Introduction

Teaching English has gradually shifted from mere teaching of vocabulary and literature; it has become more than that. It's become a quest to learn with my students, to question my own beliefs, and to continually enhance teaching strategies. we mostly believed that it was just about teaching the syllabus, explaining things well and preparing students for exams for successful teaching. I did, however, become more and more concerned that many of the students were not learning the English language, but instead they were learning words for exams.

To enhance the significance and interest of my lessons, I incorporated collaborative learning, pair work, group discussion, creative writing, peer feedback and students presentation techniques in my grade 11 and 12 English classes. Also, I urged students to be well-prepared for class and over time, class was spent engaging in interaction and dialogue with critical discussion. These practices are consistent with constructivist learning approaches which emphasize active, cooperative and social learning (Vygotsky, 1978; Johnson & Johnson, 2019). At the end of the school year, I inquired students on what they learnt. Their reflections showed greater engagement and confidence, as well as some barriers to participation (some hesitation), different learning styles and a need for greater instructional support. From my experience, meaningful pedagogical changes can only be achieved through time and flexibility and gaining new knowledge from various successes and failures (Farrell, 2022).

In the following essay I will reflect upon my conception of ELT and professional development within the context of the Nepali educational environment with the help of collaboration, student voice and reflective practice. I will look into ways how the experience and ideas of my students have impacted my perception of the need for me to become more reflective and responsive teacher (Cook-Sather, 2020; Schön, 1983).

This paper is not about a pedagogical method that allows ‘one size fits all’ approach, but rather about the way for the teachers to become better by learning to be critical about their performance and treating their learners as active parties involved in this process (Farrell, 2022; Cook-Sather, 2020).

Professional Growth through Students' Voices: Reflection as a Pathway.

The most important thing I learnt on this journey was not from a workshop or books or from a professional training program, it was from my students. My reflection on the lessons was a common practice throughout my teaching career: "Did I keep to my plan? Did I explain that concept well? Was the classroom well-managed? These were good questions but from my teacher's point of view. I did not think much about students' experience of my teaching, or what an understanding of their viewpoints might offer me as a way to improve my teaching. It was a change in perspective when students were invited to consider their learning. Their feedback helped me to see my classroom through the different lens and to re-examine many of my beliefs about effective teaching.

Toward the end of the school year, I asked my 11th and 12th grade classes to share a personal thought about what had happened in the classroom. I asked them to identify the activities that assisted them in learning, the difficulties they faced, and the improvement that they would suggest for future classes. I had anticipated that many would be concerned with grades, exams or the challenging nature of the class. Rather, students thoughtfully discussed classroom relationships, working together in the classroom, confidence, and the need to be heard. It was encouraging and humbling to read the reflections. Their voices supported some of my pedagogical choices and provided feedback on where I still needed to work on my teaching.

Students emphasized the collaborative aspects of the classroom as one of the most beneficial parts of their classroom experience. Instead of talking about the individual lessons, they spoke about how much they had learned about the English language through conversations and interaction with their peers and through collaborative problem solving. One student wrote:

"I felt comfortable learning because everyone could participate in the learning, I learned from others rather than relying solely on the teacher, and it was beneficial to hear the differing points of view as this helped me to understand what the lessons were from the various perspectives.

With this comment I started to think about what it means to be part of the group. In the past, I used to think that participation was synonymous with answering teachers' questions or volunteering answers in class. My students' feedback indicated that there was more to it than just that. Participation embedded listening others, negotiating ideas, challenging others' perspectives, and collaboratively building understanding. Learning was no longer a solitary process, but became a shared social process. This insight deepened my understanding of dialogic learning and helped to emphasize the need to build classrooms in which students see their ideas are appreciated.

Confidence was another common theme in the students' reflections. Some of the students gave an account that they had been hesitant to speak English as it was their fear of making mistakes and getting scolded by their peers and a teacher. What sticks with me from one student's reflection was:

"At first, I was afraid to speak as my English is not good enough, but during the group discussion, my friends encouraged me, rather than laughed at my mistakes. I slowly realized that it is not necessary to speak English perfectly when I am learning English, but I need to express myself confidently."

This reflection really had a profound impact on my conception of language teaching and learning. My previous efforts in teaching were directed toward building language proficiency of students through well-prepared lessons and activities aimed at improving their language skills. However, though language skills have played an important role in education, factors such as trust, confidence in your communication with others, and emotional security turned out to be equally important. In this sense, Mercer & Dörnyei (2020), claim that students are more willing to make mistakes in their speech when being surrounded by friendly and supportive people. The principle was confirmed in practice with my students' reflections. A sense of confidence was not developed because students were not making mistakes but because they were gradually learning to recognize that mistakes were not a sign of failure but a natural part of the learning process.

