I don’t often look in the mirror (for better or for worse) but I do often reflect on what I’m doing, and what I’ve done with my life. When this happens, my mind naturally goes out to all the students I’ve had over the years. I’d like to think that I have had an impact on their lives, and that that impact has been positive.
Arbiters of Oneself
But when I stop and think about it the fact is that I actually don’t know if that’s the case. I have literally no idea what has happened to the overwhelming majority of learners (and teachers) I’ve trained. I recall them being somewhere between overjoyed and bored in my classes. But even students being overjoyed isn’t evidence of learning, nor is good test performance an indicator of the learning experience being a positive one.
There are of course evaluations conducted by our peers or our supervisors, but the regularity and comprehensiveness of these, in our industry in particular, leave much to desire.
Conclusion: ours is a solitary profession in which we are, ultimately, our own arbiters. But there isn’t much that’s more distorted than what one sees when one stares long enough at one’s one image by oneself.
And this is why professional development, for me, in a vastly personal way, is such an integral part of being a teacher of English as a foreign language.
The Parable of the Two Teachers
We’re all familiar with the parable of the two teachers, one of whom continues to develop after their initial training, and the other of whom works hard for the first year of their career, and then teaches the same lesson again and again for the rest of their career. We can easily see here that the culprit is the latter teacher, and that the former is the one who should be lauded as a paragon of the profession.
The easy way to interpret this parable is that by virtue of professional development, the creative spark remains, the passion re-ignites, and our students are caught up in a blaze of educational glory. But when I first heard this parable, when I first got trained up as a CELTA trainer, that wasn’t my initial reaction. My initial reaction was: If they’re teaching good lessons, why is it so bad that it’s the same ones they’re teaching every year? It doesn’t sound like fun for the teacher, but if the person we really care about is the learner, and the learner is getting good lessons, then we’re getting what we really want, right? Besides which, coming out of a trainer’s mouth, I would hear it as a barely disguised attempt to make the trainer’s role perennially crucial in the life of any noble teacher.
Teachers and Classmates: Loyal Mirrors
The way I now interpret it is that the teacher who doesn’t get regular training may think they’re teaching a good lesson, but in fact they’re not. Memory distorts conveniently, and it doesn’t just distort the past, it also distorts the future. When you’re convinced that the lesson you’ve taught was a good one, and that you’re capable of delivering it with your eyes closed, pretty soon you’re basically doing just that: you’re delivering it with your eyes closed. The reactions you see in your students’ faces either match the memory you have of the first times you’ve taught that lesson, or you fail to see that they don’t match, because surely they’re just tired today, or else the students these days just don’t have the focus they used to in the good old days, in the days before this or that new technology came along…
And this is precisely where professional development comes in. Training courses, trainers, once past the initiation stage, aren’t there to teach you new things, so much as to let you know that there are people watching… Not in real life (though that does happen on good courses) but in your head. When your trainers and colleagues, that’s precisely what they’re doing: sharing their vision, not in terms of what they think of one technique or another, but in terms of their actual physical eyesight, their way of interpreting things, their point of view.
Eyeballs with which to Scrub our Reflection
This is why people come out of training courses feeling refreshed—they often use the phrase “My eyes have been opened.” That’s pretty close, but that’s not quite it: you’ve acquired new eyes, eyes which will continue to watch you well after the course is finished. Those eyes will keep you fresh by polishing the mirror with which you see yourself as a teacher. Your colleagues and trainers will be loyal mirrors not of the teacher you are, but of the type of teacher you can be. And that vision, in the final analysis, is what helps the ambitious, earnest teacher stay true to themselves.
As I said, I’ve always avoided mirrors… but I didn’t say why. It’s because I don’t trust myself to see myself for who I am, that I would end up seeing myself as better than what I really am, because that’s what I want to see. Don’t we all want to see ourselves for better than we are? Isn’t that the reason many of us start teaching in the first place—the immense validation sent to us by our students?
The antidote? The stern and supportive of gaze of trainers on a well-crafted training program.
Join me and my team of trainers for our webinar on professional development opportunities in Morocco, on Thursday 16 January, at 8 pm local time.
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