High School EFL Teachers' Beliefs And Practice Of Collective Lesson Planning

As one of the important forms of teaching and research activities,collective lesson planning is designed to strengthen the cooperation between teachers,promote the development of teachers and teacher groups,and improve the efficiency of classroom instruction.However,in the process of the implementation of collective lesson planning,problems such as teacher's misunderstanding of collective lesson planning,lack of “rational examination” and “deep questioning”,lack of real cooperation and communication between teachers,result in a mere formality,etc.The idea of taking part in collective lesson planning merely for the sake of collective lesson planning leads to the loss of its own value and significance.A large number of studies have shown that there are certain ideas behind teachers' teaching practice;teachers' teaching beliefs affect their teaching practice.Collective lesson planning is no exception.How on earth do senior high school EFL teachers understand and practice their collective lesson planning? In other words,what are the teachers' beliefs and practice in their collective lesson planning? what's the correlation between the beliefs held by the teachers and their practice? This study attempts to explore the teachers' beliefs,practice and the correlation between them in their collective lesson planning.In this paper,a case study of the English teaching and research group of Chongqing Banan Z Secondary School was carried out by means of using the questionnaires,interviews and participatory observation.SPSS19.0 was also used to help analyse the data.The research content covers three dimensions: ontology,management and evaluation of collective lesson planning.The results are summarized as follows:1.As for the high school EFL teachers' beliefs of collective lesson planning,it is found that they believe collective lesson planning can promote the development of both the individuals and the group teachers;formalism should be avoided and process management should be implemented.Most of the teachers also agree that teachers of the same grade and subject follow the mode — “individual preparation-group researching-secondary preparation-independent teaching-teaching reflection”,and discuss the curriculum standards,teaching syllabus,teaching materials,teaching methods,teaching experience,teaching confusion,learning situations and the presupposition of problems to create a unified teaching plan.However,in reality,teachers' beliefs of collective lesson planning still remain in the solution of teaching problems and the communication of teaching experiences.They lack the study of the curriculum standards,syllabus and students;lack systematic understanding of the mode and only focus on teaching grades,but neglect their own professional development.Also,different genders,teaching experiences and professional titles have an influence on the teachers' beliefs of collective lesson planning.2.As for the high school EFL teachers' practice of collective lesson planning,it is found that the current situations are as follows: formalism is relatively conspicuous.The teachers tend to put more emphasis on “teaching” than on “research”,and more emphasis on “teaching” than on “learning”;focus on the process of the collective discussion,while ignoring the process of teachers' individual preparation and post-collective lesson planning;and ignore the supervision of the process,not implementing every sector of process management.The teachers,the leaders of lesson planning group,the leader of the teaching and research group as well as the leaders of school,lack the evaluation of collective lesson planning.Also,different teaching experience and professional titles as well as teaching different grades have an influence on the teachers' practice of collective lesson planning.3.As for the correlation between the teachers' beliefs and practice of collective lesson planning,it is evidenced that the teachers' beliefs make an influence on their practice to a certain extent.However,due to many factors such as the teachers' not profound understanding of collective lesson planning,the imperfect management system and the lack of evaluation mechanism on the part of the school,etc.,the teachers' beliefs of collective lesson planning are not always consistent with their practice.Based on the above findings,this paper finally proposes some improving strategies from the aspects of English teachers and the school respectively.