 There is a myriad of CPD applicants out there, this great world of professional development, the resources that could come in from online courses from short, the short pre-courses to the more expensive or expensive, slightly longer ones, the wealth of reading materials, the wealth of frameworks that we can fill in, what you can learn from observations, what you can learn from going to events like these, conferences. There is a lot out there, a lot to follow and it can be a lot to absorb and not to actually put into practice, you can lose sight of things. The challenge here was taking all of these notes and ideas and putting them into practice and implementing them. It is something easy, something off the shelf that is applicable and relevant to teachers, summarizing that it can be picked up and go with. And CPD as the buzzword here is, it's opt-in. Our emphasis was not on the opt, but on the in, to take that opt and make it as small as possible and therefore make it as easy as possible. I'll start with a quick little story about the background to this talk. We started a project in Atlantic in January to update our CPD programme, to make it more applicable and to make it more pick up and go for teachers. This event came about as a nice kind of natural deadline to force us to do it and this is kind of a launch day, if you like. In a moment of blissful naivety, I volunteered to do the talk which led to the cycle of two months of Peter chasing me for information. I started with the bio, which two weeks after the deadline, I saw him at a conference, I was sitting behind him, I wrote down the bio and we notes and threw it at him. It wasn't the digital way of sharing it, but it got there. He continued on with Laura, with the slides, sent the soft deadline, then the hard deadline, it was Thursday. When I started talking, really thinking about the content and then yesterday she came back to me and then I started really thinking about the content. Then along the way up here I started really putting it together. The hard part to think of here was I spoke to Peter a couple of months ago about how to frame this talk and what he wanted from it. His very sage advice was to have a narrative. The narrative was the tricky part to come up with it, to succinctly represent. I did have a couple of ideas on this narrative, which I'll go into now. This was the first narrative idea. Any takers, any ideas about that? Really complicated visual puzzle. This was my first narrative idea. We went away and we studied a lot and we thought about CPD. We tried everything, we tested everything and we were experts. And here are five things to do to make CPD engaging and relevant for all of your teachers. Coffee, paste, go. That was one option. This isn't it. We have only just picked up the hammer. We have not nailed it in any form. We probably will nail it, but we haven't. And I want to emphasize that point, so that is not the nerve. Next one is this one. We've all been to talks. I stress not today. We've all been to talks where maybe the speaker is not presenting that much content, but they are extracting content from the audience and from the talent. Yes, I am calling you the talent skill. Extracting these ideas from, as a purpose of your talk, and putting these ideas back as opposed to presenting something. That was an idea which I thought about, but I couldn't think of a good acronym. It's a nice adjective. How I perceive these talks sometimes. If anyone has any ideas or an acronym, please do shout. The third idea I had was this word I invented, or I thought it invented, called justificationism. I googled this actually, just to make sure it didn't mean anything nasty. Quite a lot of search results, most of them have nothing to do with that season. It's what I thought I invented. Justificationism is the type of talk where you've done a little research with the data, and your manager is saying you must do a presentation on it, or you need to justify the funding you've got, or you need to make sure you get the next round of funding. And that's not something going on in this talk. So that's ultimately been directed. And finally, I had to get Hobbes in here because he's my Europe. The idea of the sage on the stage holding forth and opining, and the conundrum of CPD, and just to be, you know, I'm going to take microphones and make an extra public speaker, and solving the puzzle for everyone. Because let's face it, this, as an industry, I think we probably are prone to overthinking things sometimes. But it's sometimes necessary because it's a funny training cycle, or in that it's so back loaded. The learning curve, most people's learning doesn't happen in the initial course they do to become an English language teacher, or a language teacher, which is quite short of comment, and happens later. Most of the learning happens in the middle of the career. Hence, we only think about development a lot more. And it's not an option. It's because not doing professional development leads to statements. It's a direct correlation, in my opinion. And the statements is there if the CPD isn't there, if the CPD isn't pursued. Which is why we all obey things. Okay, so I went back. In terms of the narrative, I went back to my start-up days, and all these Dragon's Day and Type