Tag Archives: Professional Development

“He who stops being better stops being good.” Oliver Cromwell

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“He who stops being better stops being good.”  Oliver Cromwell

This is one of those daily table calendar quotes. It was scripted for a day in August on my table. As soon as I saw it, I loved it. How true! I guess it is true for anything. The other day, a friend of mine was complaining about how he feels about his Salsa dancing skills which has gone backwards recently. He said he has not been learning anything new, or practicing anything he has learned and that he needs to get back to practice it in order not to go backwards. A bit like , you need to water the plants to keep them alive and growing.

Last May, IATEFL Teacher Development SIG and Learning Technologies SIG joint event which took place in Istanbul hosted a renowned speaker J.J. Wilson who had a plenary talk entitled “Mentors, Myths, and Memories: The Dream Lives of Teachers” J.J. asked us the following question:

What do you do to develop as a teacher?

And here are his answers and my reflection on them:

1. Read deeply: There is so much to learn out there. The things you already know or you think you know about, need to be revisited to refresh yourself. Although I have been reading a lot in ELT, when I come across a question I see that I need to go back and read again to be able to answer the question properly. For example, I was asked about Lexical Syllabi the other day. Well, I was not ready to give a good reply. I had to go back and revise what I thought I knew. Needless to say, reading in general is also extremely important for a teacher.

2. Do an Action Research: I have been helping some of the teachers who would like to do AR in the institution I work for. It is fascinating to research in a small scale and see how some of our assumptions are sometimes so wrong. It is a great learning experience. If you enjoy academic studies, doing an AR or CR (Classroom Research) is a great way of improving yourself and looking for answers and/or just to understand a classroom issue a bit better.

 3. Write your own materials and reflect on them: All of us feel the need to adapt the materials we have in hand to our students’ needs. When we actually produce a material, though, we come to think the learning process and this gives us a totally different perspective. I can see why J.J. says that it is a way of improving yourself as an ELT teacher.

4. Write articles: This is an area I need to focus more on. I am personally not a very active article writer. I appreciate the articles I read. There are so many things I do that I could turn into articles but I am putting them off :(. Maybe I should put it in my new year’s resolutions list 🙂 .

5. Collaborate: The synergy created in groups is fantastic. Learning from one another is a practice that we can benefit from so much. After all, you cannot do everything or learn everything on your own. And every one of us has experience and interests in different areas. We are so lucky that online platforms give us great opportunities to share ideas and collaborate. So like one colleague once said to me, they can stay anonymous in online platforms and feel safer since sometimes they are judged by some older/more experienced colleagues when they ask questions. As awful as it sounds, this may be a case at times, at least in my culture it definitely may be a case.

6. Teach a new course: How this would help us improve is pretty obvious actually. You tend to get stale while giving the same courses the whole time. It is refreshing to teach a new course. A bit like,  leaving your comfort zone. Catherine Pulsifer says “Your comfort zone is not a place that you want to remain in. Dare, discover, be all that you can be.” And if you don’t like it you can always go back to what you have originally been doing. The learning along the line will be your reward. This last year I taught in the ELT department first time. I loved the experience. I learned so much. It gave me the opportunity to look at the classroom practices from a different perspective. I will go on doing this next semester and can’t wait for the new experiences.

7. Giving a worskshop for colleagues: This is another useful way of leaving your comfort zone. Thanks to these people who take the time to share their knowledge, experience and researches, we have learned so much. As it is an amazing experience to share what you have developed with other colleagues, it is another great learning opportunity from many perspectives. I am proud of taking part in conferences, institutional workshops and learn a lot before, while and after these sessions.

8. Keeping a teaching journal: This is something I have not tried. I observe my husband who is doing his MA at University of Manchester keeping a journal. I think it is especially useful if you have a focus. For example, you may focus on giving instructions and at the end of the day or week you can jot down what you have noticed about your instructions. Are they effective, clear and staged? Do you need to repeat what you have instructed? Do you see that students are doing what you want while monitoring or not? Or you can focus on the effects of praising students and reflect on it. For example, my husband, Lee, noticed that he was praising a shy student to encourage him after every single correct answer, and when he didn’t the student felt unsure of his answer even if it was correct. In a way, he noticed that he was actually over-praising the student. It is amazing what you realise about your teaching while reflecting on a certain topic.

9. Mentoring: Novice teachers benefit so much from observing a mentor and/or working with a mentor. That’s obvious. How come a mentor can benefit from this, and consider this as a way of developing professionally? Well, I guess we learn best while we are teaching something. When we are asked to a be a mentor, we take the responsibility and do our best to accommodate the novice teacher and support him/her in this journey. After all, every one of us was a novice teacher once. We probably remember the mentors we had over the years and appreciate them.

10. Use PLNs (Personal Learning Network): We are living in an era when communication is extremely easy. Just take a look at how much you spend on your internet connection, wifi, etc.  Well, we can make use of this by connecting people professionally as well. There are amazing opportunities out there for creating your own PLN. I use lots of IATEFL , TESOL affiliated professional groups in facebook and follow tweets of incredibly active, creative and hardworking people such as Shelly Terrell, Nik Peachey, Ozge Karaoglu and so many others.    

11. Go to conferences and courses: Since 1994, I have been attending conferences. Sometimes I was amongst the audience, a lot of times I was also one of the speakers. Sometimes I enjoyed them greatly, sometimes not so much. But I have always learned one thing or another each time from colleagues. Even if you do not learn anything new, it is important to revise what you have already known. It is said that teachers do not change habits by encountering a new idea the first time anyways.

