6 ways to survive the crisis with PD

Another week, another guest blog post.  This time I wrote about 6 cheap ways to offer Professional Development to your staff, on Lindsay Clandfield’s 6 Things blog.

Enjoy.

Further reflections

A long time ago, when I last posted to this blog (many apologies for the extended hiatus everyone), I talked about how managers could use the concepts of reflective practice, familiar from teaching, in their own “management practice”.  I also said, during that post:

I would like to suggest that managers of language teaching organisations should therefore consider two specific courses of action. Developing the reflective skills of and building in reflective time for their staff, and, also, for themselves

I then went onto to describe how the second half of that might work. My intention then was to look at the first half in a second blog post, before life (and death) intervened and halted my blogging for a while. But now I’m (finally) back, and would like to look at that second piece – that of “Developing the reflective skills of and building in reflective time for their staff”.

Now I won’t go into great depth explaining why I think providing professional development opportunities is something that ought to be one of the top priorities for any school, I think we can take it as a given (but if anyone wants to question that assumption, I’m happy to do so at some later date).

What I will do is to assert that well-structured reflective practice is one of the best and most effective sources of professional development that exists.  It is also one of the cheapest (and while this ought not to be a deciding factor in selecting PD , let’s face it, it is unfortunately not unimportant).

Many teachers these days have a fairly good idea about how to best reflect on their practice – courses like the CELTA reference it, while the SIT TESOL Certificate (the closest US equivalent to the CELTA) is built around reflective practice. But how many teachers, faced with long hours and heavy schedules, really make the time to actually reflect on their practice?

So, a five step process to make reflection less the exception and more the norm:

1. Run a workshop (or series of workshops) on reflective practice, covering the why, the how, and even the what.  Get people inspired by the idea of reflective practice, and give them the tools to get the most out of it.
2. Initially set up a series of facilitated reflective practice sessions.  In such a session, teachers meet to share their experiences and work through the process themselves (with facilitator assistance).  You may find that there are some very committed reflectors in your staff – use them to help and support the others.  they can be the facilitators in such a process.  Check out the literature on this process – there’s plenty out there.
3. Once everyone is competent and really sure of themselves and the process, then they can either stay within the facilitated session system if they wish, or find a place within their own work week to independently keep reflecting.  Working with someone is more effective than working alone, so perhaps a buddy system can be encouraged, but ultimately teachers should work out the way that works best for them.
4. To make this as systemic as possible, I’d even go as far as to write one hour of reflective practice time into everyone’s contract.  That doesn’t mean it should be clocked in and clocked out of, just that it is clear that this is something that the organisation values, and that teachers should avail themselves of the opportunities offered in this area.  how and when people choose to take this hour is up to them (as, indeed, is whether – the hope is that having gone through a process of training and practical experience, they will in fact make sure that they make reflection part of their weekly work load)
5. As ever, seek feedback, monitor and evaluate how this is going.  Get feedback from teachers on how the training, facilitated sessions and subsequent independent reflective practice is going.  What could be done to make it better?  Are they actually doing it?  Why/Why not?  If not, what would help them to do so? Do they feel that it’s helping their teaching?  Are there follow up/refresher trainings that could be useful? Etc etc.

Reflective practice should not replace other forms of professional development, but it should form a major part of the professional development programme of any language teaching organisation.  In order to do so, it needs to be fully integrated into the work week, and needs to be supported with training and support.

Thoughts?

Reflections from Transyvlania

[I bet you thought that people in Transylvania didn't actually have any reflections didn't you?]

Anyone who has ever been a teacher knows the value of reflection. What did I observe in my lesson? What did the students do/not do? What conclusions can I draw from this? How will this inform future lessons? This rough cycle of questions is (or should be) familiar to all teachers, and will certainly be familiar to anyone who has taken a valid teacher training course. It is, I hope, a given that reflecting on our practice in this context is an extremely valuable thing to do, and will ensure that we focus on the students’ learning and that we continue to develop as teachers.

But it is not just teaching and teachers that benefit from this process. Reflecting in and on action (as Donald Schon and later Peter Senge termed it) is valuable for all of us, in whatever field of endeavour. I would like to suggest that managers of language teaching organisations should therefore consider two specific courses of action. Developing the reflective skills of and building in reflective time for their staff, and, also, for themselves.

I’ll start with managers themselves. Every week you do loads of managementy things. I won’t list them all here, but obviously there are tons of different tasks you do in the week – some planned, others responding to circumstances. Do you ever take a moment to reflect on what you did? To sit and think through a series of questions which might help you learn from the experience (in a fairly structured way)? Probably not. We tend to assume that there is too much to do. All of our (expanding amount of) work is crammed as tightly as possible into the time available. How would we ever find time to reflect on top of all that? Yet somehow, though there are always more things to do, and new tasks that we have, we always do seem to find the time. So, if necessary, think of reflection as yet another vitally important management task. Because it is one.

If it helps to have a plan laid out to structure this reflection time, here is one: First, decide when you are going to reflect. One option would be at the end of the week, since that works in the looking-back-at-what-I’ve-done sense. The downside is that if you set 4pm on Friday as a weekly reflection time, there’s always a danger that it will get shunted back by other things, until it’s too late and it gets dropped as being less important. This is really only something you can work out with the knowledge of your own schedule and your working approach. I find that it works for me to set two times a week as reflective time – at the end of the Tuesday, and at 111am on Friday. I do everything I can to keep these times fixed (and treat the times like predetermined meetings with myself). If it is really impossible to avoid scheduling something else at 11am on a Friday on a particular week, then obviously do that and move the reflective “meeting” back a couple of hours. To start with put aside an hour for each such “meeting”. When the time comes, make it clear that you cannot be disturbed for that time, and turn off your computer (at the very least make sure you are not distracted by incoming emails – for me actually turning it off is the only way I can really do that).

Start by brainstorming a list of all the things you’ve done since the last time you reflected. Note them all down. Some of the things will be easy as they will have been scheduled, others may be harder to recall since they may have been short and unplanned. But try as much as possible to remember everything you did in the week. It doesn’t have to be in chronological order. Now take a look at your list. Is there anything that stands out? Something that didn’t go well? Something that went very well? An event or activity that seemed to contain a critical incident or other learning moment? Take that activity and break it down, asking yourself the following series of questions:

• What exactly happened? What did I do? What did others do? (What, not why. List everything you can remember, no matter how trivial, just in case it turns out to have relevance)
• What possible explanations are there for these events (what I did, what others did, actions, reactions, etc)? Make a list of any or all that you can think of.
• Which of these explanations are most likely to be factors in what happened? Can I draw any general conclusions from this? What can I learn about management, my own management style, and about the needs and styles of others?
• Based on this, is there anything I could have done differently, more successfully? If some similar situation arises in the future, what do I want to make sure I remember?

Obviously there’s nothing earth-shattering about this set of questions, they are a standard set of questions designed to take one around Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. But by doing this in a structured way it’s more likely that you’ll get something valuable out of it.

There’s one way of doing it better though, and that’s to involve others. Get their input into how things have gone, get their input into the way you’ve handled things. The more feedback you can get and the more opinions you can accumulate the fuller your view of things will be. But now we’re getting onto feedback, another of my little obsessions… and for now, this will have to do.