WHAT IS TEACHER DEVELOPMENT?
By Paul C. Davis, Pilgrims

 The idea of development as embodied in support groups has been prevalent in fields such as social work and therapy for a long time. It is not a new concept. But the recent transfer of the idea from other fields to EFL has caused confusion and, as with any new fashion, those engaged in the profession have not wanted to be the last to adopt the latest fad. With teacher development as the latest EFL jargon, there has been considerable confusion over what the term means and what activities it describes. In many cases, it seems to be used as a new name for old forms of teacher training.

For example, I have recently seen advertised a two-week ‘Teacher Training Development Course’ with the content and the methods of input by the trainers set out in the advertisement. As another example, at a meeting I attended, a teacher trainer said that her school had ‘development’ on Wednesday afternoons. Later it transpired that the afternoon comprised training and staff meetings.

For me, teacher development is a bit like the first time I drove a car alone after passing my driving test. It was an experience totally different from driving with an instructor or driving my flat mate’s car with him sitting next to me. I was free to savour the experience for its own sake, to make mistakes and to be relaxed about them and learn painlessly from them. Like most people, I do not resent those people that taught me to drive, but it was not really a good experience compared to the way I have developed my driving since. And my driving has improved through conversations with friends and trying out what they said. In this analogy, being taught by an instructor was like the training I received to pass the RSA. I learned to pass a test, but I certainly did not feel relaxed or confident. The lessons with my flat mate are like in-service training or going on courses. Although my flat mate was nice and really unthreatening, it was his paintwork I was going to scratch and after all, he had paid for the car. Talking to other drivers in a free and relaxed way in my own time is development. Although I was still dependent on other people, I took responsibility for what I wanted to learn and how and when I was going to apply it.

If development is about training yourself with colleagues, is it so different from teacher training? Is there a clear distinction?

In the UK based language school in which I work, the teacher training notice board has been relabelled teacher development, although what is posted on the board generally has not been changed. Teachers are still offered three or so seminars a term by outside speakers. However, on the timetable something new has appeared… a development period for each teacher. In fact it is not new time, but that odd period that has always been on the timetable when we used to do a bit of preparation and have tea.

Now we have development on the timetable, but is it really development, or is it merely teacher training renamed? It is timetable, so it is in paid time when the teachers meet regularly in small groups. And it is almost a peer group; it would be a peer group if a senior teacher had not been designated as chair by the management. For permanent teachers unworried about contract renewals, the group can function as a peer group; however, for new pr temporary teachers, the designation of a senior teacher as chair makes the group appear to be a training session in the ways of the school. The agenda is usually set by the group. Occasionally, however, the members of the group are asked to put their own needs aside and develop themselves along setlines. If the organization has invested money in computers, for example, then head office may direct staff to devote some of their development time to computer assisted language learning.

At the same school, however, a group of staff may also meet along with colleagues from other schools once a week in their own time for teacher development.

The situation outlined above may be very different from the one on your workplace, but just this simple description of one model illustrates the confusion of terms and raises some important questions about the dividing line between teacher development and teacher training:

Should, or even can, teacher development be instituted by the management or teacher trainer, or should it be teacher led?

Should it be a peer group? Can a teacher trainer attend a development session as a peer? Can in-house development or training be unthreatening to people whose jobs are not secure (such as new or temporary teachers)?

Should it be in paid time or your own time? If it is in paid time, will the needs of the workplace always intervene? Is it a good idea to give up your own time rather than expect the workplace to provide time for personal development?

Who sets the agenda? Could a school give the time for personal development within the timetable and not interfere with the agenda?

Key Distinctions:

The make up of the group

A teacher development group will normally be comprised of people who work together or work in the same geographical area. Although they may have different levels of experience and/or status, because their participation in the group is voluntary or because they come from different workplaces, they should be able to act as a peer group. A quasi-peer group situation would exist if, for example, a director of studies or teacher trainer from the workplace of one of the participants decided to come or was invited but consciously tried not to assert their position when working with the group. Since that person is in a judgmental position during work time (a hirer and firer), it would in normal circumstances not benefit the group to have that person present, since it would inhibit the honesty of the group. In our group, we have no members holding management positions, although we have not found any problems with admitting people who ostensibly have a different position or status from ordinary teachers, e.g. Administrative staff, writers, senior teachers. Generally we have not found different levels of experience to be a problem.

