We have been working as program administrators and teacher trainers for a number of years. Working in a school for international adult students, one of our main responsibilities is to deliver regular professional development opportunities to our teaching staff. These include prerecorded teaching tips and, more often, professional development workshops (PDWs). In order to garner ideas for the PDWs that we deliver on a monthly basis to our teachers, we attend conference sessions, both regional and national, throughout the year. Despite the fact that many of these conference sessions are extraordinarily useful in terms of the information that is presented, we often find that we need to tweak the format and adjust the information to fit our teaching context, because the majority of our teachers are looking for teaching ideas and activities that they can immediately implement into their lessons. When creating PDWs for our teachers, we operate from the understanding that:

• The workshops we create must relate to our teachers’ context.
• Teachers want to see practical applications/ideas in the workshops.
• We only have 1 hour to present the information.
• The information in the workshops should be easily understood and digestible.
• The workshops should also be interactive and hands on.
• The workshops should be structured in such a way that the information is clearly presented to the teachers and after which the teachers are given opportunities to use the material immediately in the workshop.
  
  

Therefore, whenever working to adapt conference sessions into in-school PDWs, these are the questions that you can ask in order to focus yourself and create a structure appropriate for your teachers and their teaching context:

1. What should be adapted from the session so that it relates to my/my teachers’ teaching context(s)?
2. What practical applications/ideas from the session would be most helpful for my teachers?
3. What are the essential ideas from the session that can be presented in 1 hour (or whatever specific timeframe your PDWs take)?
4. How can the information from the session be organized so that it is easily presented in the time period available?
5. How can I manipulate the information from the session in order to create an interactive and hands-on PDW?
   
   

An important factor to keep in mind is that these questions should not only be asked after attending a conference session, but also when choosing which conference sessions to attend. This, rightfully so, becomes easier and easier the more conferences one attends, but it is still crucial that we work hard at attending only those sessions whose information we feel will be the most useful for our teachers.

In an ideal world, we would be able to take conference sessions and present them just as they are to our teachers. However, as many program administrators find, this is not always the case. Here are some common problems that administrators may find when thinking about adapting conference sessions into PDWs, and their accompanying solutions.

1. What should be adapted from the session so that it relates to my teaching context?
   One common problem that we often find is that the information presented in a conference session may refer to a very specific context (for example, teaching vocabulary to university students in an English for academic purposes setting). In order to solve this problem, it is important to look at the material presented and think about how it can be related directly to your teachers’ classes and specific context. In this case, you might be able to focus on the manner in which vocabulary is presented and practiced, but take it out of the academic English setting, if that is not the context you are working within.
   
   
2. What practical applications/ideas would be most helpful for my teachers?
   What you may find is that research-oriented sessions might present very useful information and new ideas, but not practical applications of those ideas. A solution to this problem would be to think of what those practical applications are and to use the practice (not the research theories) that the research is based on as the basis for these practical ideas. For example, if attending a research-oriented session on the results of a study on improving student motivation through teaching strategies, you might consider focusing on the techniques that teachers in the study used to increase student motivation and presenting these practical techniques to your teachers.
   
   Despite the fact that we may not present the research that the ideas in the PDW are taken from in full, we do present this information to our teachers and supply them with the background information necessary to not only make the PDW more viable, but also to allow them to do further research on their own.
   
   
3. What are the essential ideas from the session that can be presented in [1 hour]?
   Another common problem is that some sessions may be too long or too short for the time that you have to deliver your workshops. The solutions for these problems would be to find ways to digest the workshop material by either selecting the most relevant information, or combining information from several sessions. For example, you can combine a number of techniques focusing on teaching different aspects of pronunciation taken from different sessions. On the other end of the spectrum, you may have to synthesize information from a 90-minute session on innovations in teaching listening skills by omitting any underlying theory and focusing only on those activities or ideas that might be new for your teachers. You can always share additional ideas in a later workshop or in a handout given at the end of the PDW.
   
   
4. How can the information be organized so that it is easily presented in the time period available?
   In a conference session, the information that we see may need to be reorganized, combined or condensed. In order to solve this problem, it is necessary to work on reorganizing the information in such a way that it becomes easy to present in the time period available. One successful method is to reorganize the information with a practical-oriented structure. This structure can take on the following form: Information is presented to the teachers, teachers are given controlled practice activities, and finally are able to freely apply and personalize the information/material. We have found that teachers attending our PDWs respond very favorably to controlled practice activities, because these allow them to immediately see how the information we are presenting can be applied in the classroom.
   
   
5. How can I manipulate the information in order to create an interactive and hands-on PDW?
   Some conference sessions, especially if they are research based, may not be interactive. The solution here would be to explore hands-on, interactive ways to present content so that it becomes practice-oriented for your teachers.

These five questions are a very useful checklist whenever adapting conference sessions to in-school PDWs, and will help you make your PDWs that much more relevant for your teachers.

Noga La’or has worked as an ESL teacher, academic director, program administrator, and teacher trainer for almost 20 years. She is currently the director of ESL Programs at Long Island University–Brooklyn, working with adult international ESL students.

James Stakenburg is the center director at Rennert New York. He has worked in the ESOL industry for almost 20 years as an ESL and EFL teacher and as a program administrator, and in teacher training.

Autumn Westphal has been working in the field of English language teaching since 2007. She has taught English to speakers of other languages in the United States and in South Korea. She became a teacher trainer with the WL-SIT Graduate Institute in 2010. She currently works as the head of teacher training at Rennert New York, where she is responsible for training teachers, developing teacher training curricula, and delivering professional development workshops to Rennert teachers.