© 1999 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
The facilitator as agent of change
Lives in Vienna and teaches English at secondary and tertiary level. He has been involved in the in-service training of teachers of English since 1983. He is coordinator of the School-Based Project, and also works as one of its facilitators. Areas of special interest include the Lexical Approach and English grammar. E-mail: 
kh.ribisch{at}vienna.at
The Vienna School-Based Teacher Development Project (SBP) is an inservice training project, established in Vienna in 1991 to meet the need for an entirely new form of teacher INSET. This article describes the background which led to the creation of the SBP, and explains the importance that the Project has come to have for the teaching of English in the Vienna area, and for the many teachers it has reached. A key feature of the Project has been that the teachers involved not only acquire knowledge and new professional skills, but also improve their group performance through an attention to group dynamics, and the experience of working in a team relationship with each other. In SBP training is seen as a process in which decisions should be taken by the teachers themselves, in their own schools.