In teacher training, by contrast, there can never be a peer group since there is, by definition, always a leader and/or expert running the course. Although the participants of the group may be more homogenous than in a teacher development group, they always have an expert or leader of higher status than them and so can never function as a peer group. One of the major advantages that teacher development brings by  functioning as a peer group is that, while in teacher training the major contribution comes inevitably from the leader or expert, a teacher development group can work towards equal contributions from all the participants. In essence, since all the participants voluntarily choose to attend, they share the responsibility for the dynamics and success of the group and also for negotiating the agenda.

The agenda of the group:

There are two distinct issues here: who sets the agenda and how personal it is. In most training, the agenda is set by the ministry, education authority, the needs of the workplace or the syllabus. It is thus, pre-planned and fixed. Although it may be very advantageous in career or even personal terms for individual teachers to have training or qualifications, they will in nearly every circumstance have at best very limited control over the agenda. Most of the agenda will be classroom related or designed to meet short-term needs (I must get my RSA / MA to have job security). Even if trainers want to negotiate the agenda, they are severely restricted by the nature of the contract and the expectations that go with it.

In a teacher development group, the agenda is normally set by the group itself. Immediate problems can be immediately dealt with by drawing upon the experience of the members of the group who themselves are more likely to be in tune with the particular needs and situation of the person concerned. Assuming regular meeting, the problem or idea can be followed through. A training course generally has a beginning and an end; you cannot phone up the expert who gave the seminar to tell him that his idea did not work when you put it into practice. Because the agenda in teacher development is set by the group and because it is flexible, impromptu changes are possible. The immediate can be dealt with, and the immediate is so often a personal need. As the group meets and matures, a personal agenda can be built up which fits the participants in a way that no trainer, however sensitive, can hope to achieve. As a rule, teacher development will be affective, teacher training informational.

I have attended many training sessions… initial training, the RSA, weekend courses, in-house seminars, conferences and so on. Generally they have left me feeling that they were unsatisfactory. My reactions have varied:

I could do better.

I know this already.

This is too theoretical.

I don’t feel like being here.

I’ m not ready for this.

This person is a trained (or natural) actor / counselor / suggestopedic teacher; it would take me years to do that.

Everybody knows more than me.

I know more than everybody else.

I must think of an intelligent thing to say to impress my tutor, boss, colleagues.

I’m going to be assessed on this.

I read this book last week.

That person in the audience is saying really sensible things; I can learn from her in the coffee break.

I said something really intelligent, and nobody noticed.

She said something really intelligent, and nobody noticed.

I’ve just been put down.

Does everyone feel that point was important and we should have spent more time on it?

I’d really like to be supportive to this lecturer; why are these people giving him a rough time?

I’m really excited by this idea, but what’s he talking about now?

Many of the same reactions would be appropriate in a TD group. But I would be able to express them, discover how the group felt and change the course of events.

A brief polemic

Probably it is clear from the commentary so far that we have a definite idea of what constitutes a ‘real’ teacher development group and what does not, but here are what we consider to be the three essentials: peer group, agenda set by the group, teacher led. The implications of this definition for managers are that trainers or directors of studies cannot set up a teacher development group for teachers, participate in a teacher development group for teachers or set the agenda for teachers to follow. By so doing, they will be providing training, not development. They can provide good teacher training in the workplace which is distinct from teacher development. They can even facilitate teacher development by providing time and space, but they cannot provide development for teachers because, by definition, development is initiated by teachers for themselves.

The Contract

We have seen that a functioning teacher development group will be a teacher-led peer group which sets its own agenda. A teacher training group, by its nature, will not be a peer group, will have an outstanding agenda and will be conducted or initiated by ‘an authority’. This has many implications for the dynamics, expectations and content matter of a group, i.e. the contract agreed by the participants. Three factors I would like to highlight are confidentiality, failure and innovation.

Confidentiality

Have you ever been to a teacher training session where the trainer has established that anything that was said was confidential and not to be repeated outside the group? When we first started with teacher development, we did not consciously make a contract which included confidentiality, but I remember that very early in the life of the group it became implicit that what was said in the group about doubts, failures and insecurities stayed within the group. By the time we acknowledged confidentiality, while this is rarely, if ever possible in teacher training since a measure of assessment or evaluation is either explicit or else implicit if the group is not a peer group. To my knowledge, in the group I belong to and in other groups where it has become part of an initial contract, this confidentiality has almost never been broken. In general people keep confidences!

