The Institute Cervantes (2012) has described the eight key competences that his teachers have or are expected to develop along their career. In this article we focus on the competence described as “Managing feelings and emotions in the development of work” for three reasons: first, it seems to be a clear correlation between the development of Emotional intelligence and effective performance. Secondly, as demonstrated in another Cervantes Institute’s research (2011), students give more importance to the emotional competence of teachers that the latter. Finally, emotional competence is not part of training programs for teachers of Spanish. In this paper, we propose a method of teacher professional development, Cooperative Development (Edge, 2002) as a model that can contribute to the improvement of these emotional skills.
In pre-service training for teachers of English opportunities for dialogic interaction (Skidmore and Murakami, 2017) with a mentor are seen to play an important role in professional awareness and development (Wallace, 1993; Gabryś-Barker, 2012; Howard and Donaghue, 2015). To fulfil the demands of their practices student-teachers work with a number of different people: a school teacher (mentor), aca-demic supervisor and the academic staff who lead the English teach-ing methodology course (Blaszk, 2015). This being the case, it was hypothesized that teaching practices might exist as a community of practice within which student-teachers in interaction with these different people would be supported in their professional development. The aim of the qualitative research reported in this paper was to discover how the student-teachers in a particular institution perceived their teaching practices and whether or not those practices could be viewed as a community of practice that supported the students.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.