Investigating the collaborative professional practices of Omani EFL teachers and their relation to the quality of their reflection
Author
Al-Hakmaniyah, Fatma Khalifa.
English abstract
This study aims at investigating the collaborative professional practices utilized by Omani EFL teachers in their community of practice and their relation to the quality of their reflection.
The participants of this study were (16) teachers in two (2) Schools in Sharqiya South. For data collection a checklist was developed from literature to find out about the common collaborative professional practices in addition to teachers' journal and researcher field notes. The data from the checklist analysed quantitatively to find out the frequency of each item. Teachers' reflective journal and the researcher field notes were analyzed qualitatively using criteria for the quality of reflection,
The result obtained from this study reveals that the common collaborative activities utilized between Omani EFL teachers in their community of practice are sharing materials and meeting sessions and the least practices are team teaching and peer-observation. Unfortunately neither of the two teams participated in the study report an attempt to a systematic action research project.
For the relation of the collaborative professional practice in the quality of teacher reflection, the findings indicate that peer discussion provides opportunity for teachers to be more analytical and critical in their reflection.
Therefore it is recommended for the ministry or school administration to encourage teachers to engage more in joint collaborative practices such as team teaching, peer-observation and action research. In the same hand, teachers need to conduct more of focused meeting session in which they could share reflections and discuss issues related to their daily teaching performance.
