In the school year 2004

Conclusion

This paper, with Takahashi’s episodes, has described how teachers in an English department in a Japanese high school struggled with projects implemented by the prefectural government and went through difficulties in order to revitalize their curriculum. It was true that teachers were forced to work on curriculum revitalization at first due to the top-down initiatives⁴ and there were many times when these teachers resisted and struggled with the projects. Yet, the more these teachers collaborated with the support of a university teacher toward the same goals, particularly in the second project, the more they experienced successful teaching practices. As the teachers confirmed better student outcomes, they began to develop materials and share them with one another. From this point of view, these teachers generated many teacher learning opportunities within their school context, as they worked on their curriculum revitalization as a team.

Throughout the first project, the teaching culture of the school was typical of other schools. Teachers resisted new approaches, lowered their expectations especially in general classes, and avoided discussion of teaching issues. In fact, most teachers thought they could continue to teach based on traditional approaches in other high schools, as Kubo said. Moreover, they reported in their interviews that teachers of other subjects in this high school expected English teachers to place more emphasis on examination-oriented English. Without sufficient communication and evaluation of the project, they might easily have gone back to their routine practices.

Yet, as this paper has described, teachers gradually took risks, changed their practices and assessment, communicated more about teaching, and moved away from the textbook. From this point of view, these teachers experienced an evolution of their beliefs about language teaching and learning (see Sato & Kleinsasser, 1999), which had the potential to impact on their school culture (Sato & Kleinsasser, 2004). In particular, changing assessment and making coherent assessment criteria became a catalyst to develop teachers’ practices (see Sato & Takahashi, 2003). Falk (2001) affirms that “[i]nvolving teachers in scoring students’ responses to large-scale standard-based performance tests offers rich opportunities to enhance teacher learning” (p. 127). Interestingly, after the first two-year project, these teachers decided to continue to develop students’ communication skills. For example, Takahashi and her colleagues chose “Impact Topics” in order to further develop students’ communication skills.

In the second two-year project (2004 and 2005 school years), four teachers (three in 2005) made a team. They discussed goals and objectives, and showed the syllabus to their students at the beginning of the school year. Moreover, they spent one hour per week on a meeting. The regular meeting became a place not only for asking questions about practices but also for sharing their teaching ideas and materials. As Sugiura said, the weekly meetings created learning opportunities within their school context, which were grounded on their daily practices. Consequently, all teachers and students worked toward the same goals. To the surprise of the teachers, the student survey indicated much better outcomes than two years previously. These teachers gained confidence in the curriculum revitalization they had been working on as they confirmed better student outcomes. From this point of view, teacher learning influences student learning, and vice versa (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Sato & Takahashi, 2003).

Nonetheless, teachers have revealed difficulties they faced. Above all, they restated that they lacked time for communication. A weekly meeting is not enough. For example, they could not afford time to talk about other English classes (English II or Reading), though they agreed to improve them through integration of language skills. Thus, horizontal articulation (between different English classes in the same grade) is still weak, compared with vertical articulation. Fortunately, Sugiura became a leader for the second-year teachers (three in total) and has continued to use the same approach in the Writing class, modifying some materials.

To conclude, how can these teachers continue to develop their curriculum after the project is over? How can a university teacher collaborate more with school teachers on curriculum development? How can they continue to communicate and collaborate with one another, discuss teaching issues, evaluate the program, and set up new goals? How can they involve other teachers to make a thorough three-year curriculum? How can they generate more learning opportunities in their workplace and empower themselves to be lifelong learners? Ball & Cohen (1999) argue for a curriculum development for professional learning.

A central element of our argument is that professional development could be improved by seeking ways to ground its “curriculum” in the tasks, questions, and problems of practice. One way to do this is to use the actual contexts of teachers’ ongoing work: their efforts to design particular units of instruction, try different classroom organizations, assess students’ learning… These sites of practice would then be used to develop usable knowledge of content, students’ learning, and teaching. (p. 20)
This paper has revealed that these teachers transformed their workplace into a site for inquiry as they struggled, went through conflict, agreed and disagreed with one another, and tried out new practices little by little. In other words, these teachers have been helping to transform this school from a weak teaching culture into a learning organization or a “community of practice” (Wenger, 1998; see also Murphey & Sato, 2005) as they carried out their curriculum revitalization.
References

Ball, D.L., & Cohen, D.K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners:

Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In L.

