Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 1; February 1999

WHAT IS TEACHER DEVELOPMENT?

Paul Davis, Pilgrims and Durham University

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 ver 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 / counsellor / 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.