12. EXPERT AND NOVICE TEACHERS TALKING TECHNOLOGY: PRECEPTS, CONCEPTS, AND MISCONCEPTS

EXPERT AND NOVICE TEACHERS TALKING TECHNOLOGY: PRECEPTS, CONCEPTS, AND MISCONCEPTS

Carla Meskill, Jonathan Mossop, Stephen DiAngelo, and Rosalie K. Pasquale
University at Albany, State University of New York

ABSTRACT
When new teachers, teacher trainers, and administrators consider the ways in which technologies can best serve practice, they are wise to turn to experienced teachers and veteran technology users. It is the voices and experiences of these professionals who have worked through the complex processes of adapting curricula, classroom design, dynamics, and teaching approaches that can best inform those new to teaching and learning in general, and teaching with technologies in particular. This study compares and contrasts the "technology talk" of novice and expert teachers of K-8 language and literacy (ESOL).

Methodolgy:

Interview data with eight teachers - two expert (experienced teachers and technologies users), five novice (limited experience in teaching and teaching with computers) and one transitional expert (experienced teacher and non-technology user) serve to illustrate the conceptual and practical differences between those who have adapted technologies as powerful teaching and learning tools and teachers who, in spite of specific formal training in instructional technology, speak about it and its application in starkly contrasting ways.

Five novice teachers also kept a daily reflective journal. Novices kept daily journals on their uses, experiences, and reflections on their teaching with computers.

Using a thematic coding approach, journals and transcripts were reviewed and coded by categories of discourse about technologies use by the four researchers in cycles of independent and collaborative coding. Coding and recoding took place during eight cycles of revision during which categories were proposed, data were reviewed accordingly, and, if contradictory or inconsistent data were located by the group, the category was rejected and/or revised to be explanatory of all interview data. Codes were continually added, rejected, retooled, and redefined as the data was repeatedly revisited. Comparisons and contrasts between discourse trends of the groups were then made under those categories
These contrasts are presented as a set of four conceptual continua that can help in explicating novice starting points, transitional issues, and the expertise of computer-using language professionals.
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Relevance:
The data collecting tools used in this study are interesting. The researchers use semi-structured interviews and reflective journal to probe the contrasts between novices and experts about what they think when they use computer in thier ESL classroom. Before I read this article, I assumed that young teachers who are more familiar to technology and online interaction would be more flexible and can make the most from the technology; on the other hand, the finding present the opposite point of view. It appears that experienced teachers are capable in applying the technology in the classroom because they have more experience and can see the potential of the hi-tech tools to enhance their teaching without too much dependence on the machine. Novices are too concerned about the class management and are not sure how to guide the students to learn from using the technology in language learning processes.

This is a major misconception happens in the Thai context as well. Whenever there are technology session requests from learners or tasks on development of e-learning programs, the young teachers are always the first priority group to take the responsibility.
People believe that old teachers always stick to their guns and resistance to changes of instructions. While novice are too busy to prepare their lessons and deal with challenging classroom situations, they might be "going around the edge" and haven't encourage students to learn collaboratively from the technology. Many unexperienced teachers might not reach the optimal use of the IT in EFL classroom because they have not yet mastered the "tricks of the trade" / "State of the Art" in EFL instruction. Therefore, the IT literacy of individual teacher is not always the key factor for teachers to apply the IT in thier instructions.