Top 3 misconceptions having a negative effect on the professional development of the teachers
Sadly, it’s a fact that not all of us allocate enough time for our professional development. There can be many reasons. Some of them are our overloaded schedules, time-consuming lesson preparations, general tiredness, etc. However, other than that, there are some misconceptions which can have a highly negative effect on our professional development as teachers. Today we’ll look at 3 of them.
1. CPD is not important
There is a widely popular belief that having a professional development plan is not a very important career goal or a goal in general. It is sad to witness how some of us don’t consider teaching as a ‘good enough’ job to start thinking about the need for improving our skills. The advocates of this view like to say that nothing tangible changes in the way people learn, so there is no need to continuously work on our skills. If you know how to teach the present simple tense for instance, then you know it for good. At the same time, another thesis is being circulated — including technology in the teaching and learning process is not necessary as it takes a lot of time and distracts the learners.
Though there might be some grain of truth in the above mentioned, we should also not forget that nothing is static or stable. Life changes, people change, methodologies and ways of assimilating new material change. Students nowadays are exposed to a lot of information inflow through media, films, etc. The way they grasp and internalise information changes every step of the way and it is the teacher’s job to make sure that the course materials are adapted accordingly. In addition to that, a lot of new apps and platforms appear which help the teachers create nice and attractive learning materials, games, activities, etc. Integrating those in the teaching process will help the learners integrate with the world developments more successfully in the future as well.
To be able to do this, it is crucial that teachers take CPD courses, experiment with new methodologies, try new activities, see what works better with their learners. Otherwise, if we don’t develop ourselves, our classes will be boring, hence, not productive.
2. Qualification courses are not that effective
As a result of deep-rooted habits of not being open to new ideas and experiments, some of us find it really hard to try out new things in our classrooms. We believe that the tested ways are the best and whatever professional development courses teach us cannot be applied in our classroom however good they might be. This is just because our students are “not ready for it”. As a result, we avoid participating in teacher qualification courses and even if we do, we feel quite reluctant to apply their suggestions to our real-life classroom setting. Well, we’ll never know unless we try.
Courses like TKT, CELTA, DELTA, TEFL, etc. prepare the teachers to be better organized, better adjust the learning materials and better deliver interactive, student-oriented and student-centred sessions. I don’t mean to say that everything those courses suggest can 100% be applied to our lessons, however, they definitely develop a new mindset, a new approach to course development and delivery.
3. Classroom observations are pointless
I probably won’t be wrong to claim that none of us like being observed. The reasons are obvious; humans don’t like being judged, they don’t like when mistakes are being pointed out. This definitely hinders professional development as we unconsciously reject the constructive feedback of the observer.
However, we cannot deny the fact that when teaching, there are things we don’t notice, like teacher talking time, student involvement, instructional mistakes, etc. It becomes more obvious when we watch our colleagues teach. We then suddenly start to notice similar mistakes in our own teaching. So why not to use classroom observations as professional development sessions? At the end of the day, we want to become better professionals and deliver effective, target-oriented classes.
In a word, if we try to be more open-minded, ready for change and challenges, we’ll have a faster and more effective outcome in our professional development as a teacher.
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Маргарита Аветисян 
Вероника Аветисян 
