2.4. Course design as a professional development activity
2.4.3. Studies on course design as a professional development activity
In 1987, Nunan wrote a book entitled “The teacher as curriculum developer”, aiming to report the curriculum issues from different stakeholders’ perspectives. He used group interviews, individual interviews, and questionnaire to seek the perceptions of teachers, administrators and managers about a number of key concepts (e.g. concept of a task force, understanding of curriculum, communicative language teaching, collegiate support, teacher needs, in-service and professional development, to name but a few). Besides, he reported a case study in which a teacher, Sally, planned her own curriculum for a group of unfamiliar learners. He argued: “It was assumed that for a teacher working with a familiar type of learner, curriculum problems would not necessarily be particularly salient. In other words, they would not necessarily be recognized as problems” (pp.61-62). In his case study, he described Sally’s professional background and feelings when she was assigned to be in charge of such a group, and then he described her situations, her doings, the reasons for her doings, and her challenges during the process. At the end of the process, Sally admitted that the most important lesson learned about curriculum was that it was not always possible to be completely well organized. Moreover, the experience with this group of learners confirmed her idea that “any sort of useful need analysis could only be carried out once some sort of rapport had been established with the group, and that this might take five or six weeks” (Nunan, 1987, p.72). Drawing on the data from the interviews, questionnaire, and the case study, Nunan voiced a number of concerns in terms of
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curriculum and research. However, he focused on findings that could be useful for the practitioners and the future curriculum activity, rather than on teacher learning.
Nearly a decade later, a book, “Teachers as course developers” written by Graves (1996), reported teachers’ experiences in designing a course. This report did not involve many kinds of data collection methods and different stakeholders as in Nunan’s (1987) but just drew on the narratives of teachers who designed their courses. The narratives revealed significant gains of teachers as course developers.
All of these teachers had to cope with the same situation in which they were assigned to teach a new course with little time for preparation and few guidelines. Although they were considered experienced in their contexts, they initially found course design challenging in such a situation. The only assistance, as they confided, were theories of language learning, theories of subject matters, and support from institution as well as from colleagues (Blyth, Pinheiro, Fujiwara, as cited in Graves, 1996). They, then, admitted that their intense involvement gradually increased their understanding of course planning as well as theories related to the course contents and methodology, and enhanced their skills of designing courses (Fisher, Fujiwara, Uvin, as cited in Graves, 1996). Equally noticeably, all of these course developers took their students’
features into account in one or more design stages. Even Blyth considered herself experienced enough to decide what students needed to learn without knowing who they were; she still waited until meeting them to make decisions on teaching materials. In so doing, she ensured that the materials were suitable to their interests and levels. In essence, the focus of this book was not about teacher learning activity, either. Although gains of some professional knowledge and skills were mentioned, the book focused on the steps that teachers needed to follow to be able to develop a useful course for the target students.
Not until the early 21st century has curriculum development or course design been looked into as a professional development activity (Zeegers, 2012; Shawer et al., 2009; Shawer, 2010a, 2010b, 2017). Zeegers (2012) reported teacher educators’
capacity enhancement through their participation in the process of curriculum review,
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construction, and enhancement in Southern Philippines. The capacity which was built from the process included pedagogical skills and curriculum development skills (i.e.
what to include in the syllabi and where to place it). The noticeable features of her study were that the curriculum process was integrated with the intensive programs of professional development on curriculum design and teaching methods and that the task forces were required to prepare the related workshops for the friends in their institutions during the curriculum process. In essence, it could not be concluded that what the task forces gained in terms of knowledge and skills was the result of the curriculum process, but it should be admitted that the process was construed as a factor.
Shawer et al. (2009) and Shawer (2010a, 2010b, 2017) agreed with Zeegers (2012) that curriculum making empowered teachers in the sense that they could be flexible and active to design their own curriculum suitable to their classroom context and that such an activity facilitated teachers’ own learning and development. Shawer (2010a) emphasizes that curriculum enactment provides “a forum where teacher professional development and curriculum development have become interdependent” (p.175). The role teachers play in curriculum design and delivery reveals their degree of personal construction: the more they need to do with their curriculum, the more they go through the cognitive process to construct the knowledge. Specifically, as teachers are creators of the curriculum, they need to employ necessary capacities to transform the external skills and knowledge into their cognitive system, and then they transform what they have in their mind into target products (e.g. syllabus, teaching materials, and assessment tools). However, the focus of Shawer’s studies were on different curriculum-related issues.
