FOSTERING AUTONOMY IN PRE-SERVICE TEACHER TRAINING THROUGH PROJECT WORK / FAVORISER L'AUTONOMIE DES FUTURS ENSEIGNANTS PAR L'INTERMÈDE DES PROJETS / ÎNCURAJAREA AUTONOMIEI IN PREGATIREA VIITORILOR PROFESORI PRIN INTERMEDIUL ACTIVITĂŢILOR DIN PROIECTE

Abstract

Developing learner autonomy during teacher training in Romania is a key matter when we talk about the student-centered approach to learning embraced by the new curricula at all levels of study. The present paper focuses on how to raise teacher trainees’ awareness of their teaching techniques during the micro-teaching sessions, through project work. We will describe an activity developed during the English as a Foreign Language Methodology Course where foreign language pre-service teachers had to prepare small-scale project work on teaching English at pre-university level. The presentation of the project work was part of their final evaluation and involved microteaching sessions: one lesson was prepared and taught by all project partners, each partner teaching a 10-15 minutes session. The Group Project could be described as follows: students got together in groups of 4 and then decided on what aspects of teaching/learning they were going to teach; they planned the lesson together and then each partner prepared his/her micro-teaching session that he/she then performed during the seminar. At the end of each teaching session, teacher trainees were asked to give self-evaluations and peer-observations on the lesson sequence which allowed them to reflect upon the teaching process. We believe that reflection resulting from self or peer observation is the key element of a good professional teacher development and makes teacher exploration possible in a plan-perform-reflect cycle. The evaluation of the Group Project was done assessing the written assignment and the overall presence and contribution of each trainee in the Group Project.

Keywords

• teacher trainer
• self/peer-evaluation
• learning-by-doing-and-reflecting
• microteaching
• reflective teacher.