IATEFL Issues 149 - Managing professionalisation or 'Hey, that's my development!'

In April 1999,
I was fortunate enough to be invited to a really excellent IATEFL Management SIG meeting organised at International House, London, by George Pickering. The theme was Continuing Professional Development (CPD). At the risk of over-simplifying things, I think it’s fair to say that contributions from the speakers came from three perspectives:

the self-development perspective of, ‘this is what my colleagues and I are doing about our own continuing professional development’ - a perspective I might characterise as that of the TD SIG. I should immediately acknowledge that that is also what I think of as my home base.
the management perspective of: ‘this is how we are trying to foster continuing professional development in our institution’ - a perspective perhaps not only of Management SIG, but also of Teacher Training SIG in terms of in-service provision.
the professional body perspective of ‘this is what we are doing in order to try to set up standards and criteria according to which individuals can register themselves as professionals and demonstrate their commitment to their continuing development’ - the emergent British Institute of ELT perspective.

I was sincerely impressed and excited by what was going on in all these areas, but as the discussions overlapped and interwove, I began to feel uneasy about some of the implications arising from the same terminology being used from such different perspectives. Were we all really talking about the same things and, if we were, should we be? Most of all, I became concerned about the emphasis on the ‘the personal’ in continuing professional development, and that’s what I’d like to explore a little here.

The personal in CPD

An emphasis on the personal in professional development has certainly become widely accepted in our field. I am very comfortable working with this emphasis in a climate where ‘development’ is understood to mean ‘self-development’.

So if I, in a self-motivated endeavour to pursue my professional goals, find that it is both useful and fulfilling to dig a little deeper into aspects of my personality, or into my preferred modes of perception, well, that’s a part of my good right. Or, simply by doing some extra reading around an area of my work, I may come across ideas or arguments which give me fresh perceptions of myself, or influence my life outside teaching. For instance, a colleague just wrote to me about how getting involved in an action research approach to her teaching has had a direct impact on the way in which she was able to help her son with a school project - and out of that arise further implications for family relationships. Conversely, I may decide, for personal reasons, to take a course in, say, counselling, or in the Alexander Technique, and discover there insights which can inform my professional growth. Yes, indeed, the personal is in many ways intertwined with professional development.

At its most far-reaching, we might even want to say that there can be no really significant development of a person’s teaching which does not also involve personal change. We are, after all, not people with a kit-bag of teaching functions to be accessed as required. We are whole people, who teach, just as nurses are whole people who nurse, and plumbers are whole people who can make your house warm. In our teaching, we express values and attitudes towards people that we also express in the rest of our lives. Change in our actions (both inside teaching and out) will relate in subtle ways to changes in those values and attitudes, and vice-versa.

Good. I take all the above to be a non-controversial statement of common ground in the area of teacher development. However. However. Just a minute. If I shift that kind of statement out of the discourse of self-motivated developmental work among peers, and into the discourse of management policy and the regulation of professionalisation, I don’t find it at all non-controversial. In fact, I find it a little disconcerting.

Managing the personal in CPD

Michael Fullan is a writer who gets quoted a lot in educational management circles, and this symposium was no exception. I find a good place to start is what he calls (Fullan 1993:21) the first lesson of educational change: ‘You can’t mandate what matters.’ This is what I understand him to mean:

As a manager, I can stipulate which published materials will be used on a particular course, or I can stipulate that no published materials will be used on that course, but I can’t stipulate whether any teacher on that course will teach better with or without published materials. I can stipulate that teachers must decide whether or not to use published materials on the course, but I can’t mandate teachers to become more autonomous in their decision making. If I continue to create the conditions in which teachers have to make decisions where the outcomes matter to them, it may well be that many of those teachers will become more autonomous in their decision-making, but then I have to be prepared to support whatever the decisions are - inside an agreed scope of responsibility - that they come to. I can manage arrangements that are conducive to real change, but I can’t mandate exactly what form that change will take.

In terms of CPD, I take this to mean that as a manager, I can provide what I believe to be opportunities that will be facilitative of continuing professional development, just so long as I don’t try to mandate what form that development will take.

