The object of Sophia’s activity system was analyzed through three components, her conception of PD, her orientation towards PD and her perception of the PD activities organized by her community of practice.
Sophia’s conception of professional development
Sophia defined teachers’ PD as “the activities teachers organized for teachers to improve their pedagogical techniques and skills” (Preliminary
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interview, 2nd March). Her definition of PD appeared to reflect her narrowed focus of her learning activities, to merely concentrate on pedagogy. However, she still insisted on the necessity of PD for beginning teachers. Sophia saw her demanding working environment along with the expert colleagues as an impetus for her learning, which can be seen below:
Extract 22
I think my motivation is from the environment I am teaching. I am surrounded by a lot of veteran teachers of the province so I always have to learn to be better. (Preliminary interview, 2ndMarch)
As stated in the article ―Factors affecting teachers motivation (Alam & Farid, 2011), 70 percent of teachers considered the relation with their colleagues as a factor of motivation, of which 23 percent said that the peer pressure motivated them to learn. Sophia, in this case, was encouraged to learn and develop herself because she compared herself with her colleagues who were regarded as experienced and professionally qualified.
Sophia’s orientation towards professional development
Regardless of her full awareness of the importance of professional learning for beginning teachers, interestingly, there was little sense of action that needed to be taken in order to achieve this competence. She obviously admitted that she set no goals for future learning as can be seen below
Extract 23
I don’t set any goals or objectives for my professional development in the near future. I will learn from my upcoming experience. (Preliminary interview, 2nd March)
In another instance of this interview, Sophia expressed her learning aspiration (Preliminary interview, 3rd March) which led to my expectation that she deliberately participated in many learning activities. However, her learning could be described as ―nearly spontaneous and unplanned‖ (Eraut, 2000, p.115). She totally depended on the PD plan and activities of school or department and drew on the
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emerging problems to learn instead of initiating any activities. As can be seen in Extract 23, she also set no plan for her learning but spontaneously learned via her classroom practice. Her passivity gave rise to the contradictions in her activity system which would be analyzed in Section 4.2.7.
Sophia’s perception of professional development program in her community of practice
Sophia felt completely inadequate when talking about her PD. This perception could be explained by her absolute dependence on activities organized by schools. This dependence can be seen in the extract below:
Extract 24
The whole department was busy preparing for national exams for the gifted students… then we had a long break so I haven’t had many opportunities to take part in professional development. (Activity interview, 19th March)
After seven months working in the current community of practice, Sophia participated in two professional learning activities organized by English Department, namely, Sample Teaching and professional meetings. Her preference was stronger for the former activity than the latter. Sample teaching was operated in her first months of working. Its objectives were to support the newcomers in getting acquainted with their job and to create opportunities for teachers to learn from each other. In this activity, firstly, experienced teachers delivered sample lessons for Sophia and other teachers observed then they together gave feedback. Thereafter, Sophia was required to teach a lesson under other teachers’ observation and she would receive feedback from them. The process of observation had fostered Sophia’s practice. She also expressed a positive attitude towards critical feedback from other teachers and was committed to taking their feedback on board. This positivity can be exemplified in the following extract:
Extract 25
I was really nervous when preparing my lesson but my anxiety completely disappeared when I carried out the lesson. I realized the similarities between
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my lesson and the lessons I observed, so I knew what to do. (Activity interview, 19th March
In contrast to the sample teaching, the professional meetings were not highly evaluated by Sophia. She expressed her disappointment with these meetings, which can be seen in the following quote:
Extract 26
I had expected that they [professional meeting] were like sharing sections so I could learn from other teachers’ experience, but it was nothing like that.
The Dean assessed the tasks in the previous week and made a plan for the upcoming week. (Activity interview, 19th March)
As stated in subsection above, Sophia completely depended on the collaborative learning program organized by his community of practice and hardly initiated any self-learning activities. This tendency was characterized by her sense of passivity and an expectation that learning would occur effectively without any intervention (Hagger et.al, 2008). Therefore, she found it hard to broaden her knowledge and skills if the activities organized by her school faced problems.