Ongoing Professional Development for Busy Teacher Teams
by Nicholas Bradley and Jason R. Walters
Ongoing professional development (PD) for
in-service teachers has traditionally involved attending seminars or listening
to invited guest speaker experts with content often focused on theory and less
on practice (Johnson, 2009). Though such opportunities can be valuable, they
are typically infrequent and not specific to the day-to-day teaching contexts
of teachers. More recent conceptualizations of effective PD aim to remedy this
with Borg (2015), for example, suggesting that the following characteristics
are required:
- relevance to the needs of teachers and
students
-
teacher involvement in content and process
-
peer collaboration
-
support from school leadership
-
exploration of and reflection on practices and
beliefs
-
job-embeddedness
-
contextual applicability
-
critical engagement with received
knowledge
-
respect for teachers’ knowledge and experience
With traditional PD requiring great organisation
and expense, and contemporary notions involving long checklists, it may seem
that implementing effective PD is no small task. Yet, this need not be the
case. In this article, we share how to implement a PD system that was
introduced within a team of busy teachers.
This PD system was introduced among a team of 18
full-time English teachers of multiple backgrounds (nationality, race, gender,
age, home language), who teach for approximately 18 classroom hours per week.
Teachers were based in two shared offices (nine teachers in each) with most
working independently on their courses despite sharing a coordinated
curriculum. A scheduled meeting time was mandated; however, without any leadership
or guidelines, meetings were little more than short chats that rarely included
issues of practice. This system can be easily reproduced in most educational
situations.
Selecting Outcomes
Based on issues relating to the wider educational
context and those discovered from attending the teachers’ meetings (see Step 1
of Implementation), several desired outcomes for PD stood out. When
implementing structured PD sessions, it’s important to explicitly mention all
of the desired outcomes to teachers; explicit mention of these areas in early
meetings helps to create buy-in by presenting the value of the PD. Over time,
this will likely become unnecessary because teachers will already recognize and
accept the value of sessions.
Following are the objectives we settled on for our
context (see Table 1); your outcomes may differ, though we do recommend a strategic approach
to selecting desired outcomes ahead of time. For us, this approach began with
identifying the teachers’ needs by maintaining an open-door policy, soliciting
feedback, and ensuring opportunities for discussion. After gathering this
input, we were able to consider the teachers’ perspectives in terms of their
interpersonal dynamics as well as their alignment with the broader mission of
the school and the department, which in turn helped us to identify gaps and
develop priorities for our intended results.
Table 1. Objectives
|
Classroom Practice and Course
Direction |
To encourage
reflection
To gain the insights of others on past and future
plans
To expand teachers’ toolkits
To increase course cohesion and
consistency |
|
Collaboration and Mutual
Respect |
To become aware of
and acknowledge the abilities of others
To provide a forum in which to demonstrate
skills
To identify teachers with similar
interests
To increase collaboration and
collegiality |
|
Engagement with the
Professional Community and Career
Progression |
To instill
confidence to actively engage in educational conferences, associations,
etc.
To allow teachers to better articulate their
practice and approach
To inform teachers of opportunities to develop and
advance their professional qualifications and credentials |
A 4-Step Approach to Professional Development
This PD system utilizes a four-step approach. As
you move through the steps, you’ll identify strengths and needs, which will
dictate your progression and changes.
1. Fact-Finding and Structure
Introduction
The supervisor visits teachers’ meetings, which
allows them to identify elements of meetings that are productive and areas
which need improvement or are absent. This stage can be considered a PD needs
analysis. Introduce into meetings a simple structure in which teachers reflect
on the past week of their shared classes and discuss plans for upcoming
classes. If the supervisor can chair meetings, this is helpful.
2. Combining
Meetings
Once a simple framework has been established and is
familiar to teachers, reserve a larger room and combine the meetings of
different teacher groups. Teachers now gain a wider range of perspectives and
practices, as well as becoming more professionally aware of teachers in other
offices, departments, or teams.
3. Introducing Explicit
PD
Although discussion and reflection of practice in
general represent PD, it’s important to introduce a section to weekly meetings
explicitly titled “PD.” Each week, one teacher is responsible for leading a PD
session for 30 minutes or more. Give teachers a broad brief to provide
parameters for their PD sessions: The information provided should be relevant
to the job they do, but the session can be structured as discussions, research
presentations, conference reports, technology reviews, successful activities,
and so on.
4. Self-Led
Sessions
With teachers familiar with the structure of the
meetings and explicit PD portion of the meeting, the supervisor steps back as
chair/facilitator of the meetings and gives the role to two senior teachers
within the group, who occupy it on a rotating basis.