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Handbooks of policy and practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brown, H. D. (1994). Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language

pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall Regents.

Cholewinski, G. M., & Sato, K. (2005). Building a collaborative school culture through

curriculum development. In T. Murphey & K. Sato (Eds.), Communities of

supportive professionals (pp. 35-46). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Inc.

Falk, B. (2001). Professional learning through assessment. In A. Lieberman & L.Miller

(Eds.), Teachers caught in the action: Professional development that matters

(pp. 118-140). New York: Teacher College Press.

Kleinsasser, R.C. (1993). A tale of two technical cultures: Foreign language teaching.

Teaching and Teacher Education, 9 (4), 373-383.

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high school teaching. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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In S. J. Savignon (Ed.), Interpreting Communicative Language Teaching: Contexts and Concerns in Teacher Education (pp. 41-81). New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Extending professional Contributions (pp. 97-104). Alexandria, VA TESOL Inc.

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perspective. Paper presented at SLRF (Second Language Acquisition Research

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Practical understandings. The Modern Language Journal, 83 (4), 494-517.

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The writers

Kazuyoshi Sato teaches at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Queensland, Australia. He has written several papers on communicative language teaching and teacher education. His research interests include teacher development, language learning strategies, and curriculum development.

Keiko Takahashi is a Gifu Prefectural High School teacher. She holds an MA in Education from Tsukuba University, Japan. Her research interests include communicative writing, extensive reading and curriculum development.

Appendix

Table 12: Writing skills

	I can hardly write	I can write 5 sentences about a topic.	I can write 10 sentences about a topic.	I can write 15 sentences about a topic.	I can write more than 15 sentences about a topic.
April	19%	39%	33%	6%	2%
October	8%	20%	36%	25%	11%
February	2%	6%	35%	29%	28%

(193 second-year students)

Table 13: Speaking skills

a) 2-minute conversation (2004)

	I can hardly speak.	I can speak a little using a script.	I can speak without any script.	I can speak aloud without any script.	I can speak with emotion without any script.
April	32%	45%	20%	2%	0%
October	5%	33%	50%	11%	0%
February	2%	11%	34%	30%	23%

(193 second-year students)

b) 3-minute conversation (2004)

	I can hardly speak.	I can speak a little using a script.	I can speak without any script.	I can speak aloud without any script.	I can speak with emotion without any script.
February	3%	13%	40%	32%	12%

(193 second-year students)

c) 4-minute conversation in advanced class (2004)

	I can hardly speak.	I can speak a little using a script.	I can speak without any script.	I can speak aloud without any script.	I can speak with emotion without any script.
February	0%	11%	48%	23%	18%

(38 second-year students)
Oral Communication (first-year students)

Unit 3 My Pastimes

Work sheet Script for the presentation

Writing (third-year students)

Unit 3 Smoking

Work sheet Writing (three reasons)

Work sheet Work sheet

Fun-essay

1 Senior high school teachers in Japan can choose textbooks among the ones MEXT has approved, while textbooks in junior and elementary schools are decided by either the municipal or the prefectual Board of Education. Teachers are required to teach using the approved textbook. Therefore, we kept the textbook supplementary, though these teachers mainly used “Impact Intro.”

2 All teacher and student names, except for authors, are pseudonyms.

3 Although the new guidelines by MEXT in 2003 stipulate that “Writing instruction is conducted more effectively by integrating writing activities with listening, speaking and reading activities” (p. 14), most teachers continue to ignore the guidelines and rely on the textbook with which they are familiar.

4 It should be noted that these top-down initiatives include a smaller class size of about 20 students. For these projects, OC and Writing classes (second and third year) were divided into two by the school’s administrative support.