Reflected on the articles "Empowering Teachers through
Professional Development" by Alice Murray and "Profesional Development: Reflective Teaching" by Naashia Modamed
Professional
Development
Up
until today, especially in our department, we always heard expressions like
“Teachers should update themselves, they should renew themselves ever and ever
and they, of course, should go on to develop themselves all throughout their
professional life in teaching because time goes by and everything chances
including education itself.
In
this sense, I must accept that I am totally agree with these statements since I
very well know that teachers should always keep professional development
because development is inevitable return of the age itself. What I mean here is
that yes, time goes on, it is passing and in this process, students are
chancing, teaching philosophies, methods, techniques are changing, and lots of
things that I could not count are changing, so teachers should follow these
changes in order not to be out of fashion: out of date. Also, looking at my
endless complaints about my own teachers both in my own educational life
including primary, high and college schools and in internship schools, I know
absolutely that teachers should fresh themselves in order to qualify teaching
and learning since I really get disappointed when I hear that my mentor teacher
does not know about communicative language teaching, my primary school teacher
still covers the lessons just as s/he did 10 years ago while s/he was teaching
to me in my classroom, and so on. In other words, I always came across and
still come across with teachers who do not renew themselves so unfortunately
could not give qualified education just because of this professional
development issue. My words should not be misunderstood, I do not find them
guilty, chastise them; I know that teaching profession is really hard to cope
with, to keep pace with and of course those teachers could love their teaching
styles, they could not know about other new things or they may basically think
that they are doing well, but I am just saying that this is still sad, disappointing
for me because now as a fresh prospective METU graduate, I know the importance
of ongoing professional development.
Starting
to talk about the first article, “Empowering
Teachers through Professional Development” by Alice Murray, I want to say
that all the things the writer mentions actually are somehow the same with what
we heard about in our department. In our department, we were taught and said
that we should go on our professional development even if we are in our 50th
year in teaching and so lots of things were showed us as examples/ techniques
to do so. In the article, Alice Murray suggest to use some individual
techniques like keeping teaching journal, analyze a critical incident and some
collaborative techniques like sharing these journals, peer mentoring and coaching,
and attending local, national and international teaching associations like
TESOL, IATEFL etc. Also, she is suggesting the teachers to attend workshops and
conferences and being active these kinds of activities in the profession. So, I
should say that the writer here reminded us what can be done in trial of being
update in the ELT area one more time. I also agree with the writer at this
point. Now, as a prospective teacher, I am always learning new things related
to the ELT area even though I never taught in classroom environment
professionally. In other words, even since just the beginning of this year,
this term, I learned lots of things related to the area and am learning that
new things are always going on to come. For example I learned Eclectic method
two years ago and these days I am reading articles about Postmethod Approach in
language teaching: this is an example of the ongoing, developing, changing
things in the profession. So, as for our mission as teachers, unfortunately I
must say that we do not have right/chance to settle back and rest without going
on learning new things in teaching area. Hence, I think that just as we do
right now as student-teachers, when we start our jobs, we always go on to read
articles in the field, attend to the conferences held, take active role in
workshops etc, follow and become a member of teacher associations, form and
support teacher groups and so on. There are lots of thing to do but still I
think that we can be successful in teaching only in this way.
Secondly,
regarding of the second article, “Professional development: reflective teaching” by Naashia Mohamed, actually, I want to say that we have already done
these suggested techniques in our department. The writer suggests to keep teaching
diary as our first article writer states also, she says that we can record our
teaching in order to watch it after the lesson and see objectively how the
lesson was like, then she also states that colleges can be invited to the
classroom so that they can watch the lesson and give feedback to the teacher,
and of course students are also important for the feedback. Lastly, she says
that sharing these things with others will also enhance the teaching because it
will help us to communicate our problems, to ask questions, to seek answers
together. Coming to these techniques, I certainly want to say that the writer
here touches to the point. In other words, we always learned that reflective
teaching is a very good perspective to the profession since you change yourself
according to the incidents, failures, successes in the teaching experience so
that you can empower your teaching. That’s why, I think that as we learned in
our department, we can record ourselves like we did with Perihan hoca, and the
watch and see ourselves on the stage, we can ask our students to assess the
lesson and see from their perspective, which I really think that is important
to have student comment because they are the ones who engage actively in
learning process, and also talking to the colleagues in order to get peer
feedback. What I say here is that I absolutely think to do these in my future
job, hopefully and these things should be done by all the teachers around the
world.
All in all, I certainly think that
we, teachers, should always renew, update ourselves by reading, attending and
participating teaching-learning related things and try to get feedback from
everybody including students, colleagues, mentors, coaches etc. It is so
logical to know that others can see the things that we cannot see in our
teaching and we can get help from them, and enhance our teaching. With
reflective teaching and professional development efforts and techniques, I am
sure that we will foster our teaching; we will facilitate it while we are in
ongoing learning process, either. I think to teach and to learn simultaneously
is a key for successful modern age teaching. I hope I can do what I stated in
this paper in my own teaching process, too. Thanks
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