However, it gets a little trickier than that in two further ways:

I must not start to believe that the opportunities that I manage are somehow definitive of what continuing professional development ‘really’ means.
I must not start to believe that I have any mandate over the extent to which a teacher makes a personal investment in the continuing professional development opportunities that I am organising.

The danger in the first fallacy is that I miss the continuing professional development that escapes my style of definition. I can count how many teachers go to the workshop on teaching intonation, but I don’t know about the person whose successful use of a certain style of story-telling, or a certain type of drill, confirmed for them their perception that this was an effective aspect of their teaching.

It’s a truism these days to assert that we can’t actually observe learning in our students - so how would we expect to be able simply to observe ‘development’ in teachers? We can look for different behaviours and we can listen for different beliefs (Hey, I’m not arguing against this - see the previous section.), but we have to allow for the long-term development of an individual teaching style which seems to run independent of the comings and goings (frequently contradictory) of ELT innovation. I guess I’m saying that the right to be my own teacher, working in ways which year-in, year-out, lead to successful language learning by my students, needs to be protected against the keenness of people like me, the manager, to have everyone involved in my version of what continuing professional development "really" means.

The danger of the second fallacy is that I, as a manager, begin to think that I have the right to demand personal involvement in professional behaviour more or less as a condition of employment. This seems to me so unreasonable as not to need disputing, but the danger does perhaps need to be articulated, so that statements from managers (as Management) along the lines of, ‘The most important thing about continuing professional development is the personal development of the teacher,’ don’t just get nodded through without question. My employers have several legitimate demands on my time and energy, but my personal development is my own business, as is the extent to which I find it in my work. If I do my job well against agreed criteria, I demand the right to find my personal development in my mountain climbing, or my motor cycle maintenance, or where I will.

So, as I strive in best continuing professional development mode to be the best manager I can be, I know that a mutually re-reinforcing experience of personal and professional development is a highly effective change force, but I also know that personal development, as welcome as it is when it comes to call, is properly beyond the scope of management. My brief concerns the professional. Here, I want to create learning opportunities for colleagues to take advantage of in terms of their own continuing professional development. I see a responsibility on me to monitor and evaluate the use of those opportunities and to be open to feedback and feed-in which will enable me to create new opportunities. I acknowledge that other forms of development take place which I cannot monitor or evaluate, but which I need to be as aware of as I can, and to respect.

Perhaps my greatest responsibility as manager is to the students. If it becomes clear that students are learning less well with teachers who do not attend continuing professional development events, then this would constitute grounds for action. If students are learning equally successfully across that divide, against criteria that we all agree to be meaningful, perhaps my energies would be well directed towards trying to find out how it is that so many different styles of teaching can bring this about.

Professionalising the personal in CPD

In one sense, I see this as the previous section writ large, but let’s take a different angle into it. I’ve been involved in ELT/TEFL/TESOL for thirty years now, which makes me one of the survivors, if nothing else. For the last year, and for the first time, I’ve had a continuing, as distinct from a short-term, contract, which also makes me one of the lucky ones. These two personal observations are meant to relate to two important aspects of professionalisation: entry and career structure. I’m writing here about ELT/TEFL/TESOL as something separate from other teaching provision in a country’s education system. If we see it as another subject, akin to geography or mathematics in a curriculum, then its teachers should be treated in the same way as geography or mathematics teachers and we don’t have a separate issue here.

Like most people of my generation on the international circuit, I came in to the occupation by accident of language and I got my professional training and education later. While I believe and hope that more and more countries are making provision for their own language education, that scenario of the young Anglo on the loose is not likely to change radically in the foreseeable future - nor is that entirely a bad thing - and ELT/TEFL/TESOL is not going to become a profession by the criterion of how you get into it. On the other hand, this fact need not get in the way of stipulating what a person needs to do in order to get themselves onto a professional register. In other words, people can be required to demonstrate seriousness if they wish to stay on in the occupation and be taken seriously. In that sense, we can talk about professionalising ELT/TEFL/TESOL.

