Peter Lutzker - The Art of Foreign Language Teaching

More crucial than all the professional qualities required of teachers, are those fundamental personal characteristics and qualities which can hardly be planned in the curriculum but which, nevertheless, have to be considered in the description of what is necessary to attain the goal of a ‘good school’. According to Hartmut von Hentig, the most important curriculum is the teacher’s personality. I would include the following qualities:

Enthusiasm, curiosity and ability to learn Ability to be moved and to be engaged Intercultural and social skills

Strength of character, civil courage and the strength to stand up to one’s principles

Love of children and humanity in general, empathy and compassion The ability to open oneself to others

The ability to engage in dialogue161

While admitting the difficulties of invoking such far-ranging changes, he considers their decisive importance in determining the quality of teaching as justifying the search for in-service training which could help to make such developments possible:

Even though it is difficult to teach these qualities, one can nevertheless discover and initiate possibilities and methods in adult education in which these abilities can be acquired and developed – for this is where the primary task of self-sought and institutional development lies; namely in the field of human relationships and in the interchange between school and society.162

Drawing on the insights of humanistic psychology Legutke has also emphasized the holistic elements of professional development for language teachers which offer possibilities of substantial change and growth. In this respect he stresses that change on the level which he is referring to necessarily implies a willingness to take risks and go beyond familiar ways of behaving and thinking.

Change is always connected to the willingness to take risks in going beyond what is known and familiar. Teacher development can only lead to this willingness to take risks if it fosters the steadfastness of the teacher, supports self-confidence and provides the appropriate help in these areas. (…) Only if in-service courses are perceived as being personally relevant, as fostering self-perception and the understanding of others, as helping teachers to be able to discover possibilities of self-development – only then will these courses serve to promote professional growth.163

In this context it becomes clear that beyond the specific demands of language teaching, fundamental issues of personal development and change are also being touched upon. The issue of teacher change has consistently emerged as a particularly complex and difficult issue in the field of teacher education, not only in regard to changing entrenched attitudes and methods of experienced teachers, but also at a pre-service level in which the deeply formative effects of teachers’ own experiences as pupils have consistently been found to profoundly influence their entire thinking and behaviour.164

Until the 1990s, the most common approach to teacher change was based on an empirical-rational strategy in which change was seen as a linear process. In this framework change could be induced by having teachers introduced to a new way of thinking or behaviour based on research, theory, or both: after being told what they had to do differently and having it demonstrated to them, teachers were expected to implement such changes in their classrooms.165 The fact that this strategy did not prove to be successful gradually led educators to try to develop approaches based on a more flexible understanding of developmental processes.

S. Sarason considers one of the fundamental problems in affecting teacher change to be the external and directive nature of the pressures to institute it:

If anything is incontrovertible in the literature on educational reform, it is how difficult it is to get teachers to change their accustomed beliefs and practices. (…) Their resistance to change should occasion no surprise. None of us likes to change. All of us in the face of change find that we like our “symptoms,” that the pain associated with change appears greater than the pain the symptoms engender. But in the case of educational reform the stimulus for change comes far less from teachers than from “higher-ups” or other external forces, and teachers regard that pressure as an unwarranted criticism of what they have been doing.166

There has in recent years been an increased recognition of the fact that in affecting teacher change, a teacher’s personal reflections in the context of a dialogue occurring in an atmosphere of trust, can play a decisive role. This emphasis on personal reflection as a basis of affecting change has received substantial reinforcement through Donald Schön’s highly influential concept of the reflective practitioner.167 Virginia Richardson sees this change in strategy from an empirical-rational to a normative-reeducative approach in teacher development as occurring within a broader societal development:

This change strategy is also, however, part of a larger movement toward the phenomenological and hermeneutic study of how individuals make sense of and contribute to the situations in which they live and work.168

There have been a number of studies in the last decades in which a biographical perspective has been introduced to ascertain how teachers can best learn to make sense of their respective situations and to develop within them. Michael Huberman’s career development study of secondary teachers presents a biographical perspective in which a series of stages within a teacher’s career are described. He has established six distinct stages of a teacher’s professional life: survival and discovery; stabilization; experimentation and activism; taking stock – self-doubts; serenity, consternation; and disengagement. Among his most significant and relevant findings was the recognition that the simple movement from one stage to the next, most notably towards the end of a professional career, does not ensure teacher development.169

Due to an increasing amount of case study research, a more differentiated understanding of the complex phenomena of teacher change has emerged.170 Through case study narratives, it has become apparent that although teachers tend to view their own careers as a process of gradual evolution, there are usually a few decisive experiences, situations and people that have profound influences on each teacher’s development. Such incidents invariably have a highly personal character and a similar incident will by no means have a comparable effect on someone else.171 At the same time, it has become clear that what is viewed as the difficult and complex task of affecting substantive teacher change is connected not only to the strong presence of personal habits, beliefs and often anxieties, but is inextricably tied to the nature and atmosphere of schools themselves. Sarason writes,

There is little or nothing in the organization and culture of schools that spurs a teacher to regard change and development as necessary, personally and intellectually rewarding, and safe. I emphasize safe because in the culture of the school the teacher who seeks help or coaching from others is one whose competence is called into question. The teacher is expected to handle all problems that arise in the classroom, and it is a sign of weakness if it becomes apparent that that is not the case.172 (italics in original)

He sees the effects of a system that is deeply inimical to encouraging teacher change as constituting one of the decisive causes of the failures of schools:

What happens over time to teachers when year in and year out they teach the same thing to the same kind of audiences? What are the sources internal and external, to give them the sense of growth, to cause them willingly to enlarge or alter their role and repertoire, to prevent the feeling that they have settled into a safe comfortable routine? The answer is: precious little. (…) In all my writing about schools and their personnel I have emphasized what I consider to be a glimpse of the obvious. If the conditions for productive learning do not exist for teachers, they cannot create and sustain these conditions for students.173 (italics in original)