Don't Stop Now: Professional Development Opportunities for Early Career Teachers
Handout and Resources
-Mark Cormier, 2025
Introduction: This blog contains content, activities, and support material for a two-hour interactive workshop given at Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica Campus Coto on May 8, 2025 as part of their Didactics Seminar 2025 - Innovation and Technology in English Teaching event.
Goals:
- Describe the importance of professional development for early career English teachers.
- Summarize key concepts in professional learning and teacher development.
- Explore a selection of innovative professional development opportunities using AI and free online resources.
Guiding Questions:
- What are the learning challenges and opportunities for English teachers in the first years of their career?
- How do teachers learn and develop throughout their careers?
- How can I use AI tools and tasks to engage in professional development?
Table of Contents
Click the links below to access the section of the blog you would like to see.
Topic 1: Warm Up - My Ideal Future Self
Before we explore what professional development means and strategies you can use, let's do a little warm up. Try to imagine two English teachers. They both graduated from the same university and they have been working for nearly twenty years at the same school. However, they have very different profiles.
- Teacher Jennifer: Jennifer is your role model and the best teacher you have ever had in any subject, not just English. She goes above and beyond anyone's expectations and you hope that some day you can be half the teacher Jennifer is when you start working.
- Teacher Johnny: Johnny is nobody's favorite teacher. He's not the worst teacher in the world and he's not going to be fired for misbehavior, but he only does the bare minimum to keep his job year after year. There are a lot of aspects of Johnny's way of teaching that you hope you never do when you start working.
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Topic 2: Theory Input - The What, Why, and How of Professional Development
Let's start by reviewing some important concepts about professional development in the field of language teaching.
What is Challenging about being a New Teacher?
Starting is the Hard Part: Starting your teaching journey is a scary and challenging experience. Crandall and Christison say, "the first years of teaching are the most intense and anxiety-producing time for teachers, as they transition from student to teacher and try to balance the need to continue learning how to teach with the need to be perceived as a 'real' teacher" (2016, p. 9). Early career teachers are not just struggling to become familiar with the curriculum and develop practical teaching strategies, they are also trying to figure out who they are and who they should be. Farrell (2009) says, "Essentially novice teachers are developing conceptions of 'self-as-teacher', they are formulating teacher identities related to institutional, personal, and professional conceptions of the role of the novice teacher" (p. 183).
Because of these challenges, the first years of a teacher's career are the most critical for future success. Studies of teacher career attrition, leaving teaching to work in another field, show that the first five years have the highest rates of dropouts with 40%-50% of teachers leaving the profession before reaching year six in North America (Crandall & Christison, 2016). It is essential that new teachers fully embrace their professional identity as teachers and develop a healthy mindset and a genuine curiosity and openness to new experiences that will power their professional growth and development. Receiving your college diploma is an acheivement worth celebrating. However, "completing an academic program is really only the beginning of a lifelong quest to better understand our students, ourselves, our discipline, and the approaches and techniques we can use to help others become competent users of English" (Crandall & Miller, 2014, p. 631).
What is Professional Development?
Defining our Terms: Professional development according to Rossner (2017) is "the professional growth that teachers achieve in the process of gaining experience and knowledge and reflecting on their teaching" (p. 169). This growth can come from fomal academic programs, workshops and trainings in a workplace setting, and through the individual teacher's process of ongoing exploration, experimentation, and reflection.
CCCN's Professional Development Model
Purpose and Design: To explore some theortical foundations of professional development for language teachers, we will use CCCN's Professional Development Model (Cormier, 2023), a framework I wrote to describe the philosophical underpinnings that guide the work we do to develop teachers at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano. The model is represented visually with the graphic above as a series of nested triangles. At the center of the model is the individual teacher who is an active participant in his or her personal trajectory of ongoing development influenced by a unique combination of beliefs, experiences, interests, and motivations. The teacher is connected on each side to the three theoretical pillars of our professional development model which ground the work we do in concepts from the academic literature of our field: professionalism in ELT, teacher learning, and Communities of Practice. The outer level represents three institutional areas of support, which we will not discuss in this session.
