MONITORING LESSON-PLANNING DYNAMICS IN PRE-SERVICE TEACHER TEAMS: A Retrospective Study

Abstract

This study was conducted at The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago. It originated from the Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (DipTESOL) practicum in June-July 2017. Teacher trainees (n=14) in seven teams or dyads were tasked with lesson planning and delivery for groups of adult refugee learners (n=57) of mixed literacy levels. The impetus for the study came from clinical observation sessions which showed that individual members of two teams functioned in an auxiliary capacity although “collaboratively constructed” lessons had been sent forward for review. This led two teacher educators to question the extent to which members of teaching teams had shared the responsibility of lesson planning. They probed two aspects of co-instructional planning (individual input and team collaboration) which impacted on trainee assessment and lesson delivery, but which remained unaccounted for in the field. A mixed-methods approach in a two-phase process was used. Using a proxy measure in phase one, the teacher educators examined 172 lesson plans and 158 supporting documents submitted on Edmodo, an online networking forum, and experimented with basic metadata (author, created, modified by, and last modified date) to extract patterns reflecting individual input and team collaboration. In phase two the former teacher trainees were invited to validate these results and to contribute qualitatively to the findings through verbal reports and email exchanges. Eleven of the fourteen teacher trainees, representing each of the seven dyads, responded. The study revealed the patterns of individual input and team collaboration which emerged during lesson-planning in the aforementioned context, and proposes that these patterns may help to guide practicum contexts where pre-service teachers are assessed in teams.