you to build your portfolio, so that it is available for assessment if and when you
need it.
The remainder of this chapter is about survival rather than professional
development, but can be viewed optimistically as ‘personal development’. We
start with some suggestions on time management. If you already manage
your time really well, you are less likely to need our next set of suggestions on
stress, but stress is by no means confined to the consequences of failed time
management. Then the following set of suggestions is directed particularly to
part-time teachers, whose conditions of employment can in themselves cause
various kinds of stress. We end with some hints on what to do with the paper
mountain that may have accumulated on your desk while you were reading this
chapter!
43 Using professional journals
In our field there are a number of journals whose articles are mainly written from
the perspective of classroom practice. Such articles can be a useful stimulus for
professional development at any stage of a career. The following suggestions
should help you make the most of them.
1 Get access, for yourself and others. Think both of the international
practitioners’ journals (eg, ELT Journal, English Teaching Professional,
Forum, TESOL journal), and of local journals which may be produced by
teachers’ associations in your area. Then find out where they are stocked. If
your own institution does not subscribe to them, perhaps there is a nearby
academic library which does. Within the limits of copyright regulations, you
and colleagues can build up a resource bank of photocopied articles to keep
in your staffroom.
2 Look out for different types of article. Lots of articles in these journals are
‘how to’ articles: reports of ideas that have worked well in the classroom for
the writer, and that readers could try. But other articles are evaluations of,
for example, textbooks, discussions of difficult issues in the profession, or
discussions of the rationale for a particular approach. These various article
types can be useful in different ways.
3 Read critically. Articles are of most use when you can relate them to your
own experience, and make your own decisions about the relevance of the
arguments and usefulness of the ideas. The following tips give you some
pointers to look for.
4 Find the suggestions in the text. If, for example, an article contains an
account of how self-access materials are prepared in a particular institution,
then this could be interpreted as a suggestion that readers might try
something similar. If you read articles in this light, you will get a good sense
of the relevance they may have for you personally.82 500 TIPS FOR TESOL