Abstract
If you are anything like me, you often think of “Continuous Professional Development” in terms of conferences and workshops: something that happens in a pre-arranged fashion, usually provided or organised by someone else, at some point in the future and usually somewhere other than your working classroom. I would like to suggest that making the most of your current teaching circumstances is a simple and powerful alternative which at the same time might rekindle your love affair with the here and now of your daily work.
Hello, I’m Anthony, I work in Germany and I am here with TDSIG.
I would like to talk to you for about ten minutes, then ask you to talk to each other for about ten minutes, and finish with you talking to me for about ten minutes.
First things first: thank you for coming.
Some of you have come a very long way to be here.
You may have turned down other opportunities for spending your weekend.
You may have taken time off work to come here. You may have had to negotiate with your partner, children, or a friend to explain why spending your time here instead of with them was a priority for you.
You have invested time and money in the hope of receiving something, being offered something, which turns out to be worth that investment of time and money.
That investment of hope.
So no pressure, then.
But do you notice what you have done?
In coming here, you have tacitly taken on a role, at least for the moment, in a very particular narrative – a narrative which says that development, in this case teacher development, resides somewhere distant from our daily work, or daily practice. It is something that does not inhere in our daily practice; it is something separate from it.
Development in this narrative is something that, like the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, needs to be sought, hunted down, typically somewhere removed from our normal working space and time.
It is to be found only after a long and perhaps arduous journey – a pilgrimage, if you will.
This narrative of development as a journey is very common as the basis of the fairy tale.
In most fairy tales, the young protagonist, usually through unfortunate change in circumstance, is forced out into the world to seek their fortune. After many trials and tribulations, they succeed in finding reward – in some distant place and time.
Sometimes they return to their point of origin bearing the scars of their journey and the bounty of their reward; sometimes they remain where they found their reward. Either way, the promise is: they live happily ever after.
Such narratives are important because they teach us that change – especially forced change – is a natural condition of life, and that by actively meeting it – especially on its own turf instead of our own – we have the chance of winning a great reward.
However, what we also learn from them is perhaps that rewards are never close at hand, never local, never something we have access to in our normal surroundings and circumstance.
This darker side to the narrative of fairy tales leads us to view personal growth as something for which we need to leave our normal lives behind.
In case you think I am stretching a point here, it does not take long to find contemporary examples of professional development as fairy tale. Take the phenomenon of the PLN, or Professional (or Passionate) Learning Network.
This term and the phenomenon it represents has mushroomed in the last five years or so thanks mainly to platforms like Twitter which enable people who would otherwise have virtually no access to each other to communicate and exchange ideas.
Now what I am about to say could be taken as a luddite attack on PLNs and so on – it isn’t.
I am convinced of the power of the PLN for good.
However, consider this…
The world of the PLN is a kind of fairy tale world.
It is inhabited not by people as such but by avatars – the people you follow and who follow you are digital presences representing people – that is to say, they are aspects of people, a selected presence.
A selected presence equals a character.
The character presented and which we follow is usually the best possible side of the actual person or, should they wish to be provocative, the worst possible side (hello to all the trolls out there). So everyone is either really nice or really nasty – just like a fairy tale.
Then everyone’s lives are always exciting and adventurous in the PLN – everyone is constantly discovering rewards (in the form of links to blog posts or the like) and sharing them, thus helping everyone live happily ever after.
We do not have relationships with most of these people in the normal sense of the word. While it is possible to have “tweetups” (actual physical meetings of tweeters) and while I am sure some of you actually have real friendships and professional relationships with some people in your PLN, more usually we never meet the people whose tweets we read, links we follow, comments we reply to.
I follow over 300 people on twitter and almost 1000 people follow me. I have never met, and will probably never meet, the vast majority of these people, yet I value what their being part of my professional life adds to it.
But if we consider these to be “relationships” in the normal sense of the word, we would also have to say we have a relationship with a news-reader whose broadcasts we watch or an author whose books we read.
I think this difference is important because I suspect that development is easier to maintain and to make cohesive when you have real relationships with real people close to your practice – people who can actually support you right where the rubber meets the road of your work.
And by the way, because online communities – unlike real communities – are generally self-selecting and homogenising hello filter bubble effect! – we lose the important catalyst for change and development presented by engaging with (and being forced to engage with) opposing views and positions.
This is a real problem for development as it is a flower that sometimes needs both stony undersoil on which to thrive.
That was admittedly a poor attempt at a poetic flourish, but thankfully, William Blake said it better when he said: “Without contraries is no progression”
As I say, there is nothing wrong with any of this and most committed users of social media for development will simply reply with “so what?”
I simply want to point out that what this use of distance technologies like social media reinforces if we are not careful is the underlying narrative that developmental potential is something which is primarily if not entirely non-local, non-immediate, and non-relational.
That is to say, if we are not careful, phenomena such as the PLN can strengthen the tendency to see development as something which we need to depart from our usual surroundings to obtain, something we cannot acquire in the moment of practice, but rather at a remove of time from it, and something we cannot gain through the relationships we have in our local lives.
If you think I am setting up a straw tweet argument here, take a look at people’s twitter or facebook feeds and see how frequently, posts like this appear: “I love twitter because it provides me with the opportunities for professional development that I do not have in my local context.” or “just got back from that wonderful conference – work blues already settling in”
There was a flood of these after TESOL France and BESIG over the last few days. This supports me in my suspicion that many of us explicitly or tacitly associate development and its positive rewards with something we feel is denied us “at home”.
