The Developing Teacher

Abstract

Teacher Development has been variously defined and distinguished from Teacher Training, Teacher Education, and Personal Development in the ELT canon of writing over the last three decades. Within ELT the term ‘development’ has been applied to a wide range of activities including skills training, curriculum development, materials development, classroom research, management training, job switching, and continuing professional development (CPD). It has also been applied to the kind of personal development perspectives that follow from the view that the way you are and how you go about things affects your teaching as much as any training, embodied for example in the well-known dictum ‘You teach who you are’ (Postman and Weingartner 1969). This elastic topic has an equally varied literature, three well-known and quite different examples being Stevick's (1976),Memory Meaning and Method, Richards' (2005),Professional Development for Language Teachers and Appel's (1995),Diary of a Language Teacher. The title under consideration here, The Developing Teacher by Duncan Foord, neither explores explicit theory or other people's experiences and reflections nor does it offer in-depth experiential and reflective pathways for developing practices. Rather it is in the currently popular genre of the 500 Activities type of handbook, in this case offering about 80 activities each complete with five- or six-step instructions and a pro forma grid to complete where needed. This book overlaps somewhat with Readings in Teacher Development by Head and Taylor (1997), and though it lacks the latter's developmental depth and breadth, it offers easy access to a range of ready-to-go activities.