides. In most EFL examination contexts, the examiner is actually discouraged from speaking naturally and participating naturally in a conversation with the learner; instead, they are asked to follow a script in the interests of standardization and fairness.

An unnatural situation

The ensuing unnaturalness of the situation is not an accident, but rather an inherent necessity, one of the necessary evils, it seems, of exams. Speaking examiners, who are mostly teachers themselves, learn to check their teaching personality at the examination room door and put on the hat of the impartial, but occasionally robotic, examiner. In a similar way, learners may also have to learn that it is in their best interest to adopt a speaking style for the examination room which may be very different from what is the norm in natural conversation.

Research into natural conversation (for example, Leech 2000, Quaglio and Biber 2006, Miller 2006) has shown that it displays characteristics like the following:

at least half of the utterances are fragments, incomplete clauses and parenthetics
more than 60% of the complete clauses used have a very simple subject – verb – object structure
more than 70% of the verbs are in the present tense
there are quite a few structures (including non-defining relative clauses, participial clauses and infinitive clauses) which are extremely rare
lexical density and lexical diversity are both very low, which means that a limited number of words are used, rare words are avoided and many of the words are repeated again and again
cohesive devices are limited to very simple conjunctions like and and but, with only occasional use of conjuncts.

And yet, to prove that they have reached an advanced level, learners taking a speaking exam are expected to demonstrate that they can construct full, grammatical sentences, that they can use a broad range of grammatical structures, that they have an appropriate range of vocabulary at their disposal and that they can employ a variety of cohesive devices to help them connect their ideas and signal what logical relationships obtain between different ideas. In other words, the kind of speaking performance that will earn learners good marks in a speaking test seems to display none of the characteristics of natural conversation; worse still, speaking tests seem to require that learners should use a register that is more typical of written than of spoken English.

What should we teach them, then?

That doesn’t necessarily mean that teachers should be teaching learners how to speak unnaturally. In my view, we should instead make sure that learners understand what the requirements of the exam are and make clear when we are practising exam skills rather than practising the language. Rather than pretending that what learners have to do in the exam is simply “be themselves” and interact the way they would in “real life” (which, unsurprisingly, is a shorthand term in the ELT world for “life outside the classroom”), I think we should clarify that an exam is most certainly not a normal communicative context, that it has its own rules and its own conventions, that it is, at the end of the day, a spoken genre different from almost all the others, which learners can master, given the right guidance.

Sheldon or Penny?

Such guidance would include explicit references to the assessment criteria used in the exam and activities focusing on evaluating spoken performance in relation to those criteria. This, however, could be introduced as a game: listening to normal conversations and deciding whether they would be good enough for an exam as well as listening to less normal conversations and deciding whether those would be good enough for an exam. Which of the two characters, for example, in the video below would you say interacts normally? And which one demonstrates a good range of structures and vocabulary that examiners would appreciate?

Learners in the know

Once learners realise that they need to play a role in the examination room, for which they need to develop a different manner of speaking, one that shows off their language knowledge and skills, it will be possible to continue teaching them real English as well as preparing them for the exam without feeling as though we were all taking part in an absurd performance of an absurd play. All we have to do is keep the two separated: this is real life, that is exam survival!

References

Leech, G. 2000. Grammars of spoken English: new outcomes of corpus‐oriented research. Language Learning 50 (4):675‐724
Quagluio P. and D. Biber 2006. The Grammar of Conversation. In B.Aarts and A. McMahon (Eds.) The Handbook of English Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

A, B, C, DELTA

What is the DELTA?

The DELTA is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, so it’s what follows ABC. It’s also the name of the modular Cambridge Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, which makes sense, as that’s a qualification that defintely goes beyond the ABC of language teaching methodology! However, the name of the Cambridge DELTA has nothing to do with the Greek alphabet – not everything was invented by the Greeks! DELTA used to be an acronym for Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults, but as the scheme evolved over the years, it naturally became more context-sensitive and is no longer limited to teaching adults; the brand name, though, was retained, so the names of the two popular Cambridge qualifications for English language teachers, CELTA and DELTA, continue to rhyme!

Who is the DELTA for?

