A self-study on the alignment of my beliefs in lesson design

Abstract

This self-study research explored how aligned my beliefs regarding the purpose of teaching English in Chile were with lessons I have designed as a pre-service teacher in the English Pedagogy Program at Alberto Hurtado University (UAH). To accomplish this, lesson plans, theoretical justifications, and reflections that I created during these last two years, were analyzed following the qualitative method, and using coding as the data collection method. In this regard, data was analyzed to discover if my lessons were coherent with my beliefs. After the data analysis process, it was revealed that lessons from 2021 were less aligned with my beliefs than the lesson from 2020. It was discussed that different factors could have either facilitated or hindered the alignment between my lessons and beliefs, such as that not all lessons were planned for the same contexts, knowing students’ backgrounds, and teaching experience. Besides, it was also revealed that I could progressively increase the alignment between my beliefs and lessons after working with students almost the whole year. In this regard, this self-study helped me to raise awareness about the importance of assessing if my lessons are reflecting what I expect because I realized that even though I have stated my beliefs regarding the purpose of teaching English in Chile, they were not portrayed in my lesson designs.