I finally made it to IATEFL Brighton and was able to enjoy talks on the final day 🙂 I spent most of the rest of my 24 hours at the conference chatting to people – one of the things I most enjoy about being together with friends and colleagues from around the world!
Niki’s workshop is on CPD (Continuous Professional Development). Her first activity was to complete these sentences:
- A CPD programme should be…
- A CPD programme should not be…
Niki has noticed that some schools have absolutely no CPD programme, some have occasional meetings with no thought in them, or some are very top down and look like a CELTA course. Her workshop is about putting teachers at the centre of the design of the CPD programme.
Frames frame our existing knowledge.
Windows give us new perspectives allow us to see things in a different way.
Mirrors help us to reflect.
Niki has been working a lot with the English Australia self-assessment tool, as well as the OUP self-assessment tool and the Cambridge English INSPIRE professional development guidance.
Frames
Niki put some of the descriptors from the English Australia framework around the room for us to look at, with post it notes to create a running dictation to get different descriptors. This was one of the ones we did as a running dictation:
Develops, models and shares with colleagues techniques to control timing and the pace of the lessons and keeps learners on task.
This is one of the ways we can help teachers to get their heads into the words of the frameworks because they’re quite dense.
We then had to decide whether our descriptors were from lesson and course planning, managing the lesson or assessment, feedback and reporting.
This is a simple way to help teachers get into a framework: Teachers are exposed to a framework in a manageable way.
Windows
You can ask teachers to film themselves teaching a class. As they watch it back, what different aspects can they watch for?
Think, Pair, Share is a way to approach this.
One person in the room mentioned a triad system: three teachers observe three lessons with three students in each group observed intensively, then decide how to do the feedback together.
Some ideas:
- Who is talking?
- Instruction giving
- Dealing with a tricky question
- Where are you? Standing up / sitting down / scrolling?
- Teacher language? Do you always say the same thing?
- Pace of lesson
- Variety
- Engagement
- Transition from activity to activity
Our group also talked about body language and thinking about teacher position, as well as who is talking to who in open class (is everybody only addressing the teacher or are they talking to each other?)
The lesson observations can then feed into the CPD programme, making the teachers the centre of the CPD programme.
Before we design a CPD programme, we need to know what is relevant: needs analysis is key.
Mirrors
We are responsible for our own CPD and we can do this ourselves. This is an OUP framework which Niki refers to:
Niki gave us a dice and we played this game:
1. Activities in a school/institution
2. Activities online
3. Activities within an association/teaching organisation
4. Activities in other contexts
5. Choose any category
6. Throw again!
Examples:
- Workshop
- Professional book club (read a chapter or an article)
- Watching videos of others teaching
- Watching webinars as a group or alone
- Reading blogs
- Volunteer for organisations
- Meet up with your friends for a chat
- Learn new skills – put yourself in the position of learners
- Work together to localise materials – you have to understand why you’re creating materials in that way
This activity can be used to help teachers to choose what they do in their CPD.
At the end of the activity we looked back at our post-it notes to see if there was anything we want to change.
Other thoughts from the floor: CPD programmes should not be overwhelming – if it comes from the teachers, it can feel more manageable.
Sandy Millin 