As an advanced, Level 7 qualification, the DELTA is not intended for those with little or no previous experience or training in ELT methodology. It is, indeed, a qualification for experienced teachers, who are already familiar with the principles of ELT methodology and have a high level of language awareness.

The DELTA is, therefore, in many cases a requirement for more senior (and better paid!) ELT-related positions internationally, such as EAP Tutor or Director of Studies. It can also be an important step to becoming a teacher trainer – in fact, a DELTA (or an equivalent qualification) is a Cambridge requirement for those who wish to train as a CELTA tutor.

What does the DELTA consist of?

For the majority of teachers who decide to begin their DELTA journey to professional development, the first step is DELTA Module 1. Module 1 is assessed by external examination and the syllabus covers all of the background knowledge an experiences teacher should have: a detailed knowledge of grammar, phonology, lexis and discourse, a very good understanding of the four skills, familiarity with language acquisition theories and language teaching approaches and methods, a good grasp of assessment and testing principles and practice, as well as the ability to analyse and evaluate teaching materials, techniques and resources. Module 1 then provides the background that you need to design and teach different kinds of lessons as well as plan and implement a professional development plan as a teacher, which is what Module 2 is about. Finally, Module 3 gives you the chance to focus on an area of specialism, such as teaching exam classes or teaching academic English, and design a whole course, thus extending your knowledge of teaching and learning principles and putting everything you’ve learnt in Modules 1 and 2 into practice.

How can I start my DELTA journey?

Module 1 is, as I explained above, an exam-based qualification. You don’t actually have to attend a preparation course – theoretically, anyone can take the exam, whether they have attended a course or not, and if they pass it they will be awarded the DELTA Module 1 certificate. In practice, though, most people choose to follow a course to prepare for their DELTA exam and personally I think it’s necessary, not only because you need to ensure that you have covered the exam syllabus, but also because you need to understand how the exam works and what kind of information you are expected to provide in answer to each of the exam questions.

The problem, however, is that anyone and everyone can claim to offer a Module 1 preparation course, whether or not they have the background, knowledge and experience required. So if you’re thinking of doing a Module 1 course, I would suggest that you spend some time researching and evaluating the options you have.

What should I consider before choosing a course?

Having designed and taught DELTA Module 1 courses ever since the modular DELTA was first offered, more than ten years ago, and having heard from a lot of colleagues with both positive and negative experience of DELTA Module 1 courses, I would suggest that you consider the following before you make a decision about which course to enrol on:

How many hours is the course and how many of those are contact hours between tutors and participants?
Check exactly what the course provider means when they say, for example, that the course is 100 hours; do they mean 100 hours of contact or of self-study? I have found that 50 contact hours and another 50 directed study hours is the absolute minimum,
What is the course schedule? Does it clearly cover all areas of the DELTA syllabus? Does it contain an exam taking skills component?
Ask to see a sample course schedule or timetable before you enrol. Make sure that the syllabus is covered comprehensively and that input is included on areas such as language acquisition theories, error analysis, approaches and methods, assessment, materials evaluation, skills development. Check also that the course includes a heavy language analysis component covering all areas of grammar, phonology, lexis and discourse. And finally, check that exam taking skills are also covered and that at least one DELTA mock exam is included.
Who are the tutors? Are they qualified? How familiar are they with the DELTA?
These are obvious questions, but often we assume that because someone has the nerve to offer a DELTA course, they must be qualified; unfortunately, that is not always the case. So do check that the tutors are Cambridge-approved DELTA tutors and that they have experience of teaching Module 1.
What materials and resources does the course use?
Most DELTA Module 1 courses are offered online these days. But ‘online’ can mean very different things: from a Moodle-based course with limited contact between participants and tutors to a live online course taught on a platform like Zoom or Blackboard, where you can interact with other participants and with the tutors on a regular basis.
How much does the course cost?
A DELTA Module 1 course doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. There are courses out there with a very limited number of contact hours that cost 1000 Euro or more! The question to ask yourself here is “does that look like good value for money?” But don’t forget to do your research before you make a decision!

Shall we throw grammar out with the bath water?

Do we need grammar?

My first thought when somebody asks the question do we need grammar? is “of course we do, what are you talking about?” Still, bitter experience has taught me that easy answers are not necessarily, or even usually, correct, especially when the question itself is ambiguous, so I then go on to consider the question more carefully.

