Chapter 10. Becoming a task-based teacher educator

In this chapter, I adopt a case study approach to my own transformation from academic researcher to university-level teacher educator responsible for training future language teachers and providing training and professional development workshops to language teachers in my community. I describe how I set out as a newly-minted Ph.D. with a background in second language acquisition (SLA) research and a specialization in task-based language teaching (TBLT), and why and how I had to move beyond my own SLA-based training in order to be able to support teachers in the real world of classroom, particularly those encountering TBLT for the first time. Fundamental to my transition was what I learned from classroom observation, teachers’ feedback, action research, and conscious reflection on my own practices. In what follows, I explore this process through the prism of TBLT, that is, in relation to a suite of courses and workshops on language teaching methodology and TBLT, and chart the evolution of a task-based orientation to the delivery of those courses and its impact on my development as a teacher educator. In this I highlight how the construct of ‘task’ played a useful and facilitative role in framing reflection and development within a teacher education context. With this personal narrative, my goal is to draw on my own experience to highlight the real-world needs of classroom teachers, particularly those new or transitioning to TBLT, and how those needs might best be served by teacher educators.