12. Learning another language (esp. if you are a native):

I guess even if you are not a native speaker, i.e. English is a foreign language for you, sometimes it is still so important to learn a different language. If you are really good at a certain foreign language, you tend to forget how you have learned it. It is so important to put yourself into the students’ shoes after a long time passed since you got your proficiency. So learning a new language (especially in a classroom) can help you understand how some exercises may be extremely boring or how frustrated you feel when you are asked to produce the new language in a short time. Surely, since native speakers learned the language they teach as their mother tongues, they will have a totally different understanding of learning a language as a foreign language and will emphasize with the learners better. I experienced the former while I was trying to learn Italian and the latter when I was trying to teach Turkish.

The demands of new generation is also requiring a teacher to be updated all the time as a person and as a professional. Teachers  may choose one or a few of  the many choices listed above or create their own not to stop being good.

Awareness-I An anology and professional development

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‘Awareness is the capacity to recognize and monitor the attention one is giving or has given to something. Thus, one acts on or responds to the aspects of a situation of which one is aware.’ (Freeman, 1989)

Awareness is an essential aspect of language teaching and teacher education, as it is, or should be, part of one’s everyday life.  Without awareness of a certain aspect in question, monitoring one’s (own) actions and/or behaviour in that area would simply be impossible.

One incident from everyday life made me aware of the unquestionable relationship and interconnection between knowledge, skill, awareness and attitude suggested by Freeman 1989).

One evening in March 2009, there was a knock on the door. I was surprised to see a man who said that he was my downstairs neighbour. He said that he had been living in that apartment since the previous July (for about 9 months), and then started to complain about the noise of my footsteps which, he called unbearable. He said he had never come upstairs to complain so far but that evening he had had enough. I was truly shocked to hear this :(, and could not believe that I had been the source of such trouble. I immediately apologised for disturbing him, thanked him for warning me as I wasn’t aware of this at all and promised to be more careful.

Since that day I have been attentive while walking in the corridors. Naturally, I do not always remember the warning; however, I have developed a kind of internal awareness which makes me monitor my steps and even my husband’s steps as well. At this point, it would be important to acknowledge my attitude as I could be a person who wouldn’t care for the warning. As an adult, I had the knowledge and the skill of walking in an apartment but I needed a warning which raised my awareness to correct or repair my behaviour. I responded to the warning by monitoring my attention to it since my attitude is responsive to this warning.

Without the direct intervention by a supervisor or evaluations on self or peer observations or any other reflective practices which would trigger one’s attention to a certain aspect of teaching behaviour, it is unlikely to change that certain behaviour even though the teacher in question is a fully prepared responsible person.

 I will continue to write about awareness and how important it is in teaching. There are aspects in our teaching that needs to be improved. Most of us are unaware of some of these. We keep going in our blissful unawareness. Until one day, we are made aware of tha,t and let to take a deliberate action  to repair it. Like my neighbour’s warning on my footsteps. The good news is, he has never come back 🙂 so I can safely say that my deliberate action repared my behaviour that I was unaware of thanks to the fact that I was made aware of it.

Reference

Freeman, Donald (1989). Teacher Training, Development and Decision Making; A model Teaching and Related Strategies for Language Teacher Education TESOL Quarterly, Vol.23, No. 1, March 1989

 

One month, two countries, two huge conferences, countless memories

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April 2011 was full of activities and a lot of rewarding moments for me.

JanThe month started with the excitement of ISTEK 2011 which was hosting many reJack Richardsspectable and well known people in the world of ELT. I was honored by being invited as one of the keynote speakers to this huge conference. I was both very excited about my share on the first day and about meeting fascinating plenary speakers such as Jan Blake took us to the enchanting world of stories and Prof Jack Richards whose notes from his studies reinforced what our classroom practices should be based on.

My session was called Different Recipes for Different Tastes and Needs focusing on the different needs of teachers at different stages of their careers. Here is my abstract;

istek_interview“As the best teachers are learners themselves, professional development for practising teachers is essential regardless of the stage in their careers. What does professional development stand for? Is it attending lots of conferences and workshops? Is it taking part in institutional induction programs or training sessions? Is it observing peers or being observed by teacher trainers?”

iatefl_interviewOne of the most professionally active months of my career was this past April. Following ISTEK, there I was in Brighton for IATEFL with another talk and another interview. My talk this time was about the vocabulary project we initiated at BILGI, the institution I work for. My session was called Size matters in teaching vocabulary in EFL. I talked about how we scanned the course books we have been using in our prep program and how we analyzed the words in terms of word frequency in order to prioritize our teaching according to frequency. I also mentioned how we prepared supplementary vocabulary materials for our students, and shared the theory behind what we have been doing. For more details you can watch the interview by following this link: Burcu IATEFL Interview.

iatefl 2011I had a  great time with my lovely roommates Ozge Karaoglu and Esra Girgin Akiskali, my friends and travel companions Aybike Oguz and Nergis Ozbay, my friends from Pearson Erdem and Bahar who we laughed together in the evenings, all the lovely people at ‘offical’ conference pub Globe such as Burcu Akyol, Shelley Terrell, Luke Meddings and of course dear Beyza Yilmaz and Isil Boy.