 مرحباً مرحباً أنا أحسن سأتحدث with you today about what teaching spots are and let me ask you first before we start when you see the word spots what's the first thing that comes to your mind yeah you may think of circles you may think of batches of colors what about circles when you see circles or when you hear the word circles what's the first thing that comes to your mind things that come together collaboration cooperation so what if the circles collect together or come together they would have lots of cooperation and collaboration so that's what we are going to speak about today hot teaching spots how can we as teachers help each other in gaining professional development and let me start first with the most important question what is professional development let me give you choices do you think is it reading the latest teaching magazines is it the assessment and the evaluation of students progress is it the acquisition of skills and knowledge is it the progress achieved by teacher in teaching students which one do you think is the most suitable let me give you 2 seconds to think it over do you think it can be the reading the latest teaching magazines do you think this is going to achieve enough professional development what about assessment and evaluation does assessment or evaluation is it considered a kind of professional development for the teacher so the answer is it's the acquisition of skills and knowledge that's the most important thing about professional development it doesn't only improve our knowledge but it also adds to our skills so the next question which comes after this question what is professional development why is it necessary for us why is it necessary for any professional why is professional development that important well yes it's both for personal and development and for career advancement we have to develop ourselves on our skills and at the same time we always look for better jobs better promotions so in order to achieve get better promotions we should develop our skills and extend our experience so that we would be able to help others and perfect our work at the same time professional development is very important also because it improves your skills increase your value to your organization for sure when we have a highly organized a highly developed skillfully developed person and he has good experience and at the same time he is a talented employee or a talented teacher for sure this would increase your value to organization and enhance your future career prospects it would offer you the chance to get better jobs in better places so let's ask ourselves also another question do all schools offer the right kind of professional development for teachers if you take a look at this article from we are teachers website you will find that we have here ins and outs about professional development when teachers get guided teachers get guided professional development learning networks they join different learning networks they mix with in person sessions classroom observations means they get involved in classroom observations they have hands on experience in different workshops they view core skills as the responsibility of educators viewing core skills no matter the subjects they teach they view different subjects for different teachers to gain different different skills from these different teachers it's a different kind of experience that observing other peers would add a lot to your your skills as a teacher and your talent as a teacher for sure you are going to find something good or something that you don't like about the other teachers so how do you see it and then how is this going to help you to develop yourself better as a teacher and how to develop yourself also at the same time there are some flexible courses that give teachers open-ended strategies for meeting the standards they help but also allow a lot of originality lots of flexible courses they ask teachers to apply what they learn in classes and they are observed to see what are the advantages and disadvantages of this in schools in their own classes all this is in contrast with other professional development topics chosen by the principal of the entire faculty of course this does not personalize the professional development and does not give the teachers the chance to choose what they really like to develop sometimes the school sees something and the teacher sees something else and they don't get along and the teacher doesn't benefit enough from the training and at the same time the students are not going to benefit as well a handful of in-person professional development sessions over the course of a year often covering unrelated topics this is one of the most irritating problems for teachers in schools sometimes they are forced to attend these different kinds of sessions and they are not related at all or they are not practical enough or they know it already so they benefit nothing it's just a waste of time professional development delivered lecture style just to give a lecture and it's not interactive you send English teachers to reading and writing workshops and math teachers to multiplication ones in other words they are highly highly unpractical sessions and so the teachers gain nothing as students do in school and they don't benefit anything and when we have time for these sessions that ignore state benchmarks and creative stripping trainings that focus on nothing but bubble tests unfortunately some some training sessions they just train the teachers how to become to train their students better to get better marks that's it and so in which case the teachers do not benefit from this it's a state of school the teachers remain the same and they gain nothing in the end so if we put the pros and cons together of professional development it's one of the most important things is that we should personalize professional development so that the teachers would be eager enough in order to do professional development and at the same time think how to do it in the best possible way let's move ahead with the next section let's ask ourselves how can we pursue professional development if we say that we as individuals not as schools we want to have professional development how can we do it how do you think what are the different kinds of ways that the teachers can follow in order to gain professional development let me suggest a few ways first of all case study methods are very effective if you go it's a personal experience I myself used to read lots of case studies from different countries applying different methods of teaching or teaching projects in different countries in the world and what were the results in the end and what's the reflections about these results they helped the teachers teachers to gain lots of information lots of experience through reading these study cases and analyzing them another point also is consultation you can ask your supervisor and older colleague people whom you trust and you believe that they have enough experience that can help you to tell you what ways to track in order to be able to achieve professional development also one of the interesting ways is coaching this coaching has been followed in the last few years in number of schools around the world where an older teacher super mentors another younger teacher and sometimes they work together the younger teacher works beside the older teacher in order to observe what he or she is doing and gain more experience from this also we have communities of practice groups of teachers they practice they read for example different articles together they do explain different kinds of lessons in front of each other so the group the group of teachers is going to comment on the pros and cons of lessons explained and so the teachers gain in depth into their own teaching lesson study also to analyze different lessons from videos let's say on YouTube or taped videos in different places lesson study is very important the analysis of these lessons are very very important the teacher in this case we turn the teacher into a teacher researcher the teacher studies the lesson what's the objective of the lesson what are the steps followed what are the games played by the teacher in class in order to make lesson fun what about the homework what about writing in class what about the revision different kinds of steps that can be analyzed through different lessons