pictures, they loved when you present a problem, and everyone goes, oh, yeah, yeah, that's a real problem. They expect you to provide a solution. So I tried to articulate the problem. I showed you this earlier. This is a selection of my own CPD folder emptied out on the desk. What I didn't mention is that this was from an event two months ago. This was from an event three months ago. So it was out here as well. You might recognise it. It was from an event a year ago. This was from an event six months ago. Point being, I went to these events. I gathered up all of these ideas, part of my own CPD, came back and got swamped because I'd made a couple of days out of the office. There was so much to catch up on. The same thing if I were teaching my students what these were. I would seem to have already been swamped. You don't get a creative. Changes around from something new and exciting in an idea and it becomes something more of a luxury, but you don't necessarily have time to do. This is the problem. And this led me to come up with my narrative finally. And this is the point if you like it. Again, would you pose any ideas? Superheroes? Superheroes. It helps if you say it in the west of Ireland accent. Forget about fancy hip plants. Action points. Action points. This is the focus. This is the idea. Making the CPD action. And I know it's one of those horrible pose words. It's like going forward. It's a very hard thing not to say. Because it doesn't mean a lot. Action points. Making CPD action. And taking things. Taking things. And taking action points to bring back and put them into practice. First of all, I like all the points that I'm using. Distressive. And I'm going to hear from Atlantic with Louch for my benefit. We broke it up into four areas. We tried to categorise and make four basic chapters if you like of CPD, which we're articulating in our updated program, Coding Motivations, Action Research, Teamwork. A whole host of other things. Flip between and interlate these different areas and contribute to them. Which are these. And I've realised even today, I've left a couple out of here. Things like frameworks and student feedback are probably a part of this as well. But they inform these four main chapters, which I now go through. And the structure I'm going to use here is I will present what I see as the problem or the challenges. You will all nod, no angrily. And then I will say, this is our crack at meeting that challenge or solving that problem. And then I will give you a task. And after the task, I will ask you to take your action point from that and bring it back to your base. So we do that for each of these four areas now. Okay. And how is my red printing there? Is that visible? Yes. It's a terrible question. Okay. Observations, first of all. And the challenge with observations, here are some of them. The why is an obvious challenge. If there's no purpose to an observation, it's pretty much meaningless. If it's to do something, you have to get observations done beyond the mandatory once-a-year DOS observation. It's an observation for observation's sake. The feedback will be relevant because there won't be as a purpose behind it. The when is a challenge. The when does a DOS have time. When does a teacher trainer have time to go and do observations? If teachers are going to do the observations, who provides the cover? If the cover is going to be scheduled for peer observations, how do you keep the DOS's hand from its glory by scheduling all of these? It's another challenge. The where. I didn't bring the where, because I thought it would be obvious. That was great. The idea that not everyone is accustomed to giving feedback and observing, and maybe we don't want to say it. Maybe it gets trapped in relationships or almost becomes self-serving. That was great. There's no detail feedback there. It's like magic. Every teacher will have instinct, instinct is a part of good teaching, and it's too easy to dismiss good teaching as instinct. You have to show an articulate and dig a little bit deeper. The best teachers and the all-good teachers will think and reflect on what they're doing. Our crack at meeting these challenges is specialising. We specialise our observations into different types, whether that's onboarding for a new teacher on the first day, whether it's orientation. We'll add more detail onboarding a couple of weeks later, whether it's a DOS observation, whether it's an intrafatical observation in an issue, whether it's a request-based observation or specific skills. We designed a template menu off-the-shelf observation, and it's ready to go with that. Pure windows where a teacher is encouraged to identify something they're good at and be observed and observed on that area. And to keep an ongoing cycle where observations are going on throughout the year, it's not this annual thing or this annual thing, we at Atlantic have a provision here to have an extra floor teacher always on duty who will facilitate these kind of observations and cover class. There's a checklist, another idea I've seen quite recently, which I think is a very good idea to inform people who are not necessarily used to observing, and things like, for example, things you should see in class. The learners understood the instructions first time. The learners were using the target language. The observer can go take it, take it, take it, take it. So now it's your turn. Think about this checklist, a checklist of observations, whether it's a specific observation on a specific area of teaching or a more general observation. I'd like you in 30 seconds to talk to your partner if you don't like them. And what items would you put on this checklist? Come up with one each. An item you would put on your checklist. 