Managing in TEFL “Classroom based professional development: a teacher first approach”

Managing in TEFL is a Companion for language school leaders by Simon Pearlman.

Do we have a fixed approach to professional development (PD)? Do we know what we want from PD? Is it what's really needed? Let's ask the teachers, “how can we help you?” and move towards a meaningful flow in classroom based professional development that benefits teachers, students and the school as a whole.

Suddenly we're into November. In the midst of the some of the difficulties of early season flu meaning staff absences, student numbers maybe being lower than we'd hoped, we need to find space to push on. And it is probably time to think about the teaching team's professional development and classroom practice. We can be humanistic about it with a teacher first approach asking, “How can we best help you?”

Short term problem solving = longer term gain

How are the teachers feeling? How are they doing as a team? What are the teachers telling us? What feedback are we getting from the students and the admin team? What’s our radar beeping with?

We ideally need teachers to be good all-rounders; just as at home telling stories to 4 year olds as leading teenagers through exam preparation or working with business executives 1:1. This is a big ask, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, our zones of comfort and discomfort. We want our team to feel confident, relaxed and happy in their work and we all know that teaching, in so many ways so joyful, can also be a really sticky business. If we can help teachers find ways through the stickiness in a supportive way, they are likely to feel valued and cared for. Feeling supported also means teachers are more likely to stay longer, try new levels and new situations and feel invested enough to help out with cover and other emergencies that inevitably pop up.

Teacher-focused professional development makes business sense

We might have already started by talking to the teachers about their highs and lows, it's so important to celebrate successes as well as to get stuck into the difficulties. Hopefully some action has already come out of that, maybe it's time now to follow that up and check in again; how is that tricky class going now? Has that worrisome student settled down yet? We certainly don't want problems to linger, much better to try to nip them in the bud at this stage. This is where professional development meets business sense; if classes are better, students are happier, happier students stay, happier students tell their friends. While it sounds a little glib, happier teachers mean happier students. Teacher-focused PD makes business sense.

A joined-up route through teacher development 

We can probably see areas teachers can work on which could make a big difference in their classes and our instinct might be to be directive, we can make a difference and want to. But there will also be lots of issues we're less aware of from the outside looking in. We also want to help teachers find their own solutions to their own problems, we can join up the process to empower teachers and lead to real change in their difficult  classes and with their difficult students.

There can be several elements to a professional development (PD) programme which can work in any school, no matter how big or how small. Regular 1:1 check ins, teacher driven PD sessions and supportive observation possibilities can be used together to really help our teachers and of course our students too. Too often these things are separate, we can join these up and things can make much more sense.

We start in the one-to-one check-ins where teachers identify what's going well and what's not. Our role here us to listen and make notes. Start with the good and then move onto the difficulties with the good stuff in the bank. We can think together about possible changes and go from there. This could happen initially but email and then followed up in-person if you prefer. 

Through the check-ins with all the teachers we get a picture about issues across the board and then we can work on those. We can create a group space to talk about the difficulties, teachers can learn so much from each other. We can have professional development meetings where we can workshop the common problems, of course we don't name teachers just raise the issues, give space to share experiences and suggest solutions, of course we can add our ideas too. Rather the a top-down approach of the mangers setting the agenda or rolling through a predestined programme, we're addressing real issues in real time. Here we're getting focus on  specific issues to hopefully provide practical solutions to their issues and its coming from the group. There is something potentially so powerful about group support and teachers growing into a team. 

And then we can move on to classroom observations. This is a big one, a complex one. There are questions to ask here, why observe? Which groups to observe? Are we observing the teacher or the students? Let's offer choice here, is our aim to problem solve? It could well be, it would be a natural continuation from the check-in and the team PD meeting through to the observation. Observation can be revealing, observation can be an amazingly useful tool. It can also be the unhelpful. We know that objects behave differently when they're observed and classes are no exception to this rule. Again, let's ask, “how can we help you?” and one answer may well be through classroom observation where we focus on the difficult students or the class behaviour that isn't going as we want. 

Teachers often feel worried about observation even in a supportive environment. We probably want to observe to help solve problems but now might not be the time. We can solve problems in lots of different ways, not just through observation. It might be more appropriate to ask teachers the groups they want to be observed with and why, it's could be that they want you to see them in their comfort zone and that's great too. In feedback you can then discuss how different that class is to another more difficult one and why.

Creating meaningful flow benefits everyone 

Hopefully this joined-up approach can help to create a meaningful flow through classroom based professional development that better supports the teacher. It allows us to reflect on how we can better help each of the teachers working with us instead of having a one-size-fits-all system of PD. It is relatively simple, it can work in a school of any size. And most importantly, it benefits the teacher, it benefits the students and it benefits the business as a whole.

We'd love to hear how you approach classroom based professional development, please comment here or send us your thoughts. 

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