mentoring which is one of the most beautiful ways of professional development when you have a much much older teacher and you consider this teacher is your senior guardian and this teacher is going to help you to make a professional development plan for yourself is going to follow you up and tell you you are doing this right this is wrong what do you think of this what do you think of that and you go back to the teacher this senior teacher every now and then it helps a lot with lots of teachers like this very much this can be done in different ways not necessarily to have the same senior teacher and in different school a person whom you trust let's say your own model for teaching for you another one is reflective supervision also you can ask your peers to come to your class watch your classes and give you their observation about what you do in class technical assistance of course you can get this through your supervisor of the department these are wonderful some of the wonderful ways that you can use for personal professional development let me ask you about another another question do you think that professional development should be done on individual or group basis and why individual basis is important you have to start you have to have the initiative but at the same time if you can do it with a group this is more motivating and it gives you much better ideas than just to have your own idea alone so professional development in a group is much more effective but again the individual one is very important let us this makes us wonder this idea of having professional development is very important for us maybe because we have read a lot we have got in contact with the internet a lot because we live in urban areas but what about the people we live in poor areas in the urban areas also in poor parts of the cities or people who have no facilities at all what about teachers who have no facilities no supervision or live in rural areas what can we do about these people as I have just told you I'm sorry those people need people to help sometimes we find people from these different places telling us please come we have no facilities we have nothing want somebody to help us just give us ideas track us the way tell us what to do because the city is very far from us and is very ghosty and we don't know what to do so here in Egypt since I've been in the teaching profession for lots of years over 30 years in fact we have thought of an idea that can help people in different places even people who live in good places what to do lots of people seek professional development but they don't know how to do it it's not easy for them to have a mentor or even a coach so we came up with a new idea why not form an online network among Egyptian English language teachers that's why we thought we can do it first online and we started with the Egyptian teachers since we know that lots of Egyptians really are in need of this idea of professional development so we came up with this idea of we started thinking of this idea because we believe it's a community responsibility it's not an individual responsibility we should share together collaborate together in trying to solve this idea why not ask people from teachers from different places to join us in order to help in this kind of development so we came up with this idea of our community we started thinking why don't we get down to the teachers in schools whether private or governmental and call them for professional development and help them sustain a lifelong one the idea itself to go to these places to these schools and call the people for professional development when we started it was a big challenge because lots of people say we don't have time during the school year and even in the summer vacation we have to take the kids to the summer resort or we have to stay home so it was a great challenge for us not to call people and convince them of the importance of professional development but also to sustain it as a lifelong one we believe that professional development should start with the teacher should start with the teacher or herself it has to be personalized you have to be convinced as a teacher of the importance of professional development it has to be blended means I have to use different ways as we said before we have coaching we have mentoring we have lesson study different things workshops to attend it has to be blended to get as much benefit collaboration share together as a group of teachers this kind of professional development it has to be supportive somebody has to support you whether the school, the administration the head of department, your friends your colleagues you have to be supported by someone to help you give you motivation to go ahead and to be on going be motivated all the time motivate yourself all the time that you have to go on with professional development and never to give up whatever happens and sometimes the people they like to apply it but sometimes it's a failure and they get nowhere so they believe there is no need for professional development I forget about it I won't apply anything but you have to keep on trying and trying and think of different ways let's think of the whole story as if we have a child who is a slow learner or a child who has learning difficulties are you going to leave him or are you going to check for different ways to help him so that's the idea we have to track different ways to help not only ourselves but our students who are the final goal of this kind of professional development this is a nice idea was said through intel.com it's you next thing how did we start our community we started of having this kind of training community we started first with courses and workshops and then when we started attracting people's attention through the internet and through these courses and workshops we started having a number of programs that would help us help teachers be convinced of the importance of professional development we started convincing people to come to weekly discussions the teachers come from different schools to attend discussions about any topics concerning teaching we do it once a week on the last day of the school last school day of the week which is Thursday for us here and then we started inviting teachers to come to internship programs the teachers would spend with us three months we would help them get their professional level evaluated help them have a plan for professional development attend professional development sessions for two weeks attend all weekly discussions and we have also the teaching club which I'm going to speak about after that and then they would get their professional development level after three months evaluated and they get the certificate for that this was one of the programs that attracted a number of teachers we had two groups of teachers and they joined in these two internships and the best thing about these internships is that the teachers start reflecting this on what they do in classes and they start thinking of the problems that they have and they were looking for answers for them but with no success another thing that we do also is that the teaching club we have this event on the last Saturday of every month and we invite three distinguished speakers from different places and we have people face-to-face or we have people distinguished people online like for example we had Dr. William Koch we had Vicky Hallett we had Scott Thornbury and we had Adrian Underhill the teachers enjoyed speaking to those people online and that was so exciting in addition to the teaching club we also have this networking scheme we are in touch with lots of people around the world not only in Egypt but around the world as well through our network of MAHA ESL Training Community we set different posts online that help teachers with professional development and at the same time help in communication with teachers with different experiences around the world and this is our Facebook page and group if you'd like to join us here we have a number of pictures of some of the events that we have already arranged so far we have arranged eight teaching clubs and lots of weekly discussions and at the same time we are having our internship program we are trying to get to as many teachers as many schools as possible in order to be able to spread the belief in long life professional development and enjoy the photos