Abstract
In this narrative article, I document my implementation of action logs as a tool for reflective practice and teacher development as I transitioned from working in a small eikaiwa (English conversation) school to working in a private international university. After providing a brief description of my contextual background and how I came to start action logging, I give examples of student feedback I received and their relevance to my reflective teaching. Finally, I explain the varied ways in which I feel using action logs aided me in improving the efficacy of my classroom practice and influenced my evolving teacher identity during a stressful transition between two markedly different professional worlds.
I Transitioning between worlds
[M]uch of the English taught (in eikaiwa) is about as nutritious as a bag of salty fries, say those involved. Lessons have morphed into sleek, bite-sized delivery systems staffed by teachers who are being transformed into the pedagogic equivalent of burger flippers. (McNeill, 2004)
Prior to my transition into university teaching, I had worked as an instructor in two different eikaiwa (private English conversation) schools over roughly eight years. Eikaiwa teaching is generally regarded as an entry-level English teaching job in Japan, with teachers often lacking professional qualifications and lessons sometimes offering a dubious mix of education and entertainment (Kubota, 2011). As can be observed in the above quotation taken from a prominent English-language newspaper in Japan, eikaiwa teachers are often stigmatized as teaching ‘fast food English’ and positioned on the bottom rung of the English language teaching (ELT) hierarchy in Japan (Hooper & Hashimoto, 2020; Nagatomo, 2016). Furthermore, due in part to their position outside of formal education, eikaiwa schools rarely feature in academic research or discussions (Lowe, 2015; Makino, 2016). Because of these factors, despite having completed my MA TESOL, I came into university teaching with somewhat of an inferiority complex as I was still struggling with the idea of myself as a ‘real’ teacher. This meant that my professional transition was initially quite a stressful one and I clearly recall one day during orientation when I had a panic attack over whether I was indeed ready for the ‘serious business’ of higher education.
As an eikaiwa teacher, I always saw the learners in my class as not only students but also paying customers who held a significant amount of power in terms of my perceived efficacy in the school. There is a phrase in Japanese, okyakusama wa kamisama desu (‘The customer is God’), and the sentiment of this phrase was always present in eikaiwa classes. If a student was not satisfied with my instruction, they could easily complain to the school who would then force me to change my approach. While at times stressful, this did cultivate a strong sense of egalitarianism and reactivity in my language teacher beliefs. For the majority of my teaching career, the traditional authoritative teacher identity was never really something that I was familiar with or even embraced, and resisting it became a thread that ran through all my classes. As a new university teacher I felt that I needed support for my professional transition from eikaiwa into higher education and clarification regarding what my new students needed from me. I saw ‘action logs’ – notebooks for collecting student feedback – as a line of communication to my students that would inform me about whether or not I was meeting their expectations and also highlight to me any potential points of conflict or tension emerging from my transition to a more formal context.
II What are action logs?
As stated above, action logs are notebooks used to record student feedback on what happens in class and any other issues relevant to their learning (Kindt & Murphey, 2000; Murphey, 1993; Murphey, Barcelos, & de Moraes, 2014; Woo & Murphey, 1999). At the end of every class, the teacher asks students to write down comments about each class activity; how much English they used; and any general comments about what they liked or disliked, what they found difficult or easy, and what they regarded as useful for their learning (see Figure 1). The teacher then collects their action log notebooks every week and checks through their comments, leaving feedback or asking questions if necessary. The teacher can then adjust their lesson planning or teaching approach based on the student feedback so as to better serve learner needs or address any instances of learner confusion or anxiety. In this sense, action logs are comparable to a ‘ship’s log’, a resource for recording and later reflecting on a journey: in this case a class’s ‘learning journey’. An example of a completed action log entry is shown in Figure 1.
A completed student action log entry.