Teacher Views on the Structured Professional Development
We conducted a survey among all participating
teachers, past and present, and follow-up interviews with several teachers
whose survey responses reflected a diverse range of perspectives.
Classroom
Practice
Overall, 78.6% of respondents felt that the PD had
a positive impact on their classroom practices, primarily by providing more
variety in their activities and new ideas for their lessons. Interview comments
also revealed largely positive experiences with many teachers praising the
effectiveness of the PD in terms of collaboration and building a more cohesive
language program. The results also highlighted the importance of PD in providing
validation to teachers and strengthening their belief in their own teaching
practices and efficacy, evidenced in comments such as,
One of the most positive effects…has been learning
that most of my colleagues have/had similar issues with classroom management.
As a result, it reassured me to know that it wasn’t necessarily something that
I was doing wrong, and…I could learn what others had been doing and try it in
my own classrooms.
Professional
Culture
The PD program was reported to have had an
overwhelmingly positive effect on the team’s professional culture, with over
92.8% reporting that it had a positive impact both on their professional
relationships and on their level of recognition for their colleagues’ abilities
and talents. This heightened awareness of both self and others positively
impacted the frequency and quality of collaboration (82.1%), idea-sharing
(86%), and improved social relationships between colleagues (78.6%). As one
teacher highlighted, the PD sessions were “informative about the type of
teachers and researchers some of my colleagues are, and it has strengthened our
professional relationship by collaborating or simply sharing ideas on the topic
outside of the professional development sessions.”
Involvement in the Academic Community
and Career Growth
Though participants reported positive impact of PD
on the team’s professionalism, collaboration, and congeniality, the study also
aimed to assess whether these benefits translated into improved professional
opportunities. Survey results indicated increased involvement with the larger
academic community and favourable perceptions of their career prospects, though
feelings about the quality of academic output (e.g., research articles,
conference presentations, and the like) did not significantly improve due to PD
sessions. Nevertheless, teachers acknowledged that PD enhanced their
presentation skills through additional practice opportunities and positively
influenced their interest in conducting research and publishing. Comments such
as “I used to see the field as out of my reach, but I now feel confident that I
have a place and can do it as much as anyone else,” and “The PDs helped me
prepare for events and they offered a place to share what I learned from
conferences and workshops. Most of my writing improved through writing, not the
PD,” indicate that PD generates interest in these endeavours but may not
necessarily improve the final products.
Ultimately, the majority of teachers (85.2%)
reported a positive impact on their career progression due to this new PD
structure, with most experiencing at least a “slightly positive” impact.
Additionally, 77.7% of teachers reported increased job satisfaction, which can lead
to a much desired positive feedback loop in the professional culture of the
group.
Final Word
The success of the PD sessions in achieving set objectives was clearly demonstrated in teacher surveys and interviews, and it
was also present in multiple anecdotal ways, from the more frequent rate of
teacher publication within university journals to the noticeable increase in a
positive and supportive atmosphere on campus. If you implement this structured
PD within your own teaching team, the successes you’ll see won’t occur
overnight, but will be the result of a process that involves a person of
authority implementing a framework and actively participating within it until
its value becomes clearly evident to the teachers. The success of the PD
sessions created the desired feedback effect within our group, with some
teachers continuing the momentum it generated and establishing their own
conference and journal, which further contributes to the culture of
professional growth. Positivity breeds positivity.
In the early stages, “selling” the value of the
sessions to teachers to create buy-in is as important as the framework itself,
which allows teachers to put forward their best selves within it. Once teachers
embrace the value to their classes, their work environment, and their careers
as educators, multiple follow-up options become possible.
References
Borg, S. (2015). Overview - beyond the workshop:
CPD for English language teachers. In S. Borg (Ed.), Professional development
for English language teachers: Perspectives from higher education in Turkey (pp. 5–6). British Council. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/
teacheng/files/pub_British%20Council%20CPD.PDF
Johnson,
K. (2009). Trends in second language teacher education. In A. Burns &
J. C. Richards (Eds.), Second language teacher education
(pp. 20–29). Cambridge University Press.
Nicholas Bradley, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of British and American Studies at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. His research interests include course design, professional development and teacher team management, and conceptualizations of culture in English language teaching.
Jason R. Walters works as a full-time lecturer and has coordinated language teaching programs at Japanese universities since 2015. His research interests include learner autonomy, native speakerism in Asian EFL education, and practical applications of positive psychology in the language classroom.
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