Confidentiality enable us to be more honest, to trust each other and to support each other. What else is gained from confidentiality? Heresy, subversion, fun, confidence. These qualities have two results: we can admit and accept failure (both in the group and in the classroom), and innovation is possible.

Failure

Just as in the language classroom fear of making a mistake inhibits the performance of many students, so in training fear of admitting failure inhibits the proceedings. I can remember as we got used to functioning as a TD group someone admitting they had made a mess of a class. I had heard people say how they had had a disastrous class before, but this was different somehow. It was not said as a jokey throwaway comment in the staff room over coffee. This was a real teacher who was not perfect and did not always retrieve the situation miraculously at the last moment. A real failure. There was a pregnant pause. How could this be laughed off? In fact, we did not laugh it off. And we found that we had all had classes that had failed. To admit it was not so dreadful after all.

There is a second aspect to failure. Sometimes, come Thursday (our day for TD), our flexible, impromptu agenda becomes a little too flexible and impromptu, and our TD session disintegrates. But what is important is not that this happens from time to time nut that it does not happen every week and that we accept it happening occasionally. A single failure for a teacher training session is a disaster for the trainer and the trainees. A failure in an established TD group could be taken as normal. It has even made it easier for the members to take responsibility for future sessions since they are not expected to come up with a perfect performance each time. And everybody shares the responsibility for each failure.

Innovation:

One good thing about EFL is that it is full of new ideas. Although you can go on a course or read about a new technique in a journal, how often do you manage to put it into practice? How can you be sure you understand it exactly? Will it be easily adaptable for your situation? You might like to try it out, but your class is at the wrong level. It sounded like a good idea, but you can only remember half of it. A TD group provides just the right safe environment to try out these half-formed ideas. So much thinking, reading and training needs a half-way house to become more than a good idea that you might use one day. TD has been a watershed experience for me which has enable me to put much of my training, reading and my own ideas and those of my colleagues into practice. If they work and are refined in the group, I can try them in class and they can become part of repertoire. If I try them out and they do not work, I can go back to the group and find out why. We share ideas and support each other in our experimentation.

Support:

The support we give each other in the group extends into our everyday working practice. Teaching is an isolating activity. 90% of our time is spent alone in a crowd in front of a class. When I first started teaching, the staff room was a very polite place and quite often the occupants were helpful and kind and eventually friendly. But the classroom was a fine and private place. I noted from snatches of conversation that they had good ideas. I picked up, from the feelings of quiet satisfaction as people came back into the staff room and from the pleasant atmosphere in classes I went into, that some good lessons and good class management were taking place. But no one talked openly about these things; perhaps if we admitted we had good lessons, we would also have to admit to the failures.

In TD we have shared our ideas. We have talked about our good lessons. (One of our early sessions was for each person to describe the best lesson they had done recently. Although people were embarrassed and uncomfortable, it was a good session). We have talked about how we manage classes. People had different ideas, and some did things that I would never have managed doing in a class. Bit by bit I learned a lot, and I learned that there are different ways of doing things. Since I work day to day with many people who will talk things through, suggest ideas and give me bits of material. Once a week, I know I am going to get some stimulation, some input, something surprising. I even have the feeling that the way we act in the staff room has had a profound effect on the way everyone else acts.

Confidence:

Over the years the group has been meeting, we have broken down the isolation of teaching, got support, shared ideas, tried out many new ideas and tackled many topics. We have worked on our teaching and ourselves. And each week, there is a feeling of progression. Bit by bit, we feel more confident about ourselves and our teaching. As the group has developed, so individuals have developed by writing, giving seminars, etc. Many of the things we have done would not have been done without a supportive group.

Time for Yourself:

Not everyone wants to come to the TD group, and not everyone who wants to can because of commitments to family, pressure of work or lack of time. But there is such a thing as making time for yourself. And there is such a thing as giving up time to save time. It ca be a strain to give up an hour or two a week to work on yourself and your job. But, if it works, it becomes an enjoyable staple of the week rather than a wasteful luxury. If it works well, it makes the day to day job easier and saves time. Why spend an hour planning lessons alone when you can get ideas from your colleagues? Why spend an hour brooding about a work program when you can go over it with your colleagues? Teacher development saves overworked teachers time and energy.

