Professional Development - Not An Option

This post was first written as a comment on the blog of the Secret DoS. To read the interesting article that prompted it and the discussion that followed, including my original comment, click here. I have adapted the comment for this blog post.

Conferences are just one of the many PD options 

I can never understand why some people think professional development (PD) should be optional. If we want to consider ourselves a profession, and I do, then we have to act like one. Why is it that teachers should be allowed the right to do their training, get a job and then coast for the next twenty/thirty/forty years? If I found out that my doctor, or the architect who designed the hospital he works in, or the engineer who constructed it, had the same attitude I'd be deeply worried and hightail it to the hospital on the other side of town.

Professional development means that a teacher is at the very least keeping up to date with developments in their field and updating their teaching accordingly. It can go a lot further than this, encompassing writing, reflective practice, presenting and networking, but it doesn’t have to. What it symbolises is that the teacher takes their job seriously.

This doesn't mean that I think all teachers should be blogging or tweeting, far from it. PD can take many forms and not everyone needs to be doing it in public. A small discussion group is a great way to reflect and improve. Reading methodology books is enough, if that suits you.

So I think an employer is quite justified at looking for their employees to take some responsibility for their jobs and give something back to the students who are investing their time and money in lessons. And I see nothing self-righteous about demanding high standards. This is about giving students value for their effort, having a sense of personal pride and driving up the standards in our profession.

I love having a PLN, but this doesn't make it the right PD option for everyone

But what to do if you are responsible for encouraging staff who have no desire to improve? How do we motivate those who don’t wish to be motivated? I have reservations about forcing them. To have any success, I think it has to come from them. I would also avoid an over-emphasis on tech and web based solutions as I think those who are resistant to change are most likely to reject these methods. You need as wide a range of options as possible, tech and non tech, so they can decide for themselves how they develop.

Ideally, they should lead this. If you plan on running an incentive scheme based on points and prizes, as the Secret DoS was planning to do, I would definitely ask them to create their own list of PD options, and they can even decide how points can be assigned. I think that if they feel like they own this process, they are more likely to engage in it. You can even ask them to choose the prize.

My final suggestion, and this is where I go back to being hardline again, is the true solution to this problem, but it’s not a quick fix and it needs institutional support. It involves a cultural shift I’d like to see not just in individual schools but across our profession. I think that when you employ someone, you make them understand in their interview that PD is an expected part of their job. PD can be tied to bonuses or whatever system your school operates. You have to get the right people in there from the beginning. I think this is the only real way to create that staff room that we all dream of.

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A Letter To An Unnamed Student

Dear Unnamed Student,

I am writing you this letter because I feel the need to apologise. Recently, I was thinking back to our lessons, and I realised I needed to say sorry. I should have given you more when you were a student in my class.

There was clearly a problem from the beginning. As you were all too aware, the other students in your class were at a higher level than you. You struggled to produce even the most basic sentences when asked and it was clear from the beginning that you weren’t going to fit in. I imagine that made you feel vulnerable, embarrassed, maybe even ashamed and lonely. I hate to think of anyone feeling that way in one of my classes.

When I look back on it now, I wish I had been more thoughtful and considerate. Unfortunately amongst us teachers there was an unspoken agreement that you were somehow unteachable. I think we thought that to give you the lessons you needed would have been detrimental to the other students in your class. Now I don’t think that’s true, I think we told ourselves that to make us feel better. We wanted to be reassured into thinking that by neglecting you, we were doing the right thing.

And that’s what I want to apologise for. We were wrong. It wasn’t that I didn’t care, or was incapable of finding a way to help you, but I was lazy of thought and I took the easy way out. You were there in my classroom and you deserved as much of an opportunity to learn as anyone else. So I’m sorry, and I want you to know I’ll never do that to another student for as long as I teach.

Yours,

James

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Shut Up!

Let's face it, one of the hardest things for us teachers to do sometimes is to shut up. We can feel the need to keep teaching all the time and somewhere deep in our subconscious  we have been led to believe that teaching means talking.

Maybe we don't realise what we are doing, or we find it hard to resist. We might be waiting for the training that makes us realise it's okay to be quiet for a while, or we might have a great story we want to share and half way through we realise we're really going on a bit too much here. 

Either way, it's surprisingly hard and many teachers, I believe, undervalue the importance of silence and quiet in the classroom. So to help you, I've made some posters which you can print and pin up in your office, teacher's room or on the back wall of your classroom* as a reminder that sometimes less is more...

  

And just to be provocative...

These posters were made with a poster generator to promote the new movie Shut Up and Play The Hits, documenting the farewell performance of the wonderful LCD Soundsystem, the best band of the last thirty years. You can make your own Shut Up posters here, but be warned it's not always classroom appropriate due to the language employed by other users of the site. 

If you think I missed anything, make your own poster and I'll add it to here.

Here's one from Vicky Loras:

And one from Phil Longwell:

*I should have used a different font for this.

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A Tale Of Two Teachers

Meet Steve...

True story...

Here’s a tale of two teachers, Steve and Bob. They both teach the same class, one after the other. After almost every lesson, Steve returns to the teachers room, sits down at his desk, lets out an audible sigh and then proceeds to moan about the students. They don’t engage, he complains, they don’t get what he’s trying to do. The atmosphere around him is negative and other teachers look at each other with a look that says “here he goes again...”. Steve then opens up his big folder of lesson plans, photocopies the materials he needs for tomorrow’s lesson and goes home early.


Bob teaches the same students. After his lesson, he comes back to the staff room full of energy, enthusiasm but with occasional and irrational pangs of self doubt. Sometimes the lesson is great, sometimes it could have been better but he rarely criticises the students, and when he does he feels bad about it later. He reflects on the lesson he has just given and thinks about how it could have been better. He then looks at his lesson plan for tomorrow, and prepares his materials, changing and adapting them from last time, trying to make them better. He leaves at the end of the working day.

