Two Mentor Practices that Generate Teacher Reflection without Explicit Solicitations: Some Preliminary Considerations

Introduction

The drive for fostering reflective practices in second language teacher education has gained great momentum in the last 20 years (Bailey, 1997, 2009; Brandt, 2006, 2008; Farrell, 2008; Mann, 2005; Wallace, 1991). Despite the strong focus on reflection, Copland, Ma, and Mann (2009) note the rarity of genuine reflection and call for a dialogic approach to feedback. In fact, improving the quality of post-observation conferences and understanding how teachers learn are two of the persistent problems in recent second language teacher supervision (Bailey, 2009: 272). Beyond perceptions and abstractions, however, systematic inquiries into how reflection is pursued and produced in the details of actual mentor-teacher interaction remain rare, rendering it difficult to bridge the gap between theory and practice. On the broader landscape, Wright (2010: 288) notes the paucity of research on the work of teacher educators themselves, calling attention to the larger trend of SLTE (second language teacher education) lagging behind developments in general education, and he calls for in-depth study of ‘the encounters experienced by participants in SLTE programs’ so as to reach a greater understanding of how teachers learn (2010: 289). The current project answers this call by undertaking an in-depth investigation of how reflective practices are managed in post-observation conferences in a graduate TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program using the methodology of conversation analysis, thus building upon and contributing to the small body of work in this area both conceptually and methodologically.

Background

Important work on post-observation conferences can be found in the fields of both general education and second language teacher education (SLTE), where theoretical considerations have revolved around models of supervision or supervisory styles (Freeman, 1982; Gebhard, 1984; Wallace, 1991). Much attention has been devoted to the direct vs. indirect style of supervision, where teachers have been shown to either prefer a direct approach (Copeland and Atkinson, 1978) or exhibiting a greater preference for an indirect approach as they gain more experience (Copeland, 1982). Studies on the actual mentor-teacher conversations have also generated crucial insights into a wide range of issues such as sequential moves (Arcario, 1995; Keogh, 2010), types of discourse (Zeichner and Liston, 1985), nature of feedback (e.g. Christensen, 1988, Strong and Baron, 2004; Tang and Chow, 2007; Vasquez, 2004; Wajnryb, 1998), characteristics of teacher talk (Waite, 1993, 1995), negotiation of face, topics and speaking rights (Copland, 2011, 2012), and the danger of giving advice without identifying the problem (Timperley, 2001).

Particularly relevant to the current study is the body of work that focuses specifically on issues of reflective practices in post-observation conferences. Fanselow (1988) argues that the aims of supervision should be to explore and to see things differently, not to evaluate and to help – an orientation very much in line with the reflective approach that is ‘emerging as a dominant theme’ in second language teaching education (e.g. Bailey, 2009: 275). Suggestions for promoting reflection include, for example, talking less and being less directive (Ma in Copland et al., 2009), withholding value judgments or unsolicited feedback (Brandt, 2008; Zepeda, 2007), asking mediational questions such as ‘how do you think the lesson went?’ (Costa and Garmston in Myer-Mork, 2010), and making open-ended statements about some aspects of teaching (Zepeda, 2007). Aside from writings on the difficulty of achieving reflection (Copland et al., 2009; Orland-Barak and Klein, 2005), what might have contributed to the absence of true reflection (Copland, 2010; Holland, 2005), or whether the timing of the post-observation briefing affects the quality of reflection (Williams and Watson, 2004), prior work has also provided useful descriptions of the nature of reflective talk itself (Urzua and Vasquez, 2008; Vasquez and Urzua, 2009). Much is left unknown (aside from abstract principles), however, regarding the role of mentor conduct in promoting or prohibiting teacher talk. So far, Chamberlin (2000) has alerted us to the importance of the mentor’s nonverbal behavior in inducing the teacher’s self-disclosure, and Vasquez and Reppen’s (2007) carefully designed longitudinal study has produced compelling evidence of how teacher talk, when explicitly solicited, can increase dramatically in volume.

This study extends the existing literature by describing certain mentor practices that generate reflection without explicit solicitations. It is also hoped that my endeavor will complement the existing work on post-observation meetings methodologically by utilizing (1) video as opposed to audio data, upon which the work so far (to my knowledge) has been based and (2) conversation analysis (henceforth CA) as an analytical tool, the power of which is yet to be fully harnessed to elucidate the complexities of mentor-teacher interaction.

Data and Method

Data for this study comprise four post-observation meetings video-recorded in a graduate TESOL program in the United States. The participants are course instructors and students in four practicum courses (2 Novice Practica and 2 Advanced Practica) required by the MA program. For simplicity, in this paper, I will refer to the graduate student as ‘teacher’ and the course instructor as ‘mentor.’ All four meetings were fully transcribed using the conversation analytic conventions (see Appendix). A line-by-line analysis of all four transcripts in their entireties was then conducted with no specific focus except for capturing what is going on as experienced by the participants on a turn-by-turn basis. For each line in the transcript, I asked ‘why that now?’ (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). One of the dominant themes that emerged from this analysis is how teachers sometimes engage in reflective talk without being invited to do so. A collection was then made to gather all the instances of mentor practices that generate teacher reflections without explicit solicitations. Such instances turned out to be absent in one of the Novice Practica and most dominant in one of the Advanced Practica (extracts involving M1 and Ava below). A second-round analysis was then conducted for each extract with a focus on how each mentor turn generates reflective talk from the teacher, deploying a range of analytical tools. The categories of mentor practices to be presented below only became manifest during and after this second round of analysis. Although decades of conversation analytic research have successfully generated crucial insights into the professional competencies in a wide range of institutional contexts (e.g. Antaki, 2011; Drew and Heritage, 1992; Sarangi and Roberts, 1999), the particular approach to data as outlined above has not been, to my knowledge, fully and faithfully applied to the work on post-observation conferences. This study fills that gap.

