The Impact of a New Challenge on Teachers’ Professional Development

This study investigates how a new challenge impacts on teachers’ professional development. Using a qualitative research methodology, this study explores the experiences of four Korean elementary school teachers who were required to teach maths and science using English as the medium of instruction. In particular, for this paper, I focus on how the experiences of getting involved in the curricular innovation affect the teachers’ professional life phases. As the teachers’ participation in the innovation inevitably involves the teachers’ learning of English language and subject knowledge in English, the teachers’ English proficiency and previous experiences of teaching English play an important role in their positioning in the professional life cycle. Depending on their English proficiency, the four teachers were roughly categorized into two groups: proficient English users and non-proficient English users and the two teachers in each group showed the similar tendency in their professional development.