1) The document discusses key considerations for curriculum planning in second language teacher education (SLTE), including determining goals for what teachers should know and be able to do, understanding teacher-learners' prior knowledge and contexts, and providing opportunities for practice, reflection, and collaboration. 2) It examines frameworks for defining the knowledge base of language teaching, which includes domains like content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and contextual knowledge. 3) Issues around evaluating the effectiveness of SLTE programs and ensuring they educate teachers who can challenge and change practices are discussed. The knowledge base of SLTE is framed as an evolving system requiring critical reflection.

1. Teacher Education
Professor: Dr.
Tajeddin
Prepared by:
Mozhgan Soleimani
Aghchay

2. The Curriculum of
SLTE
By
Kathleen Graves

3. The Scope of Curriculum
Planning for SLTE
The focus of planning an
educational program:
• Who will be taught?
• What will be taught?
• How it will be taught?
• How what is learned will be
evaluated?

4. A Framework for
Curriculum Planning
A
Understanding
teacher-
learners: What
they know
D
Designing a program
What How
they will they will
be taught be taught
instructional
What how practices
to teach
D1 D2
B
Determining
goals: what
teachers
should know
and be able
to doC
Understanding
content
E
Planning ways to evaluate how effectively D achieves B

5. Overview of Changes in Conceptualizing
the Knowledge Base of Lang. Teaching
Conceptions of the knowledge
base of language teaching:
• Content/ Pedagogy
• Theory/ Practice
• knowledge/ Skills
until the 1970s little attention
was paid to the contexts in
which teacher-learners would
teach

6. Teachers’ Prior Knowledge
and How Teachers Learn
In the 1980s
• Attention shifted from what teachers
should know to who they are, what they
already know, and what they actually do
when they teach.
• Attention focused on how teacher-
learners’ prior knowledge and histories
affect what and how they learn and how
they make sense of experience.
• The role of prior knowledge changed
thinking about the knowledge base of
teaching.

7. The Role of Practice
Engaging in practice can be understood in
two related ways
• First, as classroom practice: opportunities
to observe teaching, to prepare for
teaching, to teach, to reflect on it, to
analyze it, and thus to learn it / from it.
• Second, participating in communities of
practice, communities of people,
entrenched in social systems that operate
according to tacit and explicit norms,
hierarchies, and values. Teachers need to
understand why they are the way they are,
how they are positioned in those contexts,
and how to develop power to negotiate and
change them.

8. LEARNING AS A
DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS
• Learning to teach is an ongoing,
developmental process.
• The knowledge base of teaching is not a
fixed set of knowledge, skills, and
understanding, but an evolving one for
each teacher.
• For the SLTE curriculum this means that
• content needs to be tailored to learners’
needs
• one aim of the curriculum is to help
teacher-learners develop tools to
continue their learning once the program
ends

9. DEFINING THE KNOWLEDGE BASE OF TEACHING: A
SYSTEM OF KNOWLEDGE BASES
Richards (1998)
Domains of content
Roberts (1998)
Types of Language teacher
knowledge
1) Content knowledge (of target
language systems, text types)
2) Pedagogical content
knowledge (how to teach / adapt
content to learners)
3) General pedagogic knowledge
(classroom management,
repertoire of ELT activities,
assessment)
4) Curricular knowledge (of the
official curriculum and resources)
5) Contextual knowledge (of
learners, school, and community)
6) Process knowledge
(interpersonal and team skills,
observation and inquiry skills,
language analysis skills)
1) Theories of teaching (that guide
SLTE program, teacher’s personal
theories)
2) Teaching skills (essential general
repertoire, LT specific repertoire)
3) Communication skills (general
communication skills, target
language proficiency)
4) Subject matter knowledge
(specialized concepts, theories, and
disciplinary knowledge)
5) Pedagogical reasoning and
decision-making skills (both
when preparing and during
teaching)
6) Contextual knowledge (how
society, community, and institution
affect and shape teaching)

10. LANGUAGE TEACHING SPECIFIC
KNOWLEDGE
From a curriculum perspective, three issues
are salient
1) There is no clear consensus around what
teachers need to know about language in
order to teach it
2) There is consensus that proficiency
(however it is defined) in the target
language is part of the knowledge base of
teaching a language
3) A common rationale for inclusion of
content such as sociolinguistics, discourse
analysis, second language acquisition, or
literature in the SLTE curriculum is its
relevance to language teaching.

11. Instructional Practices in the
SLTE Curriculum
For effective teaching:
• Help teacher-learners understand,
examine, and challenge their previously
unexamined conceptions and beliefs
about teaching
• Provide them with concepts, frameworks,
and theories to understand, talk about,
and organize their thinking about
language teaching and learning
• Support their development of a repertoire
of both general and language teaching-
specific teaching skills

12. • Help them develop intercultural
awareness and communication skills
• Contextualize their learning by providing
opportunities to observe teaching, to
practice teaching, and to develop skills in
preparing, teaching, and evaluating
lessons and curricula for real contexts
• Scaffold their development of skills to
inquire into and critically reflect on
experience
• Help them develop skills in becoming not
only knowledge consumers and
evaluators, but also knowledge-
generators
Instructional Practices in the
SLTE Curriculum(cont.)

13. To be effective, sustained opportunities
for practice require ongoing planning
and collaboration. Collaborations
involve reciprocal learning among
teacher-learners, teachers, and teacher
educators. Such partnerships are
important for three reasons:
1) They apprentice teacher-learners into
the discourses and norms of schooling
2) They provide a “reality check” for
teacher educators on the relevance of
what they teach in the SLTE context
3) They provide fresh perspectives for
practicing teachers
Collaborations and Partnerships

14. Evaluation and Curriculum
Evaluation in curricular terms has two focuses:
1) Participant learning: based on the goals of
the program
2) Program effectiveness: looks at how effective
the program is or was in helping participants
learn
• Some key considerations for curriculum
designers are how to integrate the parts and
the whole: assessment of individual skills and
courses and assessment of the participant’s
overall ability to teach, e.g., what is the
relationship between a teacher’s linguistic
knowledge as assessed on a linguistics test
and her ability to teach language?
• A final consideration is how to balance
external criteria such as state licensing
standards with internal criteria

15. ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS
Three issues that require further
exploration and research:
1) whether the teacher education
curriculum is educating teachers to
replicate practice or to challenge and
change it. Recent research suggests
that it is imperative to educate teachers
not as “servants of the system”
(Shohamy 2005) or as “helpless
subjects” (Lin 2004), but as
professionals who are “responsible and
involved leaders” (Shohamy 2005) so
that they can have an impact on
practices (such as testing) that de-skill
teachers and are unhelpful to learners.

16. 2) Teacher educators themselves must
guard against becoming “servants of
the system,” particularly in the area
of evaluation. Teacher education has
not been immune to the standards
movement that currently dominates
education. Standards, as products of
bureaucracies, are neither locally
created nor easily changed, thus
forcing teacher educators to adhere
to - or adapt to - ways of describing
teaching that may not fit their
teacher-learners.
ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS(CONT.)

17. 3) The knowledge base of SLTE is
also a system of knowledge
bases. Teacher educators must
“practice what they preach” and
hold themselves accountable to
the same criteria to which they
hold teacher-learners, for
example adapting content to
learners and inquiring critically
and reflectively into their own
practice.
ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS(CONT.)