Anna Kaal

Background

About Anna Kaal

I am an expert in language and teacher education bringing together different perspectives within the educational field.I studied English language and culture (MA) and Communication and Information Sciences (BA) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I continued with a PhD in cognitive linguistics on the use of metaphor in conversations. After obtaining an Educational MA, I taught English and Literature to secondary school students for 4 years. I continued my path in education, first at VU Lerarenacademie (10 years), and now at the Inspectie van het Onderwijs.As an inspector of secondary education I hope to support our educational system and professionals by stimulating high quality education. I look forward to gaining a broader perspective on Dutch education and to contribute to a well-equipped Inspection.As a teacher educator and researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, I worked with pre-service and in-service teachers, amongst others to translate knowledge about language and language learning to their (foreign) language classrooms. An essential theme is the notion of ‘language awareness’, which can perhaps best be described as ‘looking at the world through linguistic glasses’ – which knowledge about language do we (all citizens) need in order to think critically about, but also enjoy, the language we use? How do teachers and pupils respond to this theme? And how can we make this classroom practice? We tried to offer some tools for this in the 'Handboek Vreemdetalendidactiek'(2020; which I co-authored and co-edited).I also explored how (student) teachers reflect on their practice and worked with my VU colleagues and a team of teachers to develop 'goal representation' tutoring. This practice is used in the VU teacher education programme. See 'Core practices in teacher education: a global perspective'(2024). As a curriculum coordinator I guided the VU Lerarenacademie team in its first steps towards 'modularisering' of the teacher education programme in order to offer a more flexible programme that accommodates different types of (preservice) teachers and allows them to obtain their teaching degrees more quickly. The challenge is to find the right balance between delivering new teachers as quickly as possible and providing them with a decent foundation and qualification.