Using Tesol Standards for Personal and Professional Development Boston 2010 Slideshare Version

Editor's Notes

• #4: I have been a presenter in many countries, and I have always found many things in common with teachers I met all over Latin America, Europe or Asia. Teachers are caring professionals who love what they do and really want the best for their students, who are usually overworked and underpaid, who struggle to find solutions to a variety of challenges. I like interactive presentations, so let’s do a little experiment here. I’m going to show you a few statements. You will decide to what extent they reflect the concerns you have in your professional life today. For each sentence, decide whether this is something that you never think about, or that you sometimes, often or always think about. Just take notes of the numeric score associated with each response. Ready? Here are the statements. Take one minute to think about your answers. This information is only for you. You don’t have to share it with anyone – unless you want to, of course. So now add up all your 5 scores. Ready?
• #5: Are you within the first group, with scores from 0 to 5? Or are you at the other end of the continuum, from 11 to 15? My guess is that we have a small group on both ends and a larger group in between. These perceptions about our work are very dynamic and change often, but today this is how you feel. Do these descriptions reflect how you see yourself and your profession? What do we do as teachers to monitor how we feel about ourselves? How we feel about the impact of our work on us and on others? I’ve been interested in this for some time, and I’ll show you what some teachers like you have been doing about this.
• #6: Who doesn’t really need professional development? I’m preaching to the choir, since you are here for a reason. Lange describes professional development as the process of continual intellectual, experiential and attitudinal growth of teachers. Really! Who wouldn’t want to keep growing?
• #7: Professional development is a process that evolves over time. It’s a journey rather than a destination. …. (read the rest of the bullet points)
• #8: These are some reasons why teachers engage in professional development activities. There are other reasons why institutions promote PD among their teachers.
• #9: And as Christison and Stoller say, PD is at the heart of a quality ELT program.
• #10: We have to recognize that ‘personal professional development results from a commitment to students and the acknowledgment that there is room for improvement at every stage of a person’s career . This quote is taken from the TESOL Standards for ESL/EFL teachers of adults, published in 2008.
• #11: We believe standards can be a valuable instrument to help us find the direction for our professional development. Standards provide a framework for all of us to understand educational processes and to improve educational results. - You can make comments about the dynamic systems -
• #21: The TESOL standards for ESL/EFL teachers of adults are organized in this way. Students’ learning is at the heart of teachers’ performance. The core standards are planning, instructing and assessing, all together as a circle that focuses on students’ learning. There are 5 additional standards in the outer circle: Language proficiency Learning Identity and context Content And professionalism and commitment
• #22: The book is an excellent resource for ESL and EFL teachers of adults. After defining each standard, several performance indicators are described to show what can be expected if the standard is met. A self-assessment checklist is provided at the end of the book with a rubric to evaluate our performance (approaches/meets/exceeds criteria defined by the performance indicator). In addition, vignettes illustrate how each standard can be implemented in different ESL/EFL contexts with adult learners.
• #23: In order to find out how standards can be used for professional development, Fernando conducted an investigation involving 9 EFL teachers   The focus of this investigation was to see if standards can be practical tools that teachers can use for their PD.  
• #24: These are the steps that were followed during a 2-3 week reflective process.
• #25: After completing an initial self-assessment based on the 8 standards and performance indicators, teachers reflected on the two questions mentioned on this slide.
• #26: Initial self reflections were divided into two main groups: some teachers tended to see their main strengths reflected in the standards. The second group saw their weaker areas. It’s similar to the glass that is half filled with water. Some of us see a glass that is half full and others see a glass that is half empty.
• #28: This table shows the standards with the average self-assessment scores for all 9 teachers. This is just a summary of teachers’ individual scores (on a scale from 1 to 3). The standards are ordered according to the average scores, with the highest on top and the lowest at the bottom. We will see what called the teachers’ attention about this distribution of results.
• #29: Here is another example. This is standard #2 on Instruction.
• #30: This teacher used the performance indicators to reflect on her class and see how she was doing in relation to this standard. Her general assessment was very positive.
• #31: These are the questions that teachers answered after completing 2 or 3 weeks using the standards as a reference.
• #32: What did teachers learn from the experience? It was valuable for all of them. One of the important results was the higher awareness they had about what they do in relation to what other teachers in the world do. Knowing they adhere to these standards in some way gave them a sense of belonging. It helped them feel less isolated and improve their self-esteem. And of course, they could identify strong areas and weaker areas in their daily work.
• #33: Some of these findings were expected by many but other results were unexpected. All of them were experienced teachers, so they felt they were doing a good job planning their classes and teaching. However, many of them still didn’t feel well prepared in the area of assessment. Being EFL teachers, they don’t always have the opportunity to work on their language proficiency, so this didn’t call their attention either.   However, Standard 4, identity and context, was unexpectedly high for this group of teachers. Perhaps it is a concept that applies more to ESL contexts than to EFL situations, especially when it says that “ Teachers recognize how context contributes to identity formation and therefore influences learning. Teachers use this knowledge of identity and settings in planning, instructing and assessing.” Still, these EFL teachers felt very well about integrating their adult learners’ background information into their teaching.   None of these EFL teachers worked at schools. They worked at language centers, so they didn’t teach content classes. That is why Content is not a priority for them. Standard 8, Commitment and Professionalism, may need some editing to consider EFL contexts more appropriately. While the first performance indicators deal with gaining and using knowledge and developing skills as teachers, the last one encourages teachers to be advocates for their adult students, which is much more relevant for ESL teachers than for EFL contexts. We know how committed and professional EFL teachers are all over the world.
• #34: These are some of the opinions teachers had about participating in this project and about using standards for their PD.
• #35: These are some of the teachers’ comments on what they felt would empower them to take ownership of their PD. If there are supervisors in the audience, there are some suggestions that may apply to your teachers’ context as well.