Chapter 7 Personal and Professional Development
43 Using professional journals
44 Doing action research
45 Starting a teaching portfolio
46 Building your teaching portfolio
47 Managing your time
48 Dealing with stress
49 Working as a part-time teacher
50 Coping with your paperwork
Parts of this chapter are about your own continuing professional development,
and other parts are about your survival!
First we look at ways of continuing to educate yourself in TESOL. Reading
professional journals is an important way of keeping up to date with, and
reflecting critically upon, developments in our field. If you want further tips on
following up the last suggestion in this set, try 500 Tips for Getting Published
(Sally Brown, Dolores Black, Abby Day and Phil Race, 1998).
Contemporary TESOL is moving towards breaking down unproductive
barriers which may exist between teaching and research. We offer some
suggestions on ‘Action Research’ that may alert you to ways that you can
continue to do creative research during your teaching.
We then offer some suggestions on starting and building your own teaching
portfolio. In many cultures and institutions there is a growing tendency to ask
teachers to build up a formal record of teaching achievement. A valuable
instrument for assessment of teaching competence is proving to be the teaching
portfolio, collecting together evidence of practice, including observation of
teaching. If you commit yourself to the building of such a portfolio as a
developmental process, you will have an ideal location in which to express the
findings of your action research projects. We hope that our suggestions will help