The comments were predominantly positive, but some urged me to reflect on certain elements of my instruction. Some students felt that collaborative learning was good, but they also wanted more grammar and explicit teaching before they started group learning and wanted more multimedia resources to be used. At first, the remarks were rather disappointing. I asked myself if all my work to make the class a learner's center had inadvertently decreased the amount of guidance I was giving to some learners.

On closer reflection, however, I realized that students were not rejecting collaborative learning. Rather, they were reminding me that learner-centered teaching does not mean that teachers are not needed. Students appreciated self-study opportunities and also wanted to have clear explanations, constructive feedback, and appropriate scaffolding from their teachers. This is something I thought about learner-centered pedagogy, and found it to be a challenge to my naive thinking. As an unspoken assumption, I thought that by speaking less as a teacher, I would make it easier for students to become more independent. With my students, I found that balance is key to effective learning. The role of teachers is still very important, although not as the source of knowledge, but as facilitators who provide structure, guidance and encouragement with gradual steps to enable independence.

These reflections also affected my views on “professional learning”. For me, professional learning has occurred when I've gone to workshops, conferences or formal learning programs – as many teachers would. This is an experience I found valuable and that I will never miss again and learned that some of the best professional learning can come from the classroom. Learning which I would not have obtained working in the classroom alone, as I tried out different approaches, watched how the students reacted, gathered feedback and critically evaluated the outcomes. Reflective practice helps teachers to create their own professional knowledge through their own experiences in teaching (Farrell, 2022). This is the view that I support with my journey. Professional learning was not just done once but was a continuous process. Professional learning was made a continuous process of inquiry, not a periodic event.

The other moments were those in which my instruction failed to bring the results I wanted. Not all collaborative activities went successfully. A few pupils were not enthusiastic, even after being encouraged a number of times. Sometimes group discussions were not directed towards the lesson goals and sometimes group participation was not equal, which led to less quality of collaboration. Sometimes I was pushing them too far, solving their problems for them, instead of solving them for themselves, at other times, I was not pushing hard enough and students just did not know what to do next. These experiences made me realize that I need to reflect as well – and to do it with integrity. Having a strategy of successful lessons only would miss out on learning opportunities for me as a professional.

Reflective practitioners are individuals who are always asking themselves questions, learning from their experiences, and are constantly striving to improve their practice, according to Schon (1983). This is very much my own story. I've found out from my teaching experience that it's not about making no mistakes, it's about being willing to learn from your mistakes. Each challenge brought me back to the thought of choices and changing my teaching, and being more mindful of student needs. So uncertainty was not a hindering factor, but it was a development opportunity.

My biggest change of thinking about the role of student, I think, was a change in perspective of how I saw the students. At first, I considered it more of a transfer of knowledge when I began teaching. Today it's a partnership that I believe we all learn from. My students were not only evaluating my instruction, but they were helping me to develop. Their experiences, questions and suggestions helped me to go beyond the scope of textbooks and training sessions to better understand what is good in pedagogy.

Student voice is more than a feedback tool, I now see that. Reflective practice is a crucial component of teaching, and an active catalyst in teacher learning. Having heard the voice of students and listened to them has made me a more thoughtful, responsive and reflective teacher. What it's done is it has brought me to a place of humility, a place of asking questions, a place of looking at my classroom through the eyes of the learner, and a place of professional development. I think that's one of the most important things that I got out of this year and I will carry with me all the way until the end of this academic year and it will also help me as a teacher to be one of the best.

Looking Ahead: Sustaining Reflective Practice in English Language Teaching

This experience has not only changed how I teach, but my view of professional development as well. Prior to a few years ago, I thought that the only way you could get professional development was out of the classroom, in workshops, seminars, conferences, or formal training. These opportunities clearly enhance teachers' knowledge and add new teaching strategies (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). This experience has also taught me that real professional learning can also happen in the daily life of the classroom. It emerges as teachers engage in critical reflection of their experience, listen attentively to their students, and are open to questioning their own assumptions about teaching and learning (Schön, 1983; Brookfield, 2017).

The most important lesson I have learned is that instructional change does not start with the teacher's methods of teaching, but rather with their beliefs about what teaching is and should be. (Borg, 2006). Prior to this experience, I had the mistaken idea that learning-centered teaching was just a decrease in teacher talk and more student activity. A rather constrained view of learner-centered pedagogy. After the realization, I think that the effective learner-centered teaching should be a reflection of the thoughtful pedagogical decision of the teacher on when to guide, when to support students' learning, and when to allow students to build knowledge by themselves through collaborative learning, which is a theory proposed by Vygotsky (1978). Effective teaching, then, is not a matter of teacher- or learner-centered but concerns flexibility in instruction based upon the needs and classroom contexts of students in a variety of ways (Tomlinson, 2014).