The real difficulty about a career structure is that there are very few places to go as you get older. ELT/TEFL/TESOL sucks people in when they are young, cheap and mobile and spits them out as they become expensive and encumbered. I know I’ve been lucky, I have friends from other waterfronts who haven’t been. In this area of our occupation, it may well be the case that a register maintained by a professional body could be a welcome additional influence in filling job opportunities in such a way that the race is marginally more often to the swift, and not only to the well-connected. That won’t make ELT/TEFL/TESOL a career in the sense of a structured and organised progression of salaried employment, or create a greater number of satisfying jobs for people as they get older, but it could provide a welcome support to professional seriousness. Inasmuch as the professional body separates out the individual teacher’s professional standing from his or her relationship with an employer, it should also offer a little more independence of status to each ELT/TEFL/TESOL ‘professional’.

But let’s pause briefly to check the situation again from the two perspectives we used in the previous section.

A long time ago (think 1970: situationalised drills and language laboratories), I taught at a language school in Folkestone. It was, in many ways, where I learned the tools of the trade. I remember a colleague being criticised for her regular practice of having students either anglicise their names or choose an English one, and for touching students too often as she moved round the class. Come to that, I remember being marked down on my teaching practice the year after that for ‘depending too much on personal relationships’, I think it was. The point I want to make is that versions of all these faults and mistakes were waiting round the corner of the seventies in order to move into the mainstream. The detail of what makes good teaching can not be mandated in the abstract, it can only be noted in the interaction of actual teachers and learners. So, we shall want to be careful that a professional body does not get involved in trying to mandate what matters, although it may well have a contribution to make in monitoring and evaluating practices that are professionally unacceptable.

If a professional body seeks to support the professionalisation of ELT/TEFL/TESOL by maintaining a register of members, updated by the members themselves as they submit evidence of their continuing professional development, this seems to me to be a potentially very useful contribution. But, for the reasons given above, we also have to recognise styles of development which we cannot monitor because they will not ‘register’ quite so straightforwardly. Otherwise, we create a false characterisation of what continuing professional development ‘really’ is.

It is not the case that we can establish undisputed polar extremes of a continuum, with the registered proof of continuing professional development at one end and static professional atrophy at the other. In terms of observable activity, the same behaviours might be interpreted as extreme cynical careerism at one end and undemonstrative pedagogic growth at the other.

The second point, as with management, is that we do not try to invade the personal, or we once again create pressures on individuals which no employer or statutory body has the right to apply. Attractive though the formulations are, the interdependence of personal and professional development is a theme which the professionalisers of our occupation should treat with extreme caution.

Talking SIGs

The SIGs have brought a great deal to IATEFL, most noticeably, to a regular member such as myself, an opportunity to get together with peers of similar interests and dig a little deeper into those interests without having to spend time establishing common ground all over again.

A corollary of all this, of course, in the context of our continuing professional development, is that the SIGs have to talk to each other, metaphorically speaking. This is one reason why I am so grateful to have been invited to the ELT Management SIG meeting. It has helped me clarify my own interim position on continuing professional development by helping me see other perspectives.

I think I am going to continue to use ‘development’ as an intransitive concept. In other words, people can train me and educate me, but no one can develop me: I develop. The age of the ‘teacher developer’ (as in ‘teacher trainer’) is closer now than it was just a few years ago when the expression would raise a laugh, but it is not quite here yet, even though IATEFL in its slogan has moved towards that usage.

But I have to be careful now about what I say with regard to the relationship between personal and professional development. ELT/TEFL/TESOL is being professionalised, which is mostly a good thing; ELT/TEFL/TESOL professionalisation needs to be managed - sensitively and seriously. Neither of these operations can be allowed to have any claims on personal development, although both must offer opportunities for professional development into which individuals may decide to make a personal investment. ‘May’ is as far as I think the management of professionalisation should be allowed to go.

References

Fullan, M. 1993. Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform. London: The Falmer Press.

Note

At the CPD Symposium from which this piece arises, Jackie Gresham spoke explicitly from what I have called the TD perspective, Fiona Balloch the managerial, and Andrew Brown the professionalisation. Adrian Underhill made the most explicit claims on the interweaving of personal and professional development, Bart Van Thielen raised the relationship between CPD and student learning, and Howard Thomas made the point about a professional body giving individuals some independence of status separate from their employer. j.edge@aston.ac.uk