Good Lord! Has It Really Been Twenty Years ???

Tessa Woodward looks back on the history and development of the Teacher Trainer Journal.

Tessa Woodward

Tessa Woodward is a teacher, teacher trainer and the Professional Development Co-ordinator at Hilderstone College, Broadstairs, UK. She edits the Teacher Trainer journal for Pilgrims, UK. She is President of IATEFL. Her most recent book is 'Ways of Working with Teachers' and she will have a new book out soon on thinking frameworks.
E-mail: editor@tttjournal.co.uk

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Background
And now…
What has changed in the field of teacher training over the twenty years?
Training settings
Professional Community
Terminology
New content areas in the journal
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1986 feels a long time ago now. That was when the first issue of a newsletter for people who train or help language teachers came out. The whole idea, dreamed up by Mario Rinvolucri and James Dixey of Pilgrims, was to provide a paper place where teacher trainers could talk to each other, recommend ideas and books to each other and take a peek at each others' work 3 times a year. Mario asked me to start the venture off since I had recently come back to the UK, was based near Canterbury and looking for work, had editing experience and was a trainer-trainer. The early issues of the journal had heavy, cream paper and an old-fashioned typeface that, at the time, gave a feeling of quality. Pretty soon, however, we changed from a back garden shed type of production process to the Print Unit at the University of Kent at Canterbury. That has allowed us to evolve our design over the years with colour covers, different paper, font, column widths etc.

So, I started The Teacher Trainer in 1986 and I'm still editing it now. Over the years I have peeled off tasks like keeping a subscriber data base up to date and phoning potential advertisers. Now the journal has a wonderful administrator in Marian Nicholson. The regular rhythm of my own tasks…answering queries, dreaming up inexpensive marketing ideas, reading draft articles and creating new columns… is such a part of my life that I hardly even think of it as 'work' any longer.
And 2006 is here now. Gosh! This means that the journal has been going strong for 20 years! We have built a bank of twenty years' material. To celebrate our 20th birthday, we have a newly relaunched magazine and a freshly designed website too with lots of new features in both. Take a look at www.tttjournal.co.uk. It's a very pretty site! And, as well as a nifty search engine, useful bibliography etc has a wonderful archive of 'golden oldie' back articles.

Quite a lot has happened in the world of language teacher training since the nineteen eighties. The explosion in demand for English teachers world wide has sucked in new teachers from different subjects and other fields and has thus brought many new people into teaching and thus teacher training, often much to their surprise and even against their will! The scramble to gain enough teachers to keep up with the demand has lead to cheaper and quicker methods of training being trialled.
If you are a teacher learner nowadays, you might be in a school working with a mentor, at university with a lecturer or tutor, on a school placement with an academic supervisor and a class-based experienced teacher, on a short intensive workshop with a FIFO (a Fly In Fly Out trainer) or with a teacher trainer on a short certificate course. You might be in a teacher development group with your peers or working in a helpful staff room with colleagues learning from them and from the books you use.

There are also now more conferences, course, books, periodicals and conversations about being a (better) teacher trainer than ever before. Regional trainers are more highly valued than earlier and the variety of settings in which and models by which trainers are now trained are better described than earlier on. We have places now, both virtual and actual, where we can listen to the voices and stories of our fellow trainers and of the teachers and language students we all work with. We have, I'm happy to say, something that I did not feel existed when I started the journal and that is…a real and "virtual" professional community.

As a result of the increased demand and types of settings and for a mentioned above, there is now a question about what we should call ourselves and our work. Since the first issue in 1986 there have also been some changes in the language of our field. The phrase "Teacher Training" has come, in some people's eyes, to carry associations of unthinking and rather mechanistic work with pre-service teachers. It is no longer universally understood to include teacher education, mentoring and professional development. Searching a thesaurus for parallel terms for the person who does the training throws up terms such as:

Adviser, coach, counsellor, consultant, demonstrator, expert, facilitator, guide, group leader, guru, helper instructor, master, mentor, pace-maker, sage, sponsor, supervisor, teacher, teacher- teacher, tutor. All of these terms seem right in some situations and not in others. All have connotations special to them. So, what to do? We have often considered updating the name of the journal but, because it is well known under its original title, instead we have changed the 'strap line' or subhead to include "…those who train, mentor and educate TESOL teachers". The articles between the covers variously refer to teacher trainers/educators/mentors and course leaders on one hand and teacher trainees/teacher-learners/mentees, and participants on the other.

Readers are still just as interested as they were in articles on observation and feedback, content and process of training sessions, people who train people in other fields, session plans, interviews with famous people, trainer resources and current research. Newer interests are…training teachers for content and language integrated learning, using e-resources and working in settings with very few resources.

In terms of a genuine change in thinking about teacher learning, I feel we have somewhat come through training based on the transmission model, we have got a little bored with the term reflection, we are still enjoying the social constructivism and scaffolding and ZPD's of Vygotsky. There is now beginning, though, a real desire to make sure that what we used to call 'transfer' has a chance of taking place. In other words a desire to make sure that teachers actually put into practice things they feel they have learned from reading, observing, reflection and courses. How can professional learning be truly activated? How is it sustained? And how do trainers know it has been activated and is sustained?

In recent issues of the Teacher Trainer journal, authors such as Julie Damron (Vol 19 No 1) Maya Manon (Vol 19 No 1) Tim Murphey (Vol 19/2) and Murphey and Kazuyoshi Sato (Vol 20/1) have got really stuck in to this area and come up with practical ideas for teacher learning, transfer and sustainability.

So..here is the Teacher Trainer, a thriving founder member of the international teacher training, education and mentoring community. All ready for you to read, contribute articles to, and advertise your events and courses in! Why not come and visit us? Why not read us? Why not join us?

Looking forward to getting to know you and your ideas!

Tessa Woodward
Editor
The Teacher Trainer Journal
Pilgrims
Theatre House
4-6 Orange Street
Canterbury
Kent CT1 2JA
UK
www.tttjournal.co.uk

Please check the Skills of Teacher Training course at Pilgrims website.