Back to Articles

Back to Home

Continual Professional Development

Adrian Underhill
First published in Issue 149, IATEFL, June/July 1999

 
That teachers should be actively involved in a process of continuous professional development is crucial, it seems to me, for several reasons:

1.  It helps us to remain fresh, alert, up to date, and confident in ourselves and in the topic we teach.

2.  It enables us to participate in and contribute to the development of our schools as ‘learning organisations’ and our profession as a ‘learning profession’.

3.  Perhaps most importantly it benefits our learners to be taught by teachers who are engaged in these first two activities, teachers who are themselves showing learning, teachers who are in some way on the same side of the learning fence as their students.

But what does continuous professional development (CPD) mean? And is it different from other similar sounding notions, such as teacher development (TD)? Here is a handy definition of teacher development that I like:

‘Teacher development is the process of becoming the best teacher one is able to be, a process that can be started but never finished’.

Although this definition is quite open-ended it is also quite poignant, and the more I reflect on it the more I find it reveals. It is quite similar in tone to some of the definitions of continuous professional development offered at a recent one day conference on CPD organised by the IATEFL Management SIG and International House. Here are a couple of examples:

‘CPD is the attitude and process of being a lifelong learner...’

‘CPD is a way of learning to become more effective by exploiting the learning opportunities that lie just below the surface of everything you do already. It helps people to learn from what they do so they can get better at it...’

From these definitions CPD and TD seem to be talking about the same thing. That there may be differences becomes more apparent when you look at their approaches to implementation. Teacher development has come to have a sort of ‘do-it-yourself’ or ‘bottom-up’ connotation, referring at least in part to development that can seed itself even in more difficult professional climates, and that is independent of, though much better with, support from the organisation, school or system. TD may start on the initiative of a teacher or group of teachers rather than from further up a hierarchy, and does not necessarily wait for the conditions to be right for development, but does everything possible to get on with it anyway, operating, if necessary, without the backing of the system. TD has also tended to embrace personal development as an essential ingredient of teacher development.

On the other hand, the concept of continuing professional development generally implies a continuous learning by practitioners that is sanctioned, even required, by the institute or profession itself. In this sense CPD is more systematically built into a practitioner’s career, in fact a number of different professions require that for an individual practitioner to retain professional recognition they must demonstrate that they are engaged in a certain amount of professional learning, updating and reskilling each year. This requires that the developmental activities are somehow measurable or quantifiable.

Whereas TD arises from the commitment of the practitioner, with the commitment of the organisation coming as a possible bonus, CPD requires the commitment of the institute or the profession as well as the commitment of the individual. TD is essentially a voluntary activity, while CPD is intended as a requirement for all. TD is likely to involve fewer people and to be more local, while CPD aims to involve all people, and to focus on benefits to the individual, the institution, and the profession as a whole.

Perhaps I have exaggerated the characteristics of TD and CPD. But the crucial point is that many (though not all) parts of the ELT profession are coming to recognise the importance of continuous learning for all practitioners not as a luxury but as an absolute necessity to provide an education that meets students requirements, that is experienced as worthwhile, that serves the community, that encourages joy in teaching and learning, that maintains a competitive edge, and that is educationally and commercially sustainable.

This is an interesting time, because although many would agree with the broad aims of CPD, and although progressive institutes here and there are experimenting with CPD programmes of one sort or another, we are still a long way from shared national and international understandings about professional development. An international association such as IATEFL can make a hugely important contribution by promoting discussion on these issues, and there are many questions to discuss:

• Can we, as individual members of IATEFL, say with conviction that we value and that we are engaged in our own professional development?
• Does CPD include personal as well as professional development?
• How important is it to measure such development, to quantify it? How can this be done?
• Does the need to measure development affect the choice of what is considered developmental?
• How can we use our activities within IATEFL to further the discussion of CPD and to clarify the values that underpin it?

CPD is not yet a fact of ELT, nor is it clear what exactly we mean by CPD. But this is exactly the right time to become more actively engaged in teasing out the various issues connected with our own continuing learning, and one place we can do that is right here in IATEFL. I invite you to read and talk about this, to make presentations and have discussions at our various events, to write about it in IATEFL Issues and the SIG newsletters, and to investigate it in the place where you work.