JOURNALLING IN TEACHER EDUCATION AROUND THE WORLD
A colloquium presentation for TESOL2004.
Jill Burton, Rebecca Mlynarczyk, Phil Quirke, Tricia Trites, Ellen Lipp, Aysegul Daloglu

ABSTRACT
Experienced teacher educators from around the world discuss journal use with teachers.
Key issues include focus, technology, participation, motivation, continuation, relevance, reflection and teacher educator time.
Audience participation is encouraged throughout.
Participants come away with new insights for using journals.

SUMMARY
This colloquium, which is of interest to teachers as well as teacher educators, discusses how journaling is used by a group of experienced teacher educators from the US, Australia, Brazil and the UAE. Audience participation is encouraged throughout and afterwards through the group's online journal on journaling.

Jill will discuss her journal work on qualitative research with a Thai teacher colleague several thousand miles away.
Phil will discuss how he uses journals to explore classroom practice and to promote reflective practice.
Rebecca will discuss her use of journals as a tool in her work with Austrian teachers of English.
Tricia uses journals to encourage future teachers to reflect on their teaching practices as they articulate their professional and personal philosophies as well as to realize that effective teaching requires collaboration.
Ellen encourages Korean teachers, enrolled in a one-month university TEFL course, to identify major problems they face as EFL teachers, and, then, uses journal writing to reflect on and identify solutions to these problems.
Aysegul will talk about fostering reflective teaching through journals with pre-service English language teachers.

After these brief presentations, panel members will encourage audience participation in a discussion of common issues of concern when journaling such as the use of technology, dealing with limited teacher educator time, encouraging the continued participation and motivation of journal writers, and promoting ongoing reflection.
The colloquium will conclude with a summary of issues discussed, which will be posted for open review and discussion on the panel's web-based group journal on journaling.

DETAIL
This paper investigates Journal Writing based on the following questions, which were discussed via email over the past year by the six authors having been originally asked by Jill:

1. What makes you start an e-mail journal conversation with a colleague?
2. What makes you re-open an e-mail journal conversation which has lapsed?
3. What makes you pause?
4. What keeps an e-mail journal conversation with a colleague going?
5. What if anything makes you feel an e-mail journal conversation is finished?
6. What do you value most in e-mail journal conversations with colleagues?

The discussion was based upon the premise that the answers were not as important as asking the right questions.
Jill initially proposed four levels with Phil & Ellen suggesting the addition of level 3 as the commentary and leaving Jill's initial stage 3 as a hypothesizing stage 3. Ellen also suggested the addition of a practice drafting or training stage for those teachers and students that have never had to write a journal entry or reflect on their experience in a written format before. The six levels below are reflected in each of the journal descriptions of the six authors.

Further to these six levels, Jill suggests ten principles of journalling and reflective writing:

1. All reflective writing (RW) is purposeful.
2. It responds to questions, which may not be apparent until later levels of reflection.
3. With each level, RW is further removed from the initial action that stimulated the reflection.
4. With practice, RW can become more focused, more thoughtful, more reflective.
5. RW is in itself a professional action.
6. RW is a tool to aid reflective practice and teacher learning.
7. RW provides a record for later reflection.
8. RW can be individual or collaborative.
9. RW can draw on professional experiences outside the classroom.
10. Collaborative RW invites wider, deeper thinking, and greater opportunities for learning.

Jill's work on qualitative research with a teacher colleague (e.g. Siriluck in Thailand) several thousand miles away found that starting with student-generated problems in short courses was an effective way of kick-starting an intensive journal-writing process. She found that her and Siriluck wrote to each other when they needed to, when it was helpful. There is a similarity to Ellen's encouragement for problematizing. Siriluck and Jill have the luxury, if you like, of being able to wait for problems to surface. It is though, different, for university / post-secondary teachers. There is a certain luxury in having regular access to internet and e-mail, of being expected to research, think, write, etc. Maybe the process we're talking about and trying to encourage happens more naturally and can be more effective among such teacher-learners, and as teacher-educators, we should be thinking of more ways to strengthen it for other teacher-learners like Ellen's?
Student motivation and needs are central, and therefore our roles as teachers must take these into consideration.
Finally, Jill found, as we all did, that email forums were more effective than discussion boards as the discussion boards seemed to be just one more log on, one more step, one more password to learn, etc. She had to discipline herself with e-mail. As a new user, she felt it a polite duty to respond to e-mails. Increasingly she is becoming transactional; saying something only when I have something to say and telling herself that lurking is saving someone else another e-mail to read at the other end.

Phil looked at the journal exchanges he has had with teachers on his Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA) course over the last three years, and how his responses to their email journals encouraged teachers to go beyond the simple description and reflect deeper on what they are doing in the classroom. The teachers all have three or more years experience and are taking the Diploma to update their classroom skills with an internationally recognised qualification. The course focuses on teachers' practical classroom approaches and tying these to the theories held by the teachers. This involves intense reflection on their classroom practice and the reasons why they act and react the way they do. This means that the course moves beyond the 'What are we doing in the classroom?' (Level 1) first asked, and the 'How are we doing what we do in the classroom?' (Level 2) fairly quickly. It is the third step the course focuses on by continually asking, 'Why are we doing what we are doing in the classroom?' (Level 3).
These moves from teaching to describing the theoretical basis are behind everything we do as teachers in our classrooms. But, as Jill suggests, these are only the first levels in the continuing professional development that is our career. Jill's levels of four and five are required if we are to truly reflect on our development as teachers. Phil has been fortunate enough to continue working with some of the teachers on his early DELTA courses, and he has continued working with them on their professional development with sporadic emails indicating the validity of Jill's final two levels.

