The role of coaching in teacher competence development for telecollaboration

The use of telecollaboration (TC) is gradually increasing across the different stages of education. However, TC is still seen as an add-on in the language classroom for various reasons: difficulty in changing the pedagogical mindset in mainstream education to engage in innovative explorations, inadequate training, lack of support, additional time and effort that these activities require or constraints imposed by the curriculum. In addition, teachers must master a number of very diverse competences in order for TC to be successful. The present contribution explores the role of the "coach" in TC, in an attempt to determine whether his/her assistance can help teachers develop some of those key competences. A total of 23 secondary school teachers participated in this case study as part of the EU-funded project TILA. Data were collected via two surveys, the first one on coaching and the second one on teacher competences. The results show that teachers highly value coaching when it comes to introducing complex pedagogical innovations in their teaching. Participants also reported an improvement in key competences necessary to implement TC exchanges successfully throughout the coaching process.

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