Page 200 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

Impact of a Professional Development Programme

activities. The participants were guided to reflect on the whole field experience, their belief changes,
and the factors influencing their beliefs. All the interviews were conducted in English and audio-taped.

Classroom Observation and Stimulated Recall Interview

The trainee teachers taught 20 lessons (45 min each) during the practicum, and I, as the university super-
visor, observed and videotaped the 1st, 7th, 14th, and 20th lesson of each participant with observation
notes taken. Each trainee also watched their video recorded lessons and wrote a reflection about their
teaching. At the end of each observation, I held a stimulated recall interview with each participant to
identify belief changes in their teaching practice. I also identified some teaching episodes based on my
observation notes, which might reflect or contradict the beliefs stated by the participants in their interviews.
Participants’ Reflective Journals

Each participant maintained a reflective journal to express their beliefs, to record insights they gained
during this programme, and how these contributed to their professional development. Each participant’s
weekly journals (in English) were collected at the end of each week. These writings provided the author
with insights into the personal and implicit processes that the trainees experienced in their research process.

Collaborative Meetings

A schedule of three collaborative meetings was held during the 10-week practicum. The purposes of
the meetings were to share trainees’ learning of ideas, practical strategies and solutions they were ap-
plying to achieve proposed principles in their teaching, and to collaboratively reflect on the process. All
discussions from the meetings were audio-recorded and later transcribed for analyses.

Data Analysis

Given the large number of participants who provided written reflections of school mentors during the
first semester of the practicum, a corpus tool was used for analysis. First, the responses were collated.
Through repeatedly reading the data, frequently used key words and phrases were identified, i.e., dis-
cipline, use of L1 and classroom management. Wordsmith was used to search for these key words and
create the preliminary categories. Further categories were created through searching the remaining data,
and identifying further key words. As for the recorded interviews, I transcribed them all. Afterward, the
interview transcripts of each participant were first reviewed to identify the specific beliefs the participant
held about language teaching and learning. The emerging beliefs were then categorized and compared
across different interviews, paying special attention to the relationships between the identified belief
change processes to account for the evolutionary nature of belief development. The videotaped classroom
observations were reviewed together with the transcribed stimulated recall interviews and the observa-
tion notes. Relevant data from the participants’ written reflections were revisited to triangulate with the
other data sources (Merriem, 2009).
The research findings are presented according to a case, which provides both a descriptive and analytic
account of what the participant’s beliefs were like before the teaching practicum, how her beliefs changed
as she was involved in teaching and the collaborative research, and what the newly emerged beliefs were.

181