30 seconds. Okay. Okay. Okay, so shout me one example. Shout me one example, Anybody else, shall we? Scope and sequence, the checker is in scope and sequence. Thanks. Moving on to the next one. I have a set of people planted here. Insets, we're another area we looked at. And the challenges around insets, and some of the challenges with implementing insets, insets, and making them engaging and applicable. The challenge of when and the scheduling, people have families to go to in the evening, it's not always possible, it's a lot of issues. If it's at lunchtime, do you provide the pizza? It's a key burning question. And we're kind of reluctant and a philosophical level to keep the teachers at many cards. So we'll be at that time as if we should not necessarily be together. The sermon on the mount, the idea that a dossier, a teacher, a trainer, in parrots, all of this wisdom and everybody else must listen. It's not necessarily the case. Budget, there needs to be buy-in here. I don't necessarily have a solution, but the person financing the CPD has to have the buy-in literally. The fear factor, some people just don't want to do insets. They would incontinence the option. It's just, it's not a feasible option for them. The hollier idea that things don't get captured, that things don't get acted on, it's just a lot of talk, but then people forget because they go back to class. And again the, wait, I've repeated myself there. Okay, so some of our crack at meeting some of these challenges. We developed a dynamic calendar of insets with the shopping list of items we wanted to hit and the people that apply to do insets on these different areas. Group were into individual delivery. A three-person inset, 15 minutes each, can be as much value or more as one 45-minute session. Workshop format, that it's not just one person speaking. There's applicable and actionable takeaways from it. Ambassadors and publication, the idea that one person had an inset is responsible for recapping that and bringing it to colleagues or republish it and share it with people who weren't there. Other platforms were not just depending on insets. There are other ways to express learnings and shared knowledge. Okay, your turn, propose an inset. I won't put this to the room, but I would like some hands up. Propose an inset, an example. When you go back to your base, what should your next inset be about? Okay, I would look at an example internally we have, where I think... We need to look at audience and greet. That's fine. Take a point, action research. A difficult area to capture, a difficult area to start to kill it. And because there's so much information there, how do you access all of these websites we're members of? How do you access all of these reading resources? It looks like work and can't and teaching. It's a distraction from the day-to-day workings of the syllabus. You can't focus on this because you don't have time. You're focusing on the teaching. It seems like something extra and other, something that happens in a void. And again, Quinn, Quinn is the question. Some of the resolutions we looked at, presenting a library of sources, in one place that people can read and adopt to. And then do the learning and approach to go fast and break things. To learn something, bring it into the classroom, try it out, then report back on your learnings. The alpha testers, we tend to forget the students and the people who test this and it's easy to forget about that. And the shared learning, not necessarily inset, maybe it's a blog, maybe it's a network where you can share your ideas and share your learnings from it. Your turn, your action point I would like you to encourage to take from this to think of action research, something you will do as an area of research when you go back to your classrooms. Why will you do it? How will you do it? And how will you share the knowledge when you've done it? Final point then, it's teamwork. And a final point, I will emphasize today more in the final. Teamwork, some of the problems here, some of the challenges, a lot of good talk goes on over coffee, good ideas that maybe go cold with the thoughts that don't get shared, they don't get implemented. The good intentions go to waste. And again, there's the catch-up factor that day-to-day admin, maybe you do not get a chance. Some of the ideas we looked at to resolve this, the questionnaire when you go to an event to write down the action points, the recommendations that you take from that event, which I think people should be doing here today, cataloged ideas sharing in one place, whether that's on a blog or WhatsApp group, built in reflection, we just added a box to our syllabus plan, things that work today that I'd like to share, exchanges, get out of the building, allow raise and cooperate with people in other schools to bring ideas.