I was introduced to the idea of action logging during my MA TESOL studies, but it wasn’t until a year later when I transitioned into university teaching that I realized the value of using action logs for reflective and collaborative teaching practice/development. My MA program put a great deal of emphasis on being a reflective teacher and constantly encouraged us to ask questions about our own practice and beliefs. This was something that I knew would be especially vital in my first year in university but I was also aware that relying on my own subjective interpretations of the classroom could become unreliable ‘navel-gazing’ or a box-checking process lacking depth. Action logs offered both evidence to base my decisions on and dialogic partners – my students – to work through the reflection process with (Mann & Walsh, 2017).
In Japan, many relationships in business, sports, and education are influenced by the senpai–kohai (senior–junior) dynamic. This relationship has been described as ‘a relay race in which information, experience, and skills are passed from generation to generation’ (Haghirian, 2010, p. 19). One of the classes that I was assigned was a sophomore reading class and I saw these socialized students as potential senpai: sources of vital insider knowledge for me as a kohai neophyte member of the university classroom. I introduced action logs in the hope that they could act as the ‘relay baton’ through which my students could pass on information about their expectations, goals, and needs for our future classes.
III My autoethnography with action logs
This practitioner research was conducted during my first year teaching in a medium-sized private Japanese university after transitioning from the eikaiwa industry. Upon arriving at the university, I met with a former professor from my MA TESOL program, an authority on action logs, and told him that I was interested in action logging. He then provided me with some examples of past students’ logs to take a look at. From this information I constructed a simple version of my own (Appendix 1) to be distributed to students that included sections for them to note the percentage of English they used in class, a rating system for each class activity/stage, and free writing sections where they could make comments on the class and state their targets for the following meeting. My rationale for action logging at this time was based on four main goals:
providing an additional line of teacher–student communication;
allowing me to catch problems I might miss due to the hectic nature of the classroom;
providing students with a sense of agency by showing that their voices matter;
getting student insights into how a university class ‘should’ be run.
Over the course of the academic year, I collected action logs on a weekly basis from 19 sophomore students in an Academic Reading class that met twice per week. I chose this particular class for this practitioner research because they were second-year students who were already to some extent socialized into the practices of higher education. Consequently, I hoped that these students would provide me with deeper insights into university English education that I could then draw on to support my transition from eikaiwa teaching. In this sense, although I was most definitely in a position of authority in terms of age and status in the classroom, I still, to a certain extent, considered these students as relative senpai or ‘old-timers’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) within the university classroom. The students completed their action log entries at the end of each class. Each student brought a notebook so that they could easily compile and keep track of their reflections whilst also making it easier for me to check them each week. The insights gained from reading students’ action log comments shaped my lesson planning for the following week, allowing me to better tailor class content and pedagogical approach to learner needs, evaluations, and suggestions.
In accordance with my institution’s research ethics guidelines, I contacted each of the Academic Reading students and received written permission to use their action logs for this reflective study on the condition that their confidentiality was assured. The action logs were finally all collected at the end of the academic year so that I could analyse them more carefully and reflect on the class. The following section will provide examples of some of the feedback I received from my sophomore Academic Reading class’s action logs throughout my first year as their teacher. Later, I thematically coded their responses using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) while reflecting on how their comments influenced my teaching praxis and teacher identity throughout the year. The two primary areas that I focus on in this study are the roles action logs had in my transition to the university classroom and the various tensions that action logging uncovered throughout this process.
IV A year of action logging
In this section I will first explain the roles that action logging occupied during my transition from eikaiwa teaching into higher education. I will also illustrate some of the tensions that I experienced during the implementation of action logs.
1 Roles
a Providing student feedback on lesson activities/approaches
The first role that action logs had was shaping my lesson planning through student feedback. At the end of each teaching week, I was able to read student log comments and get valuable information on what they were finding enjoyable, useful, or difficult. Soon after the course started it became clear that most students found the textbook activities dry, very difficult, and tiring.
Textbook contents is behavior. That is difficult in my group [and] everyone didn’t understand well include[ing] me. I was [a] little sleepy because the textbook is difficult to enjoy it.
