Professional Reading
Teachers are given a great deal of advice and very little time. This page is about spending that little time well.
What is worth your time
Rather than listing titles that may be unavailable where you are, here are the kinds of reading that repay the effort, and how to judge what you find.
Practical methodology
Books and articles about how to teach a specific thing — writing, vocabulary, mixed-ability classes. Judge them by one test: does it tell me what to do on Monday? Material that only describes principles is interesting and rarely changes anything.
Applied linguistics, in small doses
Understanding how second languages are actually acquired changes how you interpret your students' errors. An error is usually evidence of a developing system, not of carelessness, and that single realisation changes how a teacher marks.
Examiners' reports and official syllabus documents
The most underused professional reading available. They tell you exactly what candidates did badly and why. Read them before planning a year, not after.
Writing about assessment and feedback
Which is worth more than most methodology, because marking consumes more teacher time than anything else and is the part most often done in the least effective way.
Literature and language for their own sake
A teacher who is still a reader teaches differently. This is not professional development in the formal sense, and it may matter more than anything that is.
Judging what you find
A great deal of teaching advice circulates online, and much of it is confident and wrong. Three questions filter most of it out.
- Does it work in a class of forty? A great deal of published methodology assumes twelve students and a photocopier. If a technique cannot survive your actual conditions, it is not advice for you.
- Does it tell me what to do, or only what to believe? Learners should be at the centre of the lesson is not actionable. Give the class four minutes in pairs before taking any answers is.
- Is the evidence anything more than one enthusiastic teacher? A technique that worked once for someone else may still be worth trying. Just try it as an experiment, and judge by what happens in your own room.
Using professional communities well
For many teachers, the most accessible professional development is a group of other teachers. RCF has run Facebook groups for English learning and teaching for around a decade, and exclusive Telegram and WhatsApp resource groups for English teachers. Read about them.
Groups repay a little discipline, though:
- Save what you want to keep, immediately. A worksheet shared on Monday is unreachable by Friday. Download it and file it the moment you see it.
- Ask specific questions. Any ideas for teaching writing? gets nothing useful. My Grade 10 class can write paragraphs but cannot join them — what has worked for you? gets real answers.
- Answer other people's questions. Explaining your own practice is the cheapest professional development there is, and it is the thing that most improves it.
- Check before you pass material on. A worksheet with an error in it, forwarded to two hundred teachers, reaches several thousand students.
The most valuable professional habit
Keep a single page for each class: what worked, what did not, and what I will change. Three lines after a lesson that went unusually well or unusually badly.
After a year it is the most useful professional document you own, because it is about your students, your subject and your conditions — which no book can be.