Open Source Professional Development
I’m not rich. I don’t have piles of cash sitting around my house or living in my bank account just waiting to be used for whatever purpose I desire. Nope. Most of the time, my money gets earned, and very quickly leaves me to pay the telephone bill, cover mortgage payments, keep food on the table, and gas in my car. I use it to pay what needs paying.
So what about professional development? I firmly believe that if you’re a teacher, you should never stop learning. The moment you decide you’ve "arrived" and don’t need continuous development, is the moment you stop being relevant. Professional development is a vital part of being an excellent and effective teacher - in my personal case: a language teacher.
But what do you do when you can’t afford professional development? What do you do when you can’t afford to pay x thousand dollars to take a DELTA or CELTA course? What if you can’t afford to pay university tuition and books? Or worse still, what if you don’t even have access to such resources to begin with?
I don’t even understand what I’ve just found, but I want to pass it on to you. This link comes via Derek’s Blog
I just watched the vid cast by Richard Baraniuk (it’s short, interesting, and well worth your time.) and visited the Connexions site. All I can say is this: blown away.
Are you like me, and don’t have piles of cash sitting around, yet you would like to polish, and develop your teaching skills? Why don’t you take a peek at this: Teachers Without Borders: Course 1: Education for the New Millennium.
This is the start point of a 5 course certificate program. All for free. I know where I’ll be spending some serious time over the next few weeks. What do you think?
Very cool - for my specific case, I do wish the Teachers Without Borders focused on adult or workplace learning, rather than K-12.
And regarding professional development for business English teachers: for me at least, by far the best self-dev practice is action research (and it’s free!). I used to take all sorts of courses and read stuff and finally I realized that I wasn’t really applying the knowledge as rigorously as I should. I was “too much theory/too little action”. So I started documenting, as empirically as possible, little experiments, using traditional action research protocols, and I think that I learn much more now. Not that theory, books, and courses aren’t great - just that they are necessary but not sufficient. Lots of times we teachers participate in courses but then don’t practice sustained implementation / critical review of the results of the new ideas they got from the training (IMHO!).
Off topic: I keep thinking about your great “green English” post from way back and am starting to get some ideas for how to implement (hint: nothing to do with paperless institutes).
Comment by Cleve — September 29, 2006 @ 10:20 am
Thanks, Aaron, looks very interesting. I absolutely agree with Cleve, tho, about action research. This was re-inforced for me by Prof. Dr. Jozef Colpaert,
Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Antwerp, and Director R&D of the LINGUAPOLIS Language Institute, during a keynote speech he gave at the JALTCALL conference earlier this year. He said it is very important for teachers to continually evaluate their own teaching systems, whether online, wireless, remote, or whatever, develop hypotheses and test them (action research). It doesn’t have to be a big research project. Try with little things.
Comment by Marco Polo — September 30, 2006 @ 7:29 pm
Thanks for posting this! I’m enjoying your blog.
Comment by Juli — October 3, 2006 @ 7:25 pm