14.Reflecting through a teaching journal

Reflecting through a teaching journal
A review of: Language Teaching Awareness: A Guide to Exploring Beliefs and Practices (by Jerry G. Gebhard, Robert Oprandy, and Jerry Gebhard 1999)

Gebhard lived in Thailand for many years and spent a lot of time travel to places in Thailand. He kept his travel journal and continued to write when he taught English for Thai students. He wrote about his teaching ideas and plans, thoughts on teaching and learning, and what went on the lessons. He also listened to the tape recordings and analyzed what went on and shared lesson plans and teaching materials and ideas with other teachers.

What is a teaching journal?
A usual teaching journal is a first person account of a series of teaching experience. The idea is to write about teaching experience as regularly as possible over a period of time, then to analyze these patterns and conspicuous events. A teaching journal can function as a place to celebrate discoveries, successes, and “golden moments” (Fanselow 1987) as well as to “criticize, doubt, express frustration, and raise questions” (Bailey, 1990” 218). In addition, it can create an opportunity to confront the affective aspects of being a teacher, including what annoys, disconcerts, frustrates, encourages, influences, motivates, and inspires us.

Teaching journal can be a place for teachers to explore their teaching beliefs and practices. Journal is not used only to plan and analyze lessons, but also be a place to collaborate on projects, with other teachers and teacher educators, as well as to focus attention on the assumptions underlying exploration itself.
There are two directions of keeping journals: intrapersonal and dialogical.

An intrapersonal journal
- the writer is both author and audience
- generally focuses on entries on what have gone on in classrooms
- write about teaching and learning beliefs, students in the class, one’s own language learning experiences and how that relates to teaching, and anything related to teaching
- no worry about grammar, style, or organization
- analyze teaching and record prominent events, and look for patterns in teaching behaviours.
- Give interpretations to the patterns and events in their teaching

A dialogue journal
- have outside audience to provide a source of feedback
- share teaching ideas and explore practices and beliefs
- to gain awareness through interaction with others and to connect with other teacher
- to establish rapport through interaction with other teachers where they can ask other questions, react to comments, and basically communicate ideas about teaching beliefs and practices.

Brinton, Holten, and Goodwin 1993 point out that a dialogue journal shares many of the characteristics of personal letter writing as they emphasize the process of writing back and forth. As Roderick 1986 puts it, both teachers and educators become “constructors of educational experience” (p.308)

However, one may be more cautious about what to include in it for there is one another indeed be reading and commenting what is written.
Admittedly, keeping a dialogue journal can be threatening to some teachers. Sometimes one may have trouble understanding and accepting about ideas or practices and perhaps not ready to disclose to others. As Jarvis 1992 puts it, it can be like writing “confession or bearing the soul.”

A collaborative dialogue journal also offers the opportunity for us to cooperate with each other on teaching projects. Teachers might share what happens in their classes when they do the same activities. They could create the lesson plan together through joint journal entries then describe what happened in each of our classes during the activity.

Brock, Yu, and Wong 1992 state, “Through diary writing and sharing experience, we gained new suggestions and ideas from one another and discovered new options for approaching particular teaching tasks.” They point out that “the sharing of feelings and opinions through responding to one another and discussing experiences provided encouragement and support”

What do expert and novice teachers write about?

The nature of the topics teaches write and related questions seem to vary according to the degree of experience they have. Novice teachers tend to limit their questions to those about
- teaching techniques,
- way to solve teaching problems, and survival concerns.
- want to know how to teach
- looking for advice on the best way to teach, for example, how they should correct students’ language errors, give clear instructions, teach reading lesson, grade compositions, use chalkboard, and so on.
- raise more questions and address topics that focus attention to themselves, in particular their feelings about their teaching.

Closely connected, Richard and Ho (1998) discovered that only about 20% of the questions that thirty-two pre-service teachers in a HK MA TESL program asked in their journals could be considered to be reflective.

Experienced teachers tend to ask more types of questions and more reflective.
Experts seem to raise concern with student learning and teaching issues. However, there is little research on this topic.

One activity is to write about one's experience as a language learner. By writing about the experience, a teacher can consider how language learning experience have possibly influenced the way he or she teaches.
- Have you had a favourite teacher who made an impression on you or who influenced your beliefs about second language teaching and learning?
- Have you had negative experiences that have had an impact on your beliefs and practices?

What types of responses to journal entries are possible?

Based on the investigation of Brinton, Holten, and Goodwin (1993), the response types are categorized as follows:

Response types and possible benefits
Affective and personalizing comments
- journal of letter-like quality
- provide personal tone
- contribute to establishing rapport
- help to build confidence

Procedural comments
- remind teachers of established rules and procedures
- can provide a means to negotiate procedures
- communicate expectations of the teacher educator, supervisor, or peer teacher
- Can furnish information about assignments or agreed-on explorations

Direct response to questions
- provide knowledge directly related to the journalist’s inquiry agenda
- promote knowledge that can be used for more extensive commenting


Understanding response
- function as a mirror for the teacher to see his or her ideas, practices, feelings, or attitudes more clearly
- act as a catalyst for new lines of inquiry

Exploratory suggestions
- provide ways for teachers to explore teaching
- furnish a means for teachers to gain awareness of teaching beliefs and practices

Synthesis comments and questions
- provide a link between comments given earlier and comments just given
- raise issues for teachers
- provide an opportunity to pull together pieces of knowledge to form new concepts

Unsolicited comments and questions
- Draw journalists’ attention to aspects of teaching
- Raise new issues and lines of inquiry

Reviewed by T.S.
July 31st , 2007

Relevance: Teaching journal is a common tool used in teacher training program because it's convenient to ask the pre-service student teachers to keep the journal as course assignment. Nevertheless, praciting teachers rarely keep journal as it may add more load to their works. Reflective writing skills can not be handed down from teaching experience or conceived through observation but rather developed from individual's need to keep record of their ideas and feeling towards everyday class events with the strong desire to develop one's teaching competence. If teachers are not prepared to reflect qualitative written information , the journal won't reveal much underlying thought about the individual pedagogical practices.