If the question is taken to mean “do we need to teach grammar explicitly,” then the jury seems to have been out for at least a few decades; far from coming up with a simple, direct answer, psycholinguistic research seems to be simultaneously supporting both that we need grammar and that we don’t need it (see, for example, Ellis 2015). Nevertheless, there will always be those for whom, in the words of Henry Widdowson (1985, p. 161) “the delusion of simple answers will always be available as an attractive alternative to thought.” Thus, the dogmatic certainty of some, even today, that we should (at last!) do away with grammar can only compare to the certainty of others, more than a hundred years ago, that explicit study of grammar rules is the only way in which we can learn a foreign language. It seems to me that they are both wrong, not (just) because the truth is usually in the “middle ground” between two extremes, but because the question itself is problematic.

Reframing the question

A question like “do we need grammar?” is actually not just problematic, but quite meaningless if we haven’t defined what we mean by grammar, who ‘we’ refers to and what “we” might need grammar for. Thus, the answers I might give to the question would be very different in each of the following cases:

whether ‘we’ refers to language learners or language teachers
whether by ‘grammar’ we mean explicit, declarative knowledge or implicit, procedural knowledge of the grammar rules
whether we ‘need’ grammar for interaction in basic everyday communication contexts or in order to write an article, a short story or a poem or in order to teach the language

Do teachers need grammar?

As a language teacher educator, I think I can understand why I am inclined to defend grammar: I am thinking of language teachers rather than learners, and the need for them to possess declarative, not just procedural, knowledge of grammar, so that they can compose fully accurate models of language for their students and so that they can make informed decisions about how much (or how little!) grammar instruction their students need and what form this grammar instruction should take depending on the type of learners, their level and their learning purpose. In other words, what I am inclined to claim is that foreign language teachers need detailed, explicit knowledge of grammar even if they choose not to teach grammar explicitly in all cases.

Why do teachers need grammar?

In fact, knowledge of grammar (and yes, I mean declarative knowledge of the grammar rules) is a prerequisite for teaching the language even if the teacher has chosen not to teach grammar explicitly. To be precise, if they have chosen not to teach grammar explicitly, it may be even more imperative that the teacher should know their grammar. Here is why:

They can select what kind of language to include in the models they provide, so that the models do not confuse the learners and make clear and obvious the meaning and use of the structures they exemplify.
They can select appropriate contexts for the structures in focus, that is contexts which naturally invite the use of the structure and which make the meaning and use very clear without the need to resort to explanation.
They can devise appropriate, i.e. clear and simple, checking questions to ensure that the learners have understood the forms and meanings in focus even if no explicit presentation of the rules is provided.
They can anticipate what problems the learners might have and devise appropriate tasks and activities to help learners overcome these problems.
They can plan what to say if learners should ask the question most teachers dread: “why do we say it like that?”

Dismissing grammar and grammar teaching altogether on the grounds that explicit study of the grammar rules is not useful or not appropriate in a particular context makes little sense. At best, it’s based on a logical leap: explicit grammar teaching can be ineffective, therefore let’s not teach grammar at all; or worse, let’s not even bother to find out what grammar and grammar teaching involves. Beheading the patient may be a radical cure for headache, but let’s not forget it inevitably results in the patient’s death.

References
Ellis, N. (2015). Implicit AND Explicit Language Learning .Their dynamic interface and complexity. In P. Rebuschat (ed.), Implicit and Explicit Learning of Languages (pp. 3- 23). Michigan: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Widdowson, H. G. (1985). Against dogma: a reply to Michael Swan. ELT Journal 39, 1985, pp. 158-161

Respect and Inquiry in Teacher Education

‘I see myself as a transmitter of knowledge,’ a teacher trainer told me a few years ago. Her job, as she saw it, was to convey to her trainees what she herself had learnt mainly by reading about language and language teaching methodology and by attending courses, seminars and conferences. Intuitively, I’m sure many trainers would agree, to a certain extent at least. There does seem to be a body of knowledge that is relevant to our profession and that can be transmitted to teachers-in-training. One might mention, for example, the following areas of “received” or public knowledge that is theoretically transmittable and arguably useful to foreign language teachers:

knowledge of the subject matter to be taught, i.e. language
knowledge of second language acquisition research
knowledge of methods and techniques that have been developed specifically for teaching foreign languages