Consequently, one of the areas where I received positive student feedback was on 10–15 minute warm-up activities that I introduced in order to mitigate the negative reception to the textbook. These were generally short interactive tasks such as picture dictation or vocabulary circumlocution activities that were designed to develop fluency and communicative strategies as well as raise students’ energy levels. I found that by providing students with a chance to feel comfortable and engage in stimulating language study, they were able to regulate their motivation and maintain focus on the textbook activities later in the class.
Today’s games [were] fun and interesting. I could enjoy and relax. Sometimes in this semester, the content of class was difficult, but I’m glad to belong [to] this class! The textbook was [a] little difficult. Taboo was very fun. I could feel comfortable in class. I think it’s very good.
Related to using the textbook in a more engaging way, several students also indicated that providing them with opportunities for collaboration and peer-teaching helped them negotiate the challenging textbook content while also giving them a sense of achievement.
Peer teaching was funny because teaching each other is good way to learn. Actually, I wanted to be a teacher when I was a 12 years old, so it was funny. Sharing vocab is useful I think. Because teaching is better than just sitting and study[ing]. I want to do it again.
The student responses I received acted as a useful gauge that I could use to decide on what type of activity they valued and found motivating. Their feedback also assisted me in creating a plan of action when preparing the following week’s lessons for how and for what amount of time I could use the textbook most effectively.
b Helping me to bridge research and the classroom
The student voices that I gained access to from action logging also assisted me in bridging the often disconnected worlds of research and the classroom. I had completed my MA TESOL just months before I started university teaching and was still frequently reading academic literature to maintain the momentum I had built up during my formal studies. I was also keenly aware, however, of a potentially problematic gap between broad prescriptions based on research findings and the complex and nuanced realities of the actual classroom (Medgyes, 2017). One example of how I was able to negotiate this gap through action logging can be seen in how my wider reading led to the implementation of a short (4–5 minute) break in our classes. Although the academic paper that I read (Ariga & Lleras, 2011) had implied that providing ‘breaks’ or switching between tasks could help students maintain concentration during our long 90-minute classes, I felt that implementing any changes based on this research needed to be done through the lens of students’ learning expectations and beliefs. Therefore, after briefly explaining the rationale for the change, I then asked students over the next few lessons to report their feelings about the new ‘break’ system in their action logs, emphasizing that this was purely experimental and that I was personally indifferent one way or the other. The feedback from their action logs was crucial in both refining and eventually implementing this new system in the remainder of our classes for that academic year.
In today’s class I was sleepy but I could do well because of [the] short break time. Thank you. I was happy to [have some] break time. I could concentrate again. I think today’s 5 minute break worked. I would like you to keep this [in] some of the class[es]. But for me, 5 minutes was too long (a little). How about just doing [a] power pose or just relax[ing] in a few minutes (1–2 minutes).
Through these learner comments, action logging revealed to me how although research can indeed positively inform classroom practice, it is also important to engage in a dialogue with learners so as to agree on its utility in relation to their needs and goals.
c Raising my awareness of issues ‘under the radar’
Another function that action logs provided was that students were able to highlight potential problems that were occurring unbeknownst to me during class time. This then allowed me to tweak my classroom management and pre-empt student frustration or stress developing into bigger issues.
In today’s class I would like you to do [a] quick check of answer of HW. In my group there were some questions that we were not sure [about]. I couldn’t read [the] text in 4 minutes. I think it’s too short for us. [other student’s name] also couldn’t. I want you to take more [time] and then decide time shorter.
These valuable nudges back from my students resonated with me due to the reactivity that had been cultivated during my time in eikaiwa as well as the ability to briefly put my assumptions to one side and afford students more agency in how the class was run. Every week, my lesson plans were influenced and shaped by the feedback from my student ‘guides’. This, in turn, helped me to preemptively troubleshoot any problems relating to a dissonance between student and teacher perceptions of the classroom.
d Providing information on out-of-class student needs
Action logs also served to heighten my awareness of student needs both inside and outside of the classroom. As I was new to the university, there was a great deal that I was unaware of relating to tests that the students were taking and different institutional requirements for things like the study abroad program. Additionally, many of my students revealed to me various individual goals and struggles that they were having through their journeys as language learners.
