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Why CPD is a never-ending journey
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When I arrived in Abu Dhabi as a head of department, I honestly felt I had all, or at the very least most of the answers.
However, before I’d even fully unpacked, I began to realise that this wasn’t the case.
Problems are nuanced, and contexts are significant. And as I began to get stuck into my new role, I came to understand that, as both a leader and a teacher, I would need to adapt.
The teacher I needed to be would be dictated by the situation I found myself in. In short, my CPD needs in one context were not the same as they were in another setting.
My need for teacher CPD
This issue of adaptability became blatantly obvious to me when I delivered my first vocabulary lesson to a bottom set in the UAE.
My usual system of teaching new words through extended reading and then structuring some writing for the students to rehearse these words was not enough. I had to change. But the problem was, I didn’t know where to start.
In my school in the UK, there were several weekly whole-school CPD sessions, along with fortnightly department meetings that focused on subject knowledge and implementation. There were also regular Teach Meets and BrewEds in my local area.
Although in my new school there were also weekly CPD sessions, I didn’t know where to go to get the answers to my specific question.
What was the issue?
The first problem I encountered was that the boys couldn’t remember the words that they had only had one exposure to.
The next issue I found was that, being second-language learners, the boys had rarely seen these words in context.
I was spending a lot of time thinking about these problems, but solutions weren’t forthcoming. One day, in near despair, I was walking along the corridor trying to find some outdoor space to reset my brain. As I did, I passed an Arabic classroom. Inside they were chanting words and definitions back and forth.
I was intrigued, so I went inside and stayed for 15 minutes. I watched the teacher as she began by modelling lots of short sentences with the words in multiple contexts. Next, the teacher shared the extended writing with the students, and when the target words came up, they were given a quick countdown before being asked to show a synonym on their whiteboards.
Watching my colleague teach was invaluable CPD. This lesson was a useful first step, after which, I decided to look at the methods of a few authors.
I started with research on the process of writing, looking at journal articles suggested by the Education Endowment Foundation. This led me to The Writing Revolution, a non-profit organisation that shares approaches to teaching writing, one of which involved using fragmented sentences. I thought this could work really well with our targeted vocabulary.
Embedding new vocabulary
Now I had some potential strategies, I needed to make a plan before I put them into action.
I put together a mini scheme of learning that would dovetail with what I was already delivering in the classroom. I put aside lesson time to give me a chance to check for understanding by using fragmented sentence starters containing the targeted word and either “because” or “when”.
For example, “I felt naïve when…” or “I was mortified because…”
It was a simple but effective way to check the vocabulary had truly been embedded.
Once students had remembered the new vocabulary and could recall the words frequently with cues, I wanted to be certain that they actually had committed the words to their long-term memories.
For this, I needed to do some reading on long-term memory retention, and turned to Make it Stick by Peter C Brown. Here I found the idea of using picture cues to aid memory.
I started by introducing images to support definitions. I would then remove the definition and word, eventually only sharing the image as a cue and asking the students to recall both the image and definition.
Podcast CPD
This method was helpful, but as the months went on I noticed that the students didn’t actually know how to manipulate the words I was teaching them.
I picked up on this problem of application when my students were giving responses in class. I noticed how they were slowing themselves down to use the words in the verb tense.
It won’t surprise you that, as a teacher from the UK, this wasn’t a problem I had encountered before. Where could I get some help with this particular CPD need?
Podcasts, apparently, were the answer, according to my colleagues over in MFL. I discovered that there were countless podcasts discussing this very issue, and plenty on target vocabulary.
So my research next took me to the voice of Gianfranco Conti, who suggested always showing words in context. The rationale was that students would build up a pattern of how to manipulate words - what we might call derivational morphology.
Once we were at this point, we could then return to incomplete sentences such as, “The naivety of Oliver Twist is obvious because he…” and “To avoid the mortification of ______ , Adam …”
An ongoing journey
What’s the lesson of all this? The name “CPD” makes it clear: professional development is supposed to be continuous. What I’ve described here is just the beginning of what I’m sure will be years of learning about vocabulary acquisition in the international classroom.
The journey I’m on with vocabulary has shown me the wealth of CPD opportunities that are available in international schools. Both as a teacher and a leader, I’ve learned so much about how to make the most of CPD and how to find strategies that will suit my classes.
Research and then refinement: these are the two sides of CPD, both of which are absolutely vital when arriving in a new context.
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