Before proceeding, it may be useful to briefly consider how reflection is conceptualized in the literature. Whether it is ‘a recapturing of experience in which the person thinks about it, mulls it over, and evaluates it (Loughran in Brandt, 2008: 43), ‘ongoing conversation about teaching that gives teachers the opportunity to uncover the implicit beliefs and experiences that guide their pedagogy’ (Chamberlin, 2000: 353), or ‘the ability to analyse an action systematically and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the action in order to improve practice’ (Copland et al., 2009: 18), there is no doubt that much of this enterprise hinges, minimally, upon mentors’ ability to create a space that allows for the open sharing of teacher perspectives – a space that features trust (Chamberlin, 2000) or teacher-centeredness (Vasquez and Reppen, 2007). In this paper, I detail how this space is installed via practices other than explicit solicitations. As such, reflection is loosely operationalized as the sharing of teacher perspectives, which may not always manifest the depth of analysis we seek in ‘true’ reflection but constitutes at least a basis for or beginning towards achieving that end. Finally, although I am aware that whether reflection truly leads to change remains inconclusive (Griffiths, 2000), my goal in this paper is not to engage that debate but to offer a descriptive account of certain mentor practices that are potentially conducive to teacher reflections.

Analysis

Within the current data set, the mentor practices that lead to the sharing of teacher perspectives without explicit solicitation can be placed into two major categories (1) assessment and (2) advice. In the analysis below, I use M1, M2, and M3 to distinguish among the three mentors. In the transcripts, the mentor’s assessment or advice turn is in bold and pointed to with a single arrow, and the teacher’s response/reflection turn with a block arrow.

Discussion and Conclusion

In this paper, I have shown that the mentor’s assessment or advice can function as triggers for teacher reflections. In accepting or rejecting the assessment, the teacher engages a range of reflective talk such as articulating an independent analysis of her success, reconsidering a pedagogical practice, or relating her difficult endeavors in effectuating a certain behavioral change. In accepting or rejecting the advice, the teacher’s reflection ranges from detailing reasoning for an alternative course of action, asserting a critical stance towards the textbook materials, to depicting one’s diligence in pursuing but failure at obtaining a desired goal. Sometimes, teacher thinking in response to advising is not delivered as part of the acceptance or rejection package but leveraged through a stepwise topic shift.

Given the explorative aim of the study, these findings are intended to initiate rather than finalize an investigation. Admittedly, with the small sample size, there is no basis for claiming generalizability – not in the sense of ‘the traditional “distributional” understanding of generalizability’ (Peräkylä, 2004: 296). What CA achieves, however, is analytical generalization, where each case is related to a ‘theory’ (Pomerantz, 1990). Each instance is evidence that ‘the machinery for its production is culturally available, involves members’ competencies, and is therefore possibly (and probably) reproducible’ (Psathas, 1995: 50). Additional instances provide ‘another example of the method in the action, rather than securing the warrantability of the description of the machinery itself’ (Benson and Hughes, 1991: 131). In other words, the findings regarding mentor-teacher conversations in this study are generalizable not as descriptions of what other mentors and teachers do, but as what any other mentor or teacher can do.

Theoretically, findings of this study offer a microscopic look into how the much valued commodity of reflection in teacher education can emerge in the details of interaction without any explicit solicitation, thereby extending in particular the small body of work on teacher reflection in post-observation conferences. By detailing the emergence of teacher talk without explicit solicitations then, the current study stretches our existing appreciations for the myriad linkages between mentor conduct and teacher talk. In particular, insofar as doing assessments or being directive are sometimes considered impediments to true reflection (e.g. Brandt, 2006; Copeland et al., 2009; Fanselow, 1988; Keogh, 2010), there are perhaps grounds for a reappraisal in light of the new evidence, especially since advice and assessment seem to have persisted to exist as integral components of mentor talk.

More importantly perhaps, methodologically, a full-blown conversation analytic endeavor that prioritizes sequential details based on video data has yielded crucial insights into the rich dynamics as experienced by the participants, not just observed by the analysts, from one micro-second to the next in the unfolding interaction. It is in such details as an inbreath, a gaze shift, a facial expression, a specific prosodic packaging or the precise positioning of a turn onset that we become privy to the extent of a teacher’s engagement or readiness to reflect. It is also in such details that we begin to detect which part of the teacher talk the mentor is aligning with and to what extent. It is through scrutiny of such details that we manage, for example, to go beneath the surface of ‘positive assessment’ to the exact nature of such assessment that the teacher orients to as an opportunity for reflection.

For the practicing mentor, the lessons to be learned are by no means direct ones. To suggest that mentors engage in advice and assessment as a surreptitious way of obtaining teacher reflection would be ludicrous. It would, however, be prudent to develop a more realistic appreciation for practices such as advice and assessment in mentor talk. Understanding the reflection-potentials afforded by advice and assessment can push mentors to become more vigilant in these particular sequential environments, and by extension, better equipped for nurturing the possibilities of reflection, e.g. giving teachers the space to explain problems and devise solutions rather than accomplishing these tasks single-handedly. Finally, although this is not a study on how to do reflection, the range of richly detailed teacher turns that strive for and succeed in having their voices heard offer realistic exemplars of how and when precisely in the conversations teacher perspectives can be shared. In other words, these exemplars can serve as an empirical starting point for helping teachers overcome the difficulty of not knowing how to do reflection (Copland, 2010).