There are also implications for ELT in Nepal at the broader level of this reflection. While the national education policies have focused on learner-centered pedagogy, collaborative learning, and critical thinking, pedagogical practices in the classroom remain centred on lectures and examination-based teaching (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology [MoEST], 2019). Teachers face difficult working environments, such as high class size, insufficient resources, high workload, and not much time for ongoing professional development (Phyak, 2013). In such a case, an innovative approach to teaching may be challenging. But in my own case, I think that bold improvement in education is rarely to be found in the most sophisticated technology and/or the most expensive tools. Instead, it requires that classroom practices are gradually and intentionally transformed, including students' participation in meaningful conversations, discussions of problems in a collaborative manner, self-reflection on teaching and learning, and the constant listening to the voice of the students (Dewey, 1938; Brookfield, 2017). Commitment of teachers and reflective thinking is more important than instructional materials in these practices.

Additionally, this experience has taught me that innovation in education must always be based on meaningful learning, not innovation for the sake of innovation. When I first started to employ collaborative learning, I was really enthusiastic about getting more students involved in the classroom, and sometimes it was hard to remember students still needed instruction. My students helped me learn that while they enjoyed opportunities to investigate concepts on their own, they also liked when they were clearly explained, received positive feedback, and had learning activities that were well structured. My experience matches idea of scaffolding with Vygotsky (1978) regarding providing appropriate assistance to learners to reach the next level of comprehension. Now I see collaboration as an effective asset to a well-thought-out teaching method; not as a substitute for explicit instruction.

In the future, I aim to develop a more structured approach to reflective practice in my practice. I plan to keep a teaching journal with regular informal reflections after each lesson to record successes, challenges, students' responses and questions that have emerged from lessons. This reflective systemization allows teachers to be more thoughtful practitioners and make better and better teaching decisions (Schön, 1983). Additionally, I will solicit feedback from students more often than once a year, at the end of the academic year. Reflective questionnaires, learning journals, class discussion and student reflections will assist in gaining a deeper understanding of learners' experiences and prompt timely adjustments to teaching. I also hope to have more opportunities to work cooperatively with colleagues in sharing classroom experiences, discussing shared instructional issues and finding practical solutions together. Reflection is enhanced when it is situated in professional dialogue and collaborative communities for learning (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017).

In my future work, one of my objectives will be developing the use of formative assessment further. Previously, I was exclusively looking at summative assessment, which means assessing learning outcomes at the end of the teaching period. Nonetheless, I have realized that the greatest benefit of formative assessment is that it happens continuously and provides necessary information about the learning process. The best formative assessment occurs when it is used to guide instruction, as Black and Wiliam (2018) state, because it serves as a tool for learning to be used while learning is still in progress. Assessment should thus be a process rather than a one-off activity, and should be focused not just on measuring achievement, but on enabling reflection, feedback and better learning outcomes.

One of my biggest evolutions over this process has been my professional identity. I consider myself not merely a teacher providing information or conducting lessons, but rather an educator facilitating learning experience, a reflective practitioner, and a life-long learner (Schön, 1983). The difficulties and uncertainties remain an integral part of the educational process. Each classroom, for instance, has its own learners, challenges, and problems. Today, however, I take these uncertainties as opportunities for learning and development instead of as tests of failure. Finally, I have come to understand that good teachers are not those who know all the answers, but those who will learn, reflect, and grow and improve throughout their careers (Brookfield, 2017).

Conclusion

It has been a reflective learning process which has reinforced the value of good teaching to be a continuous process of learning, adaptation and learning. I observed students more willing, eager and confident to learn from one another through the incorporation of COOP in their practice as a teacher and learner. The lack of equal participation, initial skepticism by some students and my own, were also reminders that it takes time to make some pedagogical progress, thinking carefully about the changes, and to be ready to work on the changes.

The learning from listening to students' voices was probably most helpful. Their ideas not only affirmed good practice in the classroom but also brought to my attention areas for growth. As I discussed with students, reflecting with them as partners transformed my thinking in professional development (some of the best learning occurs in the context of common classroom experiences and situations, not just in the context of formal PD). This experience further strengthened my conviction that it is more meaningful and enriching to reflect on the learning process through the lens of teachers and learners.

They are reflections of what I've seen during my own teaching experience but they're applicable in the context of teaching English in Nepal, where teachers are trying their best to make classrooms more meaningful and learner-centered in an examination based context. Ultimately, I have come to understand that teaching and learning are part of a symbiotic relationship and that I and my students are enriched by it. It has furthered my dedication to establishing classrooms based on dialogue, collaboration, and respect, and to using reflection as a learning base for continuous improvement.

Author's Bio: Mr. Raju Yonjan is an English Language Teacher at Gaumati Secondary School, Sindhuli and currently pursuing an MPhil in ELE at Kathmandu University School of Education.

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