I thought speed reading will help the TOEIC, TOEFL, and so on. My friend who [is] a [another university’s] student, he had improved [his] TOEIC score to 810 point[s]. I want to know a good way to study it.
These comments were instrumental in shaping my lesson planning to better meet their needs and enhance their buy-in to what we were doing each week. Through reading this feedback I came to realize that my classes would serve them better if the activities developed transferable skills like skimming or scanning that could potentially enhance their performance in standardized tests like TOEIC and TOEFL. Furthermore, I made sure that I made clear to students the link between their action log feedback and the introduction of activities that would contribute to their performance in tests. This provided another opportunity to prove to them that their goals and voices mattered in our class and hopefully increased their sense of agency as a result.
e Establishing my status as a ‘real’ teacher
While the previous sections have focused on how action logs facilitated my lesson planning and my teaching practice, I also came to realize the role that action logging had regarding my evolving teacher identity. Although the reading course had a set textbook that was recommended to the new teachers at the start of the year, the rest of the course was left open for us to decide. This freedom was both exciting and terrifying for me in this new context as I was transitioning from an eikaiwa school that lacked professional oversight, often highlighted edutainment over sound pedagogy, and had no real assessment standards in place.
As previously mentioned, it could certainly be said that I came into university teaching with a complex about my past as an eikaiwa teacher. I was, therefore, unsure if I was in fact prepared for so much autonomy within a ‘real’ academic setting and was not confident that the pedagogical toolkit that I had assembled in eikaiwa would actually translate effectively into legitimate practice in my new professional sphere. Due to these internal struggles with my teacher identity, I came to rely a great deal on action logging. My students’ positive and negative evaluations of the activities I introduced acted as a yardstick for the appropriateness of my teaching approach in my insecurity-laden first semester and were invaluable in gradually adjusting the format of the class into something that would be both stimulating and useful for my students. I also found that positive feedback from action logging had the effect of legitimizing my past experiences in eikaiwa. This allowed me to orient the skills I learned there as part of a developing pedagogical tool box rather than viewing university and eikaiwa in a purely hierarchical sense: as ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ forms of teaching.
f Discussion
The ‘gold mine’ of feedback (Murphey, 1993) that I received over the academic year strongly suggested that my students were indeed engaged in the process of action logging. Dörnyei and Murphey (2003) also argued that action logs provide students with evidence that they are involved in the day-to-day running of a class. This also means that there is a great deal of accountability on the part of the teacher to respond to student comments either in dialogue or through concrete actions. My students were able to see the choice and implementation of activities evolve over time and language policy change as a direct consequence of their action log comments. I would also ensure to make this cause-and-effect relationship clear by making comments in class like ‘Based on some of your action log feedback, we’re going to try something new this week.’ It is through this teacher action (or lack thereof) that we reveal to our students whether their voice matters or not. In addition to this heightened empowerment in classroom decision making, action logs also represent an additional line of face-saving communication where students may ask questions or voice concerns directly to the teacher.