However, even though it seems intuitively obvious that a language teacher should know about such things, the type and amount of knowledge they require has been a matter of debate for at least the last twenty years. Bartels (2005, p. 411), for example, concludes after reviewing relevant research that “well-formed KAL [Knowledge About Language] does not seem to be necessary to be a superior language teacher”. Freeman and Johnson (1998, p. 412), similarly warn that knowledge of second language acquisition research may be “of limited use and applicability to practicing teachers”. In addition, Freeman (2016, p. 161) points out that a reliance on knowledge of methods and techniques in teacher education represents a simplistic view of teacher education, while Kumaravadivelu (1994, p. 29) emphasizes the need for practitioners themselves to “generate location-specific, classroom-oriented innovative practices” in the post-method condition.

In fact, whatever “received knowledge” there is to transmit could only form part of the content of a teacher education programme. In Jourdenais’s (2009, p.652) view, this would represent the “public theories” component, i.e. the “theories articulated in published literature and research”. However, a more important dimension of teacher education is teachers’ private theories, which are not necessarily based on received wisdom, but rather on the teachers’ own beliefs, experiences and actions. The divide between what teachers learn on teacher training courses and what they actually do in the classroom may actually have everything to do with the fact that the received (and transmitted) knowledge of “public theories” remains disconnected from teachers’ private theories, formed through practice and developed through reflection on practice.

As a trainer, then, my job is not (merely) to transmit such received knowledge, but rather, as Hedgcock (2002, p. 309) puts it, to enable teachers to question, critique and challenge public theories so that they can “construct their own operational theories of classroom practice”. Far from being a linear process of knowledge transmission, teacher learning seems to be a process of internalisation in the Vygotskian sense, whereby the focus of attention is “on the character and quality of the activities they [teachers and learners] are engaged in together, the resources they are using to engage in those activities, and what is being accomplished by engaging in those activities” (Johnson 2009, p. 62).

This is quite a humbling realisation for a teacher trainer. Privileged access to a body of received knowledge which you can use to design teacher training programmes and sessions seems a relatively easy and secure route to becoming a teacher trainer; acknowledging, however, that your work actually involves helping teachers reshape and transform their thinking in ways that cannot be predicted and in contexts which you may not be fully familiar with forces you to realise that collaborative critical enquiry is the basis of teacher education (indeed, it seems to be the basis of all educational activity): there can be no superior, privileged positions in this collaborative endeavour; there can only be mutual respect and a willingness to question public theories in the light of your own and your trainees’ situated practice.

This is not to say that there aren’t things that the trainer “knows” and the trainees do not yet “know” or that there is no room for “received knowledge” in a teacher education programme. What I am suggesting is that neither the nature nor the usefulness and applicability of such knowledge is ever a given: the body of received knowledge itself is constantly growing and, perhaps more importantly, both the trainers’ and the trainee teachers’ personal theories should also be constantly developing, based on reflection and critical inquiry, i.e. the persistent questioning and critique of the experiences, behaviours and actions of both trainers and trainees. What there is no room for is the kind of trainers who see themselves as sages in possession of all knowledge. Because knowledge is a process, not an object to be acquired; and it cannot be possessed, it can only be questioned!

References
Bartels, N. (2005) Applied linguistics and language teacher education: what we know. In Bartels, N (ed) Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education. Boston: Springer.
Freeman, D (2016). Educating Second Language Teachers. The Same Things Done Differently. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Freeman, D. & Johnson, K. (1998). Reconceptualizing the knowledge-base of language teacher education. TESOL Quarterly 32, 397–417.
Hedgcock, J. (2002). Toward a socioliterate approach to second language teacher education. Modern Language Journal 86, 299–317.
Johnson, K. E. (2009). Second Language Teacher Education. A Sociocultural Perspective. New York: Routledge
Jourdenais, R. (2009). Language teacher education. In M. H. Long, & C. J. Doughty (Eds.), The handbook of language teaching. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kumaravadivelu, B. (1994). The postmethod condition: (e)merging strategies for second/foreign language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 28, 27–48.