The Influence of Blended In-service Teacher Professional Training on EFL Teacher Creativity and Teaching Effectiveness

Abstract

Current seminal studies on teacher creativity and teaching effectiveness have been widely investigated by numerous researchers. Most of them explored both variables (teacher creativity and effectiveness) from various aspects such as the perspectives of teachers, learners, and of gender but they failed to address one important variable, namely the influence of professional development background on these variables. Consequently, this study aims to analyse the influence of blended teacher professional training on teaching creativity and teaching effectiveness from the learners' perspective. A sample of 901 learners from various secondary schools in East Java province was randomly assigned to rate 120 EFL teachers using both the English language teaching creativity scale (ELT-CS) and the English language teaching effectiveness scale (ELT-ES). For this purpose, a validated and reliable five-point Likert scale of ELT-CS and ELT-ES (1 = totally disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = partially agree, 4 = agree and 5 = totally agree) has been employed. After administering the questionnaires, the data were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The findings indicate a positive influence of blended professional training on EFL teachers' creativity and their teaching effectiveness. As for the indicators of teaching effectiveness and creativity, knowledge, subject matter, independent learning, learning environment, and material variables show the strongest influences. Conversely, fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration variables show the weakest influences. The detailed influences of each indicator from both variables were also elaborated on. Finally, recommendations for further research are presented.

Exploring Teacher Cognition in Malaysian ESL Classrooms

“…These were done so as to understand and to know more about teacher cognition; teacher's knowledge that influences instructional practices. Yin (2014;1989, p.82), for example, looked at case study as a suitable research approach because through the process of describing, explaining, evaluating and predicting they (studies) will be able to "reveal the multiplicity of factors [which] have interacted to produce the unique character of the entity that is the subject of study." Such qualitative technique helps to unravel teacher cognition in actual classroom context.…”

EFL Teacher Blended Professional Training: A Review of Learners’ Online and Traditional Learning Interactions Quality

“…While many studies on blended instructional design in the area of English Language teaching and learning can be found in the literature, the study related to the use of blended teaching and learning for teacher professional development programs has been scarce. Arifani et al, (2019) analysed how English teachers' creativity and effectiveness were influenced by blended teaching professional training. Involving 120 secondary school teachers in a survey study, they found that a positive influence was noted, with a notable increase in the teaching creativity and effectiveness especially in the aspects of teachers' knowledge of the subject matter, independent learning, and the learning environment and materials.…”

“…Maintaining the harmony of those two teaching proficiencies (proficient in the traditional and online teaching) becomes pertinent in today's digital era. Due to the growing demands of EFL teachers on these two competencies, many institutions that prepare English language teachers are competing to organize EFL teachers' training models using a blended approach for two main reasons (Arifani, Khaja, Suryanti, & Wardhono, 2019;Belland, Burdo, & Gu, 2015;Wong, 2019). First, technological development demands EFL teachers to be able to teach English using media to anticipate the shift of learning models from the traditional to online the learning model.…”

“…Second, the benefits of the results of various studies on the implementation of the EFL teacher professional development model applying a blendedlearning approach have been widely adopted by several institutions to systematically develop their EFL teachers' professionalism. Therefore, many seminal studies have examined the implementation of blended professional development from different angles such as creativity and effectiveness (Arifani et al, 2019), knowledge integration and innovative activities (Berger, Eylon, & Bagno, 2008), psychological learning needs (Wong, 2019), teacher readiness (Hung, Chou, Chen, & Own, 2010), flipped blended learning (Montgomery, Mousavi, Carbonaro, Hayward, & Dunn, 2019), systematic meta-aggregative review (Philipsen et al, 2019), pedagogical content knowledge (Van Driel & Berry, 2012;Philip et al, 2019), scaffolding (Belland et al, 2015), and technological pedagogical content knowledge (Alayyar, Fisser, & Voogt, 2012).…”

“…This program aims to equip and enhance the EFL teachers' competencies in teaching with technologies. This program also aims to determine whether EFL teachers can be professional or not and subsequently will be given professional allowance after attending a one-year blended professional development training program (Arifani et al, 2019). This unique phenomenon has not been extensively studied, especially the impact of this long-term programme which has been implemented for around three consecutive years.…”