In terms of the value that action logging has for teachers, I can be even more confident. On a personal level, the insider knowledge that I was able to examine each week from my students – relative senpai and seniors in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) – assisted me in negotiating a workable transition between two professional settings. Zittoun’s (2006) research on life transitions describes how individuals utilize social resources – people providing relational support and social knowledge on how one should act in certain situations – to assist them in transitioning between two microworlds or spheres of experience (eikaiwa and university). Action logs acted as a conduit for knowledge from social resources (my students) who facilitated my socialization into higher education: Through collaboration my students and I ensured that we were both on the right track. Additionally, the increased prominence of student voice in my lesson planning and implementation meant that I was able to retain a degree of egalitarianism in line with the teacher beliefs I had internalized in eikaiwa. The interplay between the beliefs and knowledge that I had brought with me from eikaiwa and the gradual adaptation of my teaching approach based on student feedback represented what the communities of practice literature refers to as alignment: ‘a two-way process of coordinating enterprises, perspectives, interpretations and contexts so that action has the effects we expect’ (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014, p. 21). Action logging afforded me access to student perspectives on their ‘regime of competence’: what is accepted by established members as competent participation in the community (Wenger, 1998), in this case the university classroom. These perspectives influenced the choice of activities that I included in my lesson planning, the utility of lesson content relating to institutional test requirements and students’ personal goals, and the general atmosphere that I strived to foster in class. From there I was able to negotiate and mold that knowledge into a pedagogical approach that would satisfy both myself and my students.
On a more general level, for continuing professional development, student feedback from action logging acted as concrete evidence on which I could base my reflective practice (Mann & Walsh, 2017; Murphey, 1993). This in turn reduced the risk of misinterpreting what had gone on in class or missing out on valuable details that might have otherwise gone unnoticed in the whirlwind of teaching a lesson. Perhaps most importantly, the increased accountability that I had in responding to student feedback meant that it was less likely that I could slip into teacher ‘auto-pilot’ (Paton, 2015).
2 Tensions
a Negotiating classroom role
One of the foremost tensions I experienced through action logging was what I perceived to be a mismatch between my desired professional identity and student expectations of non-Japanese teachers. As previously described, although students frequently stated that they enjoyed the warm-up activities, they would at times complain about the challenging and academic textbook content. For me, this partly represented a tension in terms of my teacher identity and the framing of non-Japanese teachers in Japanese ELT. From the feelings of deprofessionalization that I had experienced during my time as an eikaiwa teacher and because of the research I had read on the topic, I was keenly aware of and perhaps rather sensitive to the issue of foreign teachers in Japan being ascribed an identity as entertainers or hosts (Kubota, 2011) or only being suited for ‘playing games’ (Nagatomo, 2016). As a result of these influences, I was always mindful of student feedback leading us too far into the realm of ‘fun’ and moving away from its purpose of teaching academic reading skills. This meant that I often felt the need to remind students that, although I was glad that they were enjoying the warm-up activities, the textbook content and the academic skills we were developing had to remain the primary focus of our time together.
b English only?
A further issue that I struggled with was that of language policy and the role of students’ first language (L1). Action logging revealed a dissonance of teacher and student beliefs on this topic, although we were eventually able to come to an agreement over how to manage the use of Japanese in our classes. At the start of the year, I was quite relaxed with L1 use in my classes as I felt from my own experience with English-only and pluralingual teaching contexts that the latter was more conducive to a productive and egalitarian classroom. Furthermore, I was deeply interested in critical issues in TESOL such as native-speakerism and linguistic imperialism which heightened my resistance to an English-only classroom due to the ideological implications that came along with such an approach (Canagarajah, 2006; Phillipson, 1992). Despite my firm belief in the value of principled classroom L1 use, however, after roughly two weeks one student commented in her action log that she wanted the language policy to be stricter to encourage greater use of English.
I think more people speaks Japanese during class than my Freshman class so I want to work hard on speaking in English.
Having discussed this with the student, she told me about the system that her teacher had used the previous year that involved passing an object to anyone who used Japanese during a task. Whoever was in possession of this object at the end of the lesson would have to give a short speech in English. Although I was hesitant about resorting to this (albeit lighthearted) punishment tactic in class, I decided to pilot this system by using a small monkey soft toy. The feedback that I received in the action logs the following week was, to my surprise, overwhelmingly positive.
I can speak English to avoid to get [a] new friend [drew picture of monkey] but it is [a] good situation for me so it was useful. Monkey doll makes us speak less Japanese. It’s [a] good way to speak English.
Through this issue, I was forced to question my own teacher principles as it was fairly clear that, in this particular class, the presence of a light punishment to nudge students towards increased English use was actually believed by students to be beneficial to their development.
