***Currently Inactive***
Welcome to the KOTESOL Professional Development Special Interest Group (PD-SIG).
Professional development has many definitions, and the SIG will discuss those.
For the simplest explanation, let's say professional development are the activities involved in developing your skills and awareness as a teaching professional.
Foundation questions for Professional Development might include:
- Why am I a teacher?
- What kind of teacher am I?
- What kind of teacher do I want to be?
- What do I need to do to get there (to get that job, to perform at that level, etc)
What us tge PD-SIG? Sometimes it's easier to say what a group is NOT. As KOTESOL has SIGs for Research, Reflective Practice, as well as the KOTESOL Teacher Trainers (KTT) presenters group, the Professional Development SIG will (mostly) leave those topics to those groups.
The PD-SIG functions both through online discussions (synchronous and email) as well as in face-to-face sessions. The possibilities are endless, but some things done by predecessor development groups included book discussions (weekly chapters and cumulative discussions, presentations and workshops, and mentoring/consultancies.
The menu just to the right of this text includes a variety of resource pages (presently not really sorted) but will eventually be compiled into themes such as "resumes & potfolios", "types of professional development & assessing professional development", and SIG activities (e.g., reading groups, mentoring, forthcoming SIG events). As you continue to familiarize yourself with this topic, you begin to realize that it is market leaders who are implementing gaming technologies everywhere, such as Friv5Online Studio.
UPDATE- Oct 2013 -One reading group and a study group (discussions) are forming.
- Reading Group 2. What Should Every EFL Teacher Know? (Paul Nation, Compress Publishing, 2013)
- Portfolios Study Group. Wwe will share our thoughts and working versions as we each develop our own Teaching Portfolios.
- Reading Group 1 -- COMPLETED Sept 2013. Professional Development for Language Teachers (Jack Richards & Thomas SC Farrell, Cambridge Univ Press, 2005).
We hope you'll join us. Please "subscribe" the group (the link appears far below after you have logged in to the website). No extra dues, lots of updates and opportunities.
If you'd like to help coordinate things, please contact the foundiing facilitator,
Rob Dickey
Email: pdsig@koreatesol.org