Steve is a naturally gifted teacher but he has given up. He isn’t interested in becoming better and is completely incapable of self-reflection. If anything goes wrong, it’s always the students fault and he has started to resent them. The students have picked up on this and they now no longer enjoy their lessons with him. Some of them have even complained about his lessons to the administration of the school.

...and Bob.

Bob is far more experienced than Steve, and yet when you talk to him he, he knows he still has has a lot to learn and can improve. He is grateful to the students for their patience with him, and he genuinely enjoys their company. The students pick up on this and they look forward to lessons with him. He feels that after lesson he has learned something and through interacting with these people, he is becoming not just a better teacher but a better person.

I’m going to guess that nearly everybody reading this will identify with Bob. After all, the Steves of this world don’t read blogs in their spare time like you do. So I’m not trying to convert Steves with this blog post, instead I want to remind you that you are a Bob and you should be proud of yourself. Just make sure you don’t ever let go of your inner Bobness and become a Steve.

Apologies if your name is Steve, I’m sure you’re a great Bob!


Photos taken from http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinb/, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial licence,http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en_GB.

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Just Say Yes

About a year ago, I made a decision. It was the kind of decision that people have made careers out of, especially the writer Danny Wallace who coincidentally was at my university at the same time as me. Since he studied Journalism and became a writer and I studied Media, specifically television, and became a teacher of English as a foreign language, I’m going to assume that his days at the University of Westminster were rather more productive than mine.

He went to write a book called Yes Man, which was Hollywoodified (that's my word but you can use it...) into a movie staring Jim Carrey, who I definitely did not go to university with. Anyway, back to me. My decision, which was in no way at all influenced by either the book or the film (I regret mentioning them now, to be honest) was to say yes. To everything. Within reason.

Taken from http://bit.ly/JvESrw

I'm talking professionally here. You see, I don't believe in luck. I'm a rationalist, I believe that science is our ticket to a golden future and that our destiny lies in our own hands. Sure, sometimes circumstance and coincidence can wreck our plans, but it's not luck, because it doesn't exist.

If you've read this blog in the past or know me personally, you know that I became an EFL teacher because I moved to Brazil and didn't really have any other alternative job options. So I guess you would think that I was lucky because I only had one option and I loved it? I politely disagree. It's a coincidence that the one job I could do is also one I love. And how did this coincidence come about? Because I moved from London to Brasilia. I made the coincidence possible because I took a risk and went for it.

Once I realised how this sequence of events had occurred, it changed how I see the world and I made my decision to say yes to everything that I reasonably could (you have to know your limitations). And what has happened since then? Let me give you an example...

At the IATEFL conference in March, ELTchat hosted a symposium. I, me, James Taylor, theteacherjames, was featured in the first three talks. I don't tell you this to show off, really, but because it illustrates my point. Marisa Constantinides mentioned me because I am the producer and presenter of the ELTchat podcast, something I volunteered for after seeing a request on Twitter, despite having never made a podcast before. With my media background, I was confident I could learn what was required of me in order to put a podcast together, so I said yes and it's been great fun so far.

In the second talk, Shaun Wilden showed a video that I made for him on his subject hashtagging. I don't consider myself to be particularly knowledgeable on the topic, but I racked my brains and come up with something I hoped would be useful. Why? Because he needed a hand and why not? It took 5 minutes of my time and was helpful to him.

Finally, Sharon Hartle used my summary of an ELTchat from last year as an example in her talk. Coincidentally (not luckily!), this was Sharon's first ever ELTchat and included her first ever tweet. My summary was used because I volunteered to do it after what had been a feisty and fascinating chat. This was my first ever ELTchat summary, and I volunteered because it was a subject I'm passionate about and I wanted to contribute to the community that was giving me a lot. Somebody asked, and I said yes.

I could go into more details, but what it comes down to is that as well as the above, I have been to conferences in Switzerland and France, my writing has been featured in an ELT journal for the first time, I have reviewed books, I have spoken to Petra Pointner and her class via Skype, I've met two great Belgian teachers, I've given my first presentation, I’ve been featured on blogs, and more. All through saying yes.

Am I richer as a result? Well that depends on how you define richer. In monetary terms, no, categorically no (those conferences are expensive!). However, I prefer to look at it in non-monetary terms. I've met great people, been involved with fun projects, improved my skills and I hope become a better person. In that sense, I'm the richest man in ELT.

So can you do the same? Of course you can! To kick you off, I'm going to ask you some questions and you can begin by saying yes to a few...

1) Will you start blogging about teaching? 

2) Will you get involved in ELTchat whenever you can? 

3) When someone asks for help on Twitter or Facebook, will you help them? 

4) Will you help your colleagues, even though they might not help you back? 

5) Will you start using Twitter and Facebook for your professional development? 

6) If someone asks you specifically to help them, will you say yes even if it means stepping out of your comfort zone? 

7) Will you start to read more ELT blogs? 

8) Will you tackle that pile of methodology books you've been meaning to read? 

9) Will you ask for help from your PLN and not feel discouraged if you don’t get the result you were hoping for?

 

10) Will you start to say yes more often?

That should get you going! Be sure to let me know how it goes.

Update:

Some people have posted relevant links in the comments which I thought I’d share with you here above the line:

Cecilia Lemos shared the fascinating story of Profeta Gentileza (Prophet Kindness), who has painted the phrase “Kindness generates kindness” around Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Adam Simpson shared the following TED talk on the power of yes:

Phil Pethybridge was “peeved” by this post and responded here, including my reply.


And here's a quote I saw on the Facebook page of the School of Life that seemed relevant:

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