3 Discussion
As can be seen from my reflections, action logging did raise several tensions that I feel I needed to negotiate through discussion with my students. The first was related to teacher identity. As Barkhuizen (2017) says of language teacher identities, ‘They are struggle and harmony: they are contested and resisted by self and others, and they are also accepted, acknowledged by self and others’ (p. 4). In order to protect my desired teacher identity, I sometimes felt that I needed to resist certain demands from students and exercise my agency in the classroom. Several studies have raised questions over the potential negative effects of Japanese university students’ expectations of foreign teachers’ lessons. Burrows (2007) and Amundrud (2008) explored the notion of non-Japanese teachers being constructed as ‘fun’ and that there was often pressure on teachers to conform to this socially constructed role. In an ethnographic study of university students in China, Stanley (2013) encountered the same phenomenon and found it to have had a profoundly negative effect on teacher motivation and lesson quality. This resonated with me particularly because I was transitioning from eikaiwa, a teaching context often stigmatized within Japanese ELT (Hooper, 2018) for being the home of the unprofessional, ‘entertainer’ teacher. I too was concerned about this and therefore at times had to emphasize to students that, although I wanted their experience to be enjoyable and engaging, the course was first and foremost for developing academic reading skills. In this sense, I was attempting to ‘position take’ or ‘attempt to alter the patterns or practices of judgment in a social field’ (Luke, 2009, p. 290). In order to create and maintain my desired professional identity, I had to ‘push back’ against the demands of my students.
The other tension I faced stemmed from incongruence between my teaching beliefs over classroom L1 use and my students’ perspectives on the importance of an English only environment for their development. Their action log comments as well as in-class dialogue challenged assumptions that I had brought with me from my teaching experience and academic reading and forced me to take the class in a direction that I was not always comfortable with. Along with a number of other issues, the issue of language policy highlighted the role of action logs in my reasoning as a teacher (Johnson, 1999). Rather than me simply trying to apply what I had experienced in other teaching contexts or what I had read in a journal to a group of interchangeable students, action logging reinforced the need to approach each class as a complex entity. Seeing students’ individual evaluations, feelings, and suggestions in their notebooks every week led me to understand more clearly that all teaching was indeed ‘local and dependent on particular circumstances in specific classrooms with particular students’ (Johnson, 1999, p. 2). Johnson rightly claims that in terms of the best course of action in the classroom, it is always dependent on a multitude of situated considerations. I benefited from action logging as it brought more of these considerations to the surface, thus allowing me to more effectively bring my lesson planning and teaching practice in line with the unique group of learners I was working with.
V Conclusions
This year-long teacher research project via action logging foregrounds the importance of the particularities of each specific teaching context to the evolution of our professional practice and, by extension, our teacher identity. The difficulty for many teachers, however, may actually be gaining access to sufficient evidence and insight upon which they can base their pedagogical reasoning. Our learners are an invaluable source of such evidence via their beliefs, evaluations, and learning goals, as made visible in their action logs. Through action logging, we simultaneously tap into learner insights on the classroom and afford them agency to affect how lessons are run. Moreover, action log entries act as a platform for data-based and dialogic reflective practice (Mann & Walsh, 2017) that may stimulate continued professional development for teachers in any context, whether it is regarded as ‘real’ teaching or not.
By analysing the action log comments that I received, I was able to reflect on my first year and truly appreciate the impact that my students had on how our course evolved from the first day. Action logs helped me align my praxis with the needs and expectations of my students in my new teaching context and allowed me to realize the legitimacy of the skills that I had brought with me from the ‘humble’ world of eikaiwa. Conversely, action logging did bring to the surface a number of tensions between my students’ expectations and my professional beliefs and identity. Although uncomfortable at times, through dialogic negotiation of these issues and robust reasoning based on the constant stream of feedback that action logs afforded, my students and I were able to co-construct an environment that stimulated our mutual development.