Rebecca focused on her work with Austrian teachers, looking at their "Teaching Philosophy Portfolios" as examples of reflective writing. This would appear to only cover the first three levels above, but often these portfolios contained journal entries from earlier courses, and sometimes had subsequent reflections added which mirrored the final two levels above.

Tricia uses journals in her teacher training courses because "I want my future teachers:
1) to be reflective of their teaching practices and to articulate their philosophies;
2) to become aware of who they are personally and culturally and how this shapes the type of teacher they become;
3) to realize that effective teaching requires collaboration."
She found with her long-term courses that the content and purpose of the journals was critical. She used discussion boards in her online courses, but found that requiring students to post and discuss was not necessarily fruitful. Students needed to feel that they owned the material and had something worthwhile to contribute. In her intercultural competence class, all of the students readily participated and contributed volumes because they were talking about their own cultures and aspects of other cultures that they didn't understand and wanted to know more about. They felt connected to the content and eventually to each other, so much so that small cohorts formed within the student body. However, with more theoretical courses, research methods and SLA, students resisted, even refused, to participate. When asked what had caused this lack of participation, students stated that they didn't feel that they understood the material well enough to discuss it on that level. Others felt that it appeared to be more of a chore and just an assignment that they chose not to complete.
This semester, Tricia shifted her Usage Journal project to make it a more interactive journal assignment. Students were asked to observe the language around them for the semester, noting idiosyncrasies, variations, etc. and to make one journal entry each week, relating their observation to the grammatical aspects that were being studied in class. She tried general postings to a discussion board journal, providing students with the opportunity to respond to each other's entries in the hope that the content of the journal would prove interesting enough to have students interact more readily.
The trend that Tricia is seeing in her journals is that the students have to feel connected to the content in order to be effectively engaged; otherwise, the journals are just course requirements that just take up time. She found that students continue to dialogue with her after a course is over in a professional sense, but as Jill mentioned it is often more as a resource when they have a dilemma or need additional suggestions, etc.
One thing that Tricia noticed is something we talked about in Baltimore: It is so much easier to keep the dialogue going when the conversation comes to you. When I get an email from any of you, I read it and based on my work schedule, I reply. So whether I'm actively or inactively engaged, I'm still there; however, when I go to Phil's site, I have to make a point to go there, remember my login, browse around for a while to see what has taken place in my absence, and then post something. The emails seem more spontaneous and immediate, which is also something that my students say about our online course. We use Blackboard as a medium of instruction; however, students would rather send me an email about a question or problem rather than post it to the questions / problems strand on the discussion board. I see the benefit to the discussion board format in that more people have access to the information. In fact, I really want my students to ask questions there so that I don't have to reply to several emails about the same thing. I just think that in my busy schedule, something that comes to me is much easier to respond to than something I have to go retrieve.

Ellen offers a framework for using journals which emphasizes explicit problemetizing, and she explores the link between journaling and creating teacher action plans. Ellen encourages Korean teachers, enrolled in a one-month university TEFL course, to focus on writing ideas fluently rather than expressing them correctly. She also encourages teachers to identify major problems they face as EFL teachers. She, then, leads them to use journal writing at regular intervals in the course. Teachers try to clarify the nature of the problem and to describe possible solutions to these problems. Ellen collects ideas from teachers' weekly journal entries to create composite journal logs. After being distributed to teachers by email, the logs become collaborative action plans. These weekly collaborative journals give teachers a record of the group's ideas about the key problems the class had selected.
Ellen suggests that the first level be included at the beginning of Jill's RW framework to allow teachers to attempt a one-draft journal entry. She recommends this level since, when she was working with experienced Korean EFL teachers who had good English writing skills, she found that at the beginning of the TEFL course some teachers (her students) did not want to write journal entries in class. While a few of them wrote in journals at home and turned them in the next day, a few teachers did not turn in journals during the first two weeks. They needed time to get accustomed to journal writing.
Ellen notes that RW is used in many contexts: classes consisting of experienced reflective journal writers and writers new to reflective journals, preservice and inservice courses, short term and traditional full semester courses, the first introductory TESL/TEFL course and subsequent TESL/TEFL courses, and other
contexts. Ellen wonders if journal writing flows differently in short term courses especially when students interrupt their teaching to take the course, so they aren't actually reflecting on what happened in class that day. It is likely that the types of insights that are written in journals will vary depending on the context in which RW is introduced. Ellen found that in her short term TEFL course the journal entries were mostly at levels 0, 1, 2 & 3.
Besides differences due to context, Ellen has noticed there are individual differences between writers; some writers seem to be able to reach the higher reflective levels, which involve more analytic thinking, while others need teacher intervention or special training in RW. Further there are individual differences in writing style; some writers ignore levels 1 & 2 and focus immediately on a form of level 3 (How did it happen?) without having engaged in descriptive writing (levels 1 & 2). This writing style could occur when experienced teachers feel uncomfortable describing aspects of their classroom to a new teacher trainer. In such cases, teacher trainers need to allow time to build trusting relationships. The trainer may want to discuss the importance of connecting generalizations or hypotheses to written descriptions that are based on teachers' students or classes.

Aysegul's work focuses on the journals of pre-service teachers and their reflective activities, and most of their journal entries are on levels 1, 2 and 3: descriptions of what happened and commenting / reaching conclusions form the backbone of journal writing for the group I work with. I sometimes have the chance of observing level 4 (initiating, responding, and feeding back), especially when the student teacher encounters the same or similar learning / teaching difficulty in the classroom. Level 4 can be observed in the entries written prior to graduation from the department.
Aysegul also points out that journals tend to re-open as new needs arise and that time is the major factor in journals lapsing.