Overview

Within what I know of English language teaching, there at present appear to be three strands to the way teacher development is developing as a tool to help teachers.

At one extreme are those who see teacher development as a management concern, a means by which managers can encourage and direct teachers to mould their teaching styles to accord with organizational policies.

A middle way is to entrust the direction of development groups to the middle managers. They lead development until teachers and conversant with the basic format and then hand over to the teachers, who were perceived as being unable to take the initial responsibility in the first place. Some people see this as essential, a way of training teachers in development and achieving the co-operation of middle managers as well.

Our view opposes the position that teacher development can be or should be the responsibility of managers. Instead, as outlined above, we believe that teacher development, by its very nature, must be teacher-led development in which teachers take control and responsibility for their own development.

A note on exclusion:

If we adopt teacher-led teacher development, as described above, then is there a role for a director of studies or teacher trainer? It may seem unfriendly to exclude them, and we have heard of groups in which managers are members. Earlier in the chapter, we talked about the importance of the peer group and the exclusion of colleagues in management positions. But there is an alternative to exclusion. This is to allow them to come in but make a contract which stipulates that the relationships in the group are peer relationships.

If a manager chooses to join the group, however, this can pose problems. Because of the higher status, a manager may find it difficult to be relaxed and honest since there is more to lose by admitting to uncertainty. In our group, one of the members does have a quasi-managerial position, but it should be noted that this person’s status derives from his work elsewhere; he is not in a position of authority over any other group member.

If the person with a higher status, though has the power to hire and fire any of the group members, the situation becomes more difficult. The principal or director of studies, for example, who chooses to attend the teacher development group may feel uncomfortable or even unable to slough off the usual mantle of authority their position confers and participate as a peer in the give and take of the TD sessions. Similarly, group members may fear that a hirer and firer will be unable to separate what is heard in a development meeting from the job of evaluating teachers. The members may feel uncomfortable in the presence to ‘the boss’ and be uneasy about the disagreeing with him or her unwillingly to be as open about doubts and failures as they might have had. This is an acute problem for temporary teachers worried about renewal of a short-term contract or permanent teachers hoping for a promotion. Over the life of our group, three other colleagues (each in a position of authority in the workplace that a majority of the members of the group worked in) briefly attended our group sessions. In each case, there was a certain amount of unease on both sides, and the person concerned  attended only a few sessions.

Subversion and Heresy Vs Job Security and Management Insecurity

Hitherto, the only places for a little gentle subversion at our workplace have been the satire of the end of term pantomime put on by the staff for the students, the drunkenness of the end of term party and the more formalized structure of union meetings. TD has changed that. Because of the confidentiality and trust built up in the group, it is possible for members to be subversive (e.g.., to voice their real feelings about the organizations they work for) or heretical (to challenge and question established EFL gospel). This could lead to job dissatisfaction, but on the whole I think having a forum for saying what we really think and for real professional and personal development has overwhelmingly reduced the dissatisfaction and stress felt by most of the members. Whether management feel comfortable about giving their blessing to real development is another question. Certainly within our experience, this has not usually been the case. But then assuming that the group is teacher-led, it hardly matters what the management feel.

Healthy Instincts

When we began our TD in 1985, we had no idea of many of the concepts and terms referred to in this chapter. We reached for the right ways from within one collective experience and qualities. Maybe knowing the above would have helped us avoid a pitfall or two, but on the whole I think it was more important to be positive, listen to each other, have fun and find our own way for ourselves – all healthy instincts.

Are teacher trainers redundant?

Many trainers are now beginning to acknowledge the wealth of experience that any brings with them. To paraphrase Caleb Gattegno, founder of The Silent Way, everyone knows more than they think they know and much more than you think they know. If this applies to language classes, then it applies equally to training sessions. Trainers can get better at meeting the needs of their audience. And in the real world, people do need RSA Certificates or Diplomas, MA’s or whatever. Let us just say that as development becomes more powerful, the role of the trainer will become less important. Possible some areas are best left to trainers and some to development groups. In the meantime, it would be helpful to draw a clear distinction between what training and what development is. The two are very, very different.