Shawer et al.’s (2009) and Shawer’s (2010a, 2017) studies did not aim to seek evidence for the meaningfulness of curriculum making in teacher professional development. Rather, he explored which approach teachers chose to their curriculum, the relationship between learner-directed motives and curriculum approach (i.e.
curriculum fidelity, adaptation, and enactment), and factors that drove them to classroom-level curriculum development. Curriculum fidelity is understood as
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curriculum transmission; put another way, teachers take a role of transmitting what is pre-determined by external experts into their classroom. In this approach, curriculum is confined to “a course of study, a textbook series and a set of teacher plans” (Snyder et al., 1992, as cited in Shawer, 2010a). Adaptation refers the development of the given curriculum, for which to be effective teachers have conversations with external developers on necessary adaptations (Snyder et al., 1992, as cited in Shawer, 2010a). Besides discussing with the experts who translate intended knowledge, skills, concepts and values into curriculum materials so as to suitably adjust them to their classroom context, teachers also interact with their students to understand students’ needs and the curriculum itself to evaluate the appropriateness of the materials (Cohen & Bail, 1999; Shkedi, 1998, as cited in Shawer, 2010a). Such a discussion and interaction process provide teachers with opportunities to be more active and flexible. Enactment, according to Snyder et al.
(1992), refers to the process in which teachers make a curriculum themselves.
Teachers undertake the process individually or along with the interaction with students. In these two studies, interviews and classroom observations were two primary sources of data; besides, group interviews were conducted with students to validate the teachers’ data. Interviews with teachers included a general interview which aimed to investigate teachers’ perspectives on their curriculum approach, and pre- and post-classroom-observation interviews to understand deeply their approach in the classroom context. Although these studies were not directly about teacher development, Shawer et al. (2009), Shawer (2010a, 2017), based on the study findings, provided several implications for teacher training and development. First, he emphasized the importance of training curriculum skills for both pre-service and in-service teachers, such as needs assessment, course planning and design, materials assessment, and course supplementing and adapting. He also recommended that the school provided teachers with such support as decreasing workload and working hours in order to encourage them to do classroom-level curriculum development.
In the meantime, Shawer’s (2010b) study focused on what teachers learned in the
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context of classroom-level curriculum. With the aim of assessing the impact of teachers’ practices on their own professional development, the author chose the teachers who approached curriculum in different ways. His participants included three curriculum makers who analyzed student needs and construct the classroom- level curriculum based on their analysis; five curriculum developers who extensively supplemented and adapted the formal curriculum; and two curriculum transmitters who closely followed their textbooks. Interviews and classroom observation are also two primary sources of data in this study. The general interviews aimed to investigate how teachers perceived the impact of their curriculum approach on their professional development. The pre-observation and post-observation interviews clarified teachers’
intentions behind each lesson planning and teaching and validated observational data.
Then, the author coded the collected data into categories and applied grounded theory for analysis: general professional development perceptions, generic-education teaching skills development, subject teaching skills development, subject content- knowledge development, curriculum skills development, and affective development.
The results showed that those who make a new curriculum or adapt the given curriculum gained professional growth in both cognitive and affective respects. The cognitive respect of teacher development included generic-education teaching skills, subject teaching skills, subject content-knowledge, and curriculum skills (Shawer, 2010b). In particular, the subject content-knowledge involved the knowledge of four language skills (i.e. reading, writing, listening, and speaking), structural knowledge (i.e. structures, grammar, accuracy), lexis knowledge (i.e. vocabulary, collocations, expressions), and phonology knowledge (vowels, consonants, intonation). The teachers in this study shared that their improvement of the subject content-knowledge was thanks to their exposure to a variety of materials, topics, and teaching techniques (p.607). The improved curriculum skills included whole-curriculum treatment strategies (e.g. curriculum evaluation, curriculum adaptation, content sequence, content integration, and material evaluation) and textbook-use strategies (pp.608- 609). However, apart from describing what they did during their process of
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curriculum adapting or making, the teacher participants mentioned little about the resources that helped them go through these tasks and improve the related skills.
It is revealed from the above review that many reports on teachers as course developers did not focus on teacher learning but other curriculum-related issues (Nunan, 1987; Graves, 1996; Shawer et al., 2009). Besides, these reports were about course design at the classroom level (Nunan, 1987; Graves, 1996; Shawer et al., 2009;
Shawer, 2010a, 2010b, 2017), which meant the teacher mostly worked as an individual course developer for a small target group of learners. What is revealed serves as a gap in literature, which leads to the need of conducting the present study:
what and how teachers learn through their involvement in course design; in this design project teachers worked both individually and collaboratively to design courses used by all the teachers in an English Faculty.