Sustainable Professional Development

By Christopher Walker

Introduction

The seeds for this idea were planted twenty years ago. I was working in Guildford, England, and at the weekends I invariably found myself in London paying a visit to the National Gallery. If you want to see everything in the Gallery you really need a whole day, and I tried to see everything on my first visit. But soon I found myself almost sprinting from room to room, casting a quick glance at one masterpiece after another and never letting my eye settle. I left after a couple of hours feeling like I’d seen nothing.

But on my next visit – and on every subsequent one – I took a different approach. I stayed only as long as it took to find a picture that really caught my attention. I’d look at it. I’d sit on the bench in the middle of the room and view it from a distance, and then I’d go up as close as I could – sometimes too close, so the guard would clear his throat as a preliminary warning – to see how the painter had achieved such incredible effects. I’d make a note of what I’d seen and then leave. Twenty minutes, in and out, like the perfect heist.

Granted I was in the enviable position of being able to nip in and out as if the Gallery was my own personal domain; but something of the idea stuck, and when I found that my teachers were beginning to find their professional development schedule an unsustainable burden, I came back to it.

Thus was born the idea of Micro PD.

The School Library

It’s good for a school to have a library. Coursebooks change from year to year, and instead of throwing last year’s out, they can be put on a shelf and referred to as and when needed. Likewise with teaching books like those commonly reviewed in the pages of the IH Journal.

I’ve been teaching at this school for the better part of two decades, and I can’t remember us ever throwing something out. The school itself has existed for over thirty years now, and I think that the philosophy of keeping rather than binning stretches back to day one. As a result, this is what our school library looks like now:

I like a packed bookcase as much as the next bibliophile but I can see the immediate problem – it’s an intimidating array of books. At the start of each year I ask my teachers to make use of this marvellous resource, but they rarely do, simply because they don’t know where to start.

The answer is to start anywhere, but, like with me and the National Gallery, to get in, get something useful, and then get out.

This is Micro PD.

Micro PD Part One – Teacher Resources

At the start of each academic year, one of our Professional Development sessions is on Micro PD.

First, we look at the coursebooks of yesteryear. Our task is simple. Take down one of the resource books (any book that is spiral-bound is a treasure trove of photocopiable resources), open it at random, and then work slowly forward until you find something you can use in a lesson this week.

As an example, I plucked this old copy of the resource book for English in Mind from the shelf; I opened it at random and soon found a resource I thought would work.

This is the activity I chose to photocopy:

I didn’t happen to be teaching a class for which this entry in the English in Mind series was perfectly suited, but I liked the comic strip and thought the task could be sufficiently open-ended to work with my C1-level teens. Spoiler alert – I was right.

Armed with my new resource, I returned the book to the shelf. I stapled a reduced-size copy of the task into my professional development notebook and left space to add my post-task reflections, and then I moved on with the MicroPD session.

Micro PD Part Two – Teacher Development Books

We have a vast selection of teacher development books, starting with the classic Scrivener text that all CELTA teachers likely took with them on their course, going through a half-dozen Thornburys and an assortment of Underhills, all the way to the sort of niche books that are sometimes sent out at random and that schools like ours never feel quite ready to get rid of, like the Studies in Language Testing series that Cambridge published over a decade ago and that was presumably delivered here to help a Master’s candidate with one of their optional units.

The task here is much like that in the first part of the Micro PD session, though the aim now is not to find some random photocopiable activity that will help us in our next lesson. Instead, we want to find something that will push us forward as teachers, something that will add depth to our knowledge base.

Here is the book that I took from the shelf:

At under 200 pages, Challenge and Change in Language Teaching is the kind of book I could imagine sitting down with and reading from cover to cover – but not when the school year was already underway. I’d want to take my time with a book like this so that the full range of ideas would have a chance to soak into my head; like many other teachers, then, I’d simply not look at the book at all because I couldn’t afford the time – or mental space – to look at it in detail. This is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good – ideally, I’d read all of the book, but since I couldn’t read it all, I’d choose to read none of it instead.

And of course, when summer did roll around and there was time to read such volumes, I’d be so worn out by the teaching year that the last thing I’d want to do would be read anything of the sort!

But Micro PD solves this problem. Open the book at random, and read the first paragraph you see. If it’s not particularly interesting, skip ahead a few pages until you do happen upon something that makes you curious to learn more. As soon as you reach that point, look back to the beginning of that particular unit or section, and make sure you understand the context of what you’re reading.

I soon found myself engrossed in a discussion of Contrastive Analysis (CA), and the example of English versus Japanese grammar. This led me to learn the term ‘head parameter’, which was represented diagrammatically in a way that anyone who has studied sentence structure will immediately recognise.

To be fair, this task – of reading back far enough to understand what the writer was saying, and then to continue forward until they concluded their point – took me far longer than the first part of the Micro PD system. But it was time well spent, as I learnt a lot about the core structure of sentences – not just in English or Japanese, but in any language. Polish is superficially quite similar to English, but in some specific cases the head parameter differs – so, to take one example, in English we tend to keep our subject words – the head, if I understand correctly – short and digestible. We expect the verb to follow hot on the heels of the subject, so we would say “I went to the party with Agnieszka, Zuzanna, and Matylda” (1) in preference to “I with Agnieszka, Zuzanna, and Matylda went to the party” (2). But in Polish both options seem possible, with a verb change in the second instance to show that the whole ‘we’ group are involved in the action:

(1.) Poszedłem na imprezę z Agnieszką, Zuzanną i Matyldą.

(2.) Ja z Agnieszką, Zuzanną i Matyldą pojechaliśmy na imprezę.

Something originally restricted to English and Japanese thus helped me to refine my understanding of why my Polish students were favouring a particular structure – a structure that made their English sentences unwieldy.

All thanks to randomly opening a book and spending a few minutes reading.

After I’d made a note of all of this in the back of my notebook (the front is for lesson activity ideas, the back for method and theory), I popped the Challenge and Change in Language Teaching back on the shelf, and went about my teaching for the day – freshly armed with a deeper understanding of something that would help me treat my learners’ errors.

The Micro PD Protocol

Let’s put what we’ve got so far into an operational checklist. This is how Micro PD might be implemented as a habit in your school, starting with one formal session and giving each teacher a place to record their ideas and reflection:

1. Choose one resource (5 minutes) – either something from the old coursebooks, or something more academic.
2. Extract one usable idea (5 minutes)
3. Implement within 72 hours
4. Reflect in a few written sentences – what was the context (or contexts) in which the material or new knowledge could be used, and what was the outcome?
5. Repeat weekly

Conclusion

We want our teachers to engage in professional development as much as possible, but sometimes we expect too much. Not everyone has an hour or two to spare each and every week to take their skills and knowledge further, and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you have no choice but to take that hour if you’re to learn anything useful. Fifty minutes would barely cut it, and fifteen? No chance.

MicroPD challenges that assumption and makes the act of development more sustainable for teachers everywhere by demonstrating that even ten minutes really is enough. One new idea is better than zero new ideas, and over time these ideas accumulate, serving to make the teacher better at what they do. So far, it’s worked well for me!

References

Hart, B. et al (2011), English in Mind Second Edition Teacher’s Resource Book 4, Cambridge University Press

Willis, J. and Willis, D. eds (1996), Challenge and Change in Language Teaching, Macmillan and Heinemann English Language Teaching

Biography