Teacher Discussion Forums

Has anyone here ever seen research on teachers becoming students to help their reflective teaching? In other words, an ESL teacher taking a language class specifically as research to improve their own teaching? I am having trouble finding any literature on this kind of thing.

Thank you in advance if you can point out some links for me to research (or names or titles or any info at all).

Devon Woods at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada is writing a book on this but I don't think it is finished yet.

Although a language teacher is unlikely to be a typical student, attending language classes is a good idea. We can gain some useful insight into what MIGHT be going on with certain students.

On the other hand, why forget that we have surely already taken classes? The further back they were, the better, perhaps, in terms of our being typical students. We have our memory too.

I'm not sure that this is a matter for serious research and academic tomes, however. Making a broad scientific conclusion on the basis of what we find would seem to be very poor science. Something like a researcher who had tested a drug on 1000 people suddenly saying "Blow this! I'm going to take this drug myself and see what really happens!".

I think what we are trying to do is find out how the brain works through introspection and although it might be very specific for one person, it might lead to finding things that are similar as well. Since there are thousands of language teachers we could have thousands of insights into learning and surely some of that will help some of our students. It is super hard to have the same conditions as you have in medical situations where so many things can be controlled because our situations are all so different but it is still interesting to do as much research on this as possible. There just isn't a lot out there about what teachers do and think in the real world, in real time and space and precious little on teacher's thinking about learning another language. Since we are the people that are really interested in how these things work, we might be able to see something that "students" don't or can't think about.

I know this is an old post, but it struck my interest. I did my MA thesis as a "diary study," which sounds odd, but it is just as you were inquiring about: Introspection to improve teaching. There is a broad range of literature relating to introspection, diary studies, and individual development. Kathleen Bailey is a 'diary study' pioneer and has written several articles and studies about how introspection (either for students, teachers, or student-teachers) can help improve retention and teaching.
I hope you read this, seeing as it is over a year old!!!