As I mentioned in a recent post, this year I am a member of my college’s Professional Development Committee. For someone who believes so intensely in professional (and personal!) development, this is a thrilling prospect.
One of my main goals is to develop a set of educational technology training workshops to present here and elsewhere in various formats. First, though, there are some administrative duties to see to as well. The first of these turned out to be really interesting.
I was lucky enough to land the task of compiling a feedback report on the first of our PD events for this year. This was the perfect chance to gauge staff responses to this event, but also to find out where there is a call for further training.
The event in question was a workshop presented by Peter Moore, co-author of the Pearson Longman Cutting Edge textbook series. Entitled Cutting Edge from A to Z, it was an enthusiastically delivered overview of principles relevant within the textbooks and beyond. Despite the timing (the very last hours of our working week!) staff eagerly participated and the session was very well received.
Our research questionnaires had a decent return rate, but even more remarkable was the overwhelmingly positive response to the workshop. In closed questions the workshop received high rankings for relevance, quality and helpfulness, while several respondents were full of praise in the open questions as well. I was pleasantly surprised that staff were so positive about professional development on the whole. Although such a questionnaire certainly has its limitations (especially when respondents are scrambling to get out the door for the weekend!), the anonymous responses must indicate some truth.
These findings do seem very promising, and I hope that workshops presented by our staff (who are admittedly non-international non-experts) will follow the trend of quality and be as well attended and received.
(As an aside, I should admit that I am sceptical about blanket international English Language Teaching materials, preferring principled guerrilla materials creation myself. While it is a reality that “teacher-proof” materials can be a lifeline in an industry where teachers have varying levels of training, experience and expertise, the expert on students’ needs is more likely to be a local teacher than a corporate-backed international expert. That said, the Cutting Edge materials are sufficiently thorough, and can plausibly form the backbone of a General English course. I did enjoy elements of the workshop, and most respected the author’s ability to energize the audience under rather taxing circumstances. And as an aspiring serial workshop presenter, I am always looking and learning!)