So development has become for many of us a commodity that we do not expect to find in our own parlour; we feel we need to find it elsewhere.
Like anything else that becomes viewed as a commodity, especially one that is considered essential and rare, and also one that we do not possess, development acquires a price – a market price.
This may be in the form of money – think of what it cost you to come here for example. It may also be in the less direct form of time. What else could you have done with the time that you are spending – literally and metaphorically – here?
Either way, acquiring the development that you hope to find here today is costing you something that you cannot get refunded.
Henry David Thoreau said something to the effect that “the true price of something is the amount of life you have to give up to get it.”
From this perspective, events such as this one, which take up two days of your life or longer, week-long events such as the IATEFL conference, or so-called “continuing professional development” programmes run by your school or institution (which are actually nothing more than teacher training, but that is another conversation entirely…), or up-front teacher training such as diploma level courses and so on – are very costly, as the price is days or even months of life.
Your life.
Like any commodity that we have paid for dearly, we are likely to be jealous and protective of it.
I can be savagely proud of my diploma certificate or my PGCE and will fight tooth-and-claw to have them accepted as being a worthy proof of my own development, when all it can prove is my ability to meet the arbitrary benchmarks and evaluation instruments of a given qualification.
I suspect that some of you might feel the same.
We are also likely to value these over other experiences we have had, experiences that were objectively no less rich in developmental potential.
Take for example having a challenging project dumped on you, and the steep learning curve which you then found yourself on.
Some of you may have just heard Maureen McGarvey talking about how such management poisoned chalices get passed on to someone not because they are the best-suited person but because they are available, with the salving words: “it’s a great developmental opportunity for you.”
In the end, you may feel very proud of yourself for having managed a difficult task, and you may even feel the experience was “good for you in the end” – but do you think it was as valuable to you in terms of professional development as your teacher training qualifications, MAs in Applied Linguistics or weeks at conferences?
Would you trade your diploma certificate for it?
No, I didn’t think so.
Now this is interesting, because in terms of long-term developmental benefit, the unwelcome project dumped on you will probably have been more beneficial to you than the diploma course.
This will sound counter-intuitive and perverse, but such events are more likely to lead to definite and on-going development than training courses, conferences or the like.
My fellow TDSIG committee member, Duncan Foord, presents some interesting ideas about this in his book, The Developing Teacher.
If you read the book, you will find at least two things that I think are interesting. Firstly, there is the suggestion that un-planned, un-expected, un-looked for demands can lead to greater development than planned, arranged, sought out opportunities.
I said in passing earlier that fairy tales are good for teaching us to accept unplanned change as natural and positive in the long run if we leverage the opportunity; this would seem to be borne out by research into professional development – a case of a fairy tale coming true.
Secondly, when you look at Duncan’s book as a whole, about 80% of the ideas for professional development never “leave the building” – that is to say, almost all of the ideas for getting better as a teacher are driven either by you working with yourself, your students, your local colleagues or your management.
As a vaccine against the idea that professional development needs to be something you travel to and invest lots of time and money in to “get”, I think this is a shot in the arm well worth taking.
So, there are alternatives to looking for development apart from your current working context – the here and now of your practice.
The trick is, it seems to me, to get more into the habit of spotting them.
It’s easy to recognise a training course or a conference when you see one; it’s perhaps trickier to see the development potential in the class currently going wrong around your ears (or going right, for that matter), or in the colleague who for some reason you just know you’d hate watching teach, or even just the unexceptional passing moments in a lesson.
In some of the time we still have together, I’d like to try out a few simple ideas intended to focus us on just such small, local, everyday leverage points. Some of these came to me before this event; some of them were a result of conversations I had last night (which at the same time undermines and reinforces in different ways the argument I am making!)
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IDEA: What’s that mean to me?
Write down:
1) the name of a colleague you have never seen teach but think you would like to
2) the name of a colleague you have never seen teach and think you would never want to
3) the name of a model student you would like to clone and have in every class
4) the name of a difficult student you would quite happily never have had in your classroom
5) a word that describes the best lesson you have taught this month
6) a word that describes the worst lesson you have taught this month
7) a simple question that has puzzled you about what is good about your teaching
8) a simple question that has puzzled you about what is bad about your teaching
Now, swap papers with your neighbours and talk about each note. Ask questions to find out more about each note from the person who wrote it.
IDEA: What went wrong there?
During a lesson, when you notice an activity going wrong, stop and focus the students on the problem. Ask them to identify the cause(s). Get them to suggest alternatives to avoid the issue in future. Move on.
IDEA: Half-Minute Observations
Take 30 seconds at any stage of a lesson and consider the following questions:
1) What is happening right now?
2) How do I feel about this?
3) Can I improve what is happening by: a) doing something more? b) doing something less? c) doing something different?
Take action (or not) and repeat later in the lesson.
IDEA: Words of the Week
Each lesson, write down a word or phrase which sums up your feeling about the lesson. Group these by class/course/institution (for freelancers). After 5-10 lessons, review them? Is there a pattern? Positive or negative? Can you identify a cause?
Developing Teachers In Developing Schools 