Continuous Professional Development (CPD)

Be always ready to continuos learning is needed for the teaching improvement.

CPD obligations are common to most professions. CPD is a planned, continuous and lifelong process whereby teachers try to develop their personal and professional qualities, and to improve their knowledge, skills and practice, leading to their empowerment, the improvement of their agency and the development of their organisation and their pupils.

Nowadays I’m a teacher, but I’m not working yet because I’ve just finished my studies and I’m preparing my competitive exams for next June.

But, if I were already working in a school I would like to attend to the courses of the CEFIRE which gives a lot of support for teachers by free, because it’s funded by Conselleria. I would like to learn more about how to assess taking in to account the 8 competences based on the multiple intelligences of Howard Gardner, I think I would chose some course like that, but the offer is really wide.

Besides, it would be great to take part in an Erasmus + programme funded by the European Union. I find it very interesting because we can learn a lot of things travelling to others countries and adapting their best practices. It’s a beautiful experience to share knowledge around the UE and improve our skills in teaching and also in language and communication.

I hope someday this programmes will be available for all teachers, working or not, because there are very interesting courses and experiences that if we aren’t in a school/high school we can’t access to.

There are also other ways to be aware of the continuous development as:

• Classroom Action Research: teachers develop research questions, collect and analyse data and then they share their data with others teachers and write about it.
• Communities of practice: are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, teaching in that case, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
• Professional Learning Communities at School: teachers update their professional knowledge and skills within the context of an organised, school-wide system for improving teaching practices.

In my opinion, Professional Learning Communities at School are one of the best ways to practise CPD, because it’s easy organize a group in the school (it could be formal or not) where talk about teaching practices and try to improve the students learning sharing their best experiences, but also the errors, because all teachers learn about it and with less effort teachers can find better solutions to their problems.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter the programme we chose, the important thing is be aware that we should be responsible of our Professional Growth. 

Objectives and Assessment in a CLIL Context

Usually, here in Valencia, when we implement a CLIL Program, we based our lessons in the content of the subject, and the knowledge of the language is not a really aim, we use a foreign language sometimes as a language of work, sometimes to learn vocabulary… but teachers don’t teach the language in fact. What I mean, is that maybe we are too focused on achieve the curriculum objectives (and that’s what we assess) that we forget to teach and assess the language competence because it isn’t said literally in the curriculum.

I know that is important to teach the objectives established in the curriculum, but in CLIL, is also important focus on how to learn the foreign language explaining new grammar structures, vocabulary and language for communication and interaction. But, we have to take into account, that the objective of a subject is understand their content, we should avoid too only teaching language per se, forgetting their purpose of the subject. So, for me, the most important thing to teach to my Students in Economy, my subject, is to teach a well-balanced mix of both: content and language learning.

In order to what I’ve said, it seems to me a good model teaching in CLILA[1], which it defines three dimensions:

1.    Subject-specific skills and competences
2.    Subject-specific themes
3.    Communicative competences in the foreign language.

I would like to teach Economy focusing in contents, like understand how the market operates, some important skills as do a good research of information and know how to use it, and communicative competences as show opinions and personals points of view about current issues, teaching the structures that they need to show their opinion, using as support the descriptors of the language level, making it an additional aim apart from the curriculum.

For instance:

Skill: Be assertive showing your point of view.

Content: Market operation

Communicative competence: I can give or seek personal opinions in an informal discussion with friends, agreeing and disagreeing politely.

In that case, use this model is as a matter of fact, an instrument to do the assessment, because the descriptor allow teachers to focus the achievement of the students in the language competence in an integrated way whit the content objective.

I would assess their learning monitoring their learning from the beginning to the end:

1.    Diagnostic Assessment: to know what the student’s level is.
2.    Formative Assessment: to check how students are learning.
3.   Summative Assessment: To add all the contents, skills and communication competences acquired at the end of the course, as addition of the all assessments done during the course.

In my point of view, apart from assess their abilities, contents and language knowledge, is important to assess their behavior and their progression to take into account the inter-personal part of the learning process.

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[1] Ute Massler, Daniel Stolz &Claudia Queisser (2014) Assessment instruments for promary CLIL.