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Collegial Development in ELT: The Interface between Global Processes and Local Understandings

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Understanding the Language Classroom

Abstract

In focusing upon ELT practitioners, this chapter identifies the wider influences upon teachers’ work at the present time that may be undermining their personal professional identities. It explores current approaches to teacher development that can be seen as symptomatic of such changes. An initial purpose is to consider aspects of teacher development that may be contributing to this appropriation of the self as a professional. The second aim of the chapter is to identify alternative approaches in which teachers may confront present uncertainties through strategies that enable them to create positive opportunities for change on their own terms and to realize what Dick Allwright identifies as teachers’ capacities as knowledge-makers in the dialogue between research and practice (2006, Chapter 1 in this volume). The chapter begins with a brief review of some of the pressures that teachers presently face. It then evaluates currently influential approaches to teacher development as responses to these pressures. Finally, it proposes possible future directions in teacher development that may overcome the present constraints upon professionalism and the limitations inherent in current approaches. The terms ‘teacher development’ and ‘professional development’ are treated as synonymous throughout the chapter.

This chapter is developed version of a review of ELT professional development in The Kluwer handbook on English language teaching, 2 eds C. Davison and J. Cummings (forthcoming, 2006).

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Authors
  1. Michael P. Breen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, UK

    Simon Gieve

  2. Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Inés K. Miller

Copyright information

© 2006 Michael P. Breen

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Breen, M.P. (2006). Collegial Development in ELT: The Interface between Global Processes and Local Understandings. In: Gieve, S., Miller, I.K. (eds) Understanding the Language Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523166_11

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