Why is Professional Development a Teacher-Centered Process?
Teachers as Participants: Like the students they serve, teachers are not passive participants in their learning process and there are several important factors that are unique to each individual teacher that must be accounted for:
- Beliefs and Values: All teachers, whether they have articulated them or not, have a set of assumptions, beliefs, and principles that make up what Brookfield (2006) calls their “working philosophy of practice” (p. 254). A successful professional development model must acknowledge teachers’ philosophy of practice and encourage them to explore the degree to which their actions are in alignment with their beliefs.
- Interests, Motivations, and Goals: Teachers differ in their interests within the field of English language teaching, their teaching styles, preferred techniques and resources, and other important aspects. In addition, their short and long-term goals and aspects they find motivating about their job influence their thinking and decision making. Naturally, this diversity means that teachers are drawn to explore different types of classroom issues and they reflect on teaching experiences from their own unique perspective.
- Personal and Professional Identities: Throughout their careers teachers are in a continuous process of identity construction that involves a complex interplay between their past experiences, present contexts, and relationships with others. Teaching and teacher development are deeply personal activitities because, in Palmer’s terms, “we teach who we are” (1997, p. 17).
- Individual Developmental Trajectory: Teachers learn in different ways, at different speeds, and they are driven by different needs. As Borg (2003) points out, “individual teachers make sense of and are affected by training programmes in different and unique ways” (p. 91). There is no doubt that professional development is an individual process.
What is Professionalism in ELT?
Defining Professionalism: Teachers demonstrate professionalism by acting in responsible and ethical ways and by carrying out our professional duties to the best of their abilities (Rossner, 2017). Penny Ur (2002) provides a helpful way of understanding the features of language teacher professionalism by differentiating ourselves from four groups of non-professionals:
- Laypeople: A layperson is a member of the general public who does not have the knowledge, skills, vocabulary, and other markers of belonging to a specialized professional group. English language teachers by contrast are a distinct professional community with a shared knowledge base and domain-specific terminology, methodology, theories, professional organizations, and academic publications. We are professionals, NOT laypeople.
- Amateurs: An amateur is someone who engages in an activity without the necessary credentials and who is not held to the same standards of quality and commitment as a professional. Professional English teachers are committed to upholding our professional standards and responsibilities and we have dedicated ourselves to years of preparation and academic achievement. We are professionals, NOT amateurs.
- Technicians: A technician is a skilled worker who is able to perform a task well through repetition and practice over time but who lacks the autonomy and deeper understanding needed to operate independently. Professionals not only perform skillful actions, but they are able to make decisions about the course of action they want to take based on a set of guiding principles and careful analysis of dynamic contextual factors rather than following a pre-established recipe. We are professionals, NOT technicians.
- Academics: An academic is someone focused on research, knowledge construction, and theory building who is not so concerned with the immediate real-world application of their thinking. Professionals, by contrast, are focused on finding what works and their main concern is making an impact in the world through their actions. We make use of knowledge generated through research if it makes sense to us and works in our teaching context. We search for answers to our own problems through active experimentation in the classroom and reflection on the results of our actions. We are professionals, NOT academics.
How do Teachers Develop over Time?
Teaching and Decision Making: In many ways, the essence of teaching is the combination of decisions we make in preparation for a teaching experience, ones we make while engaged in the teaching experience, and ones we make after reflecting on the teaching experience; but, how do teachers make these decisions? Freeman (1989) proposes that teacher decision making is based on the interplay between four elements which he abbreviates with the acronym KASA: knowledge, attitudes, skills, and awareness.
- Knowledge: Our understanding of the subject matter; the students and their backgrounds, proficiency level, and learning styles; and “the sociocultural, institutional, and situational contexts” (p. 31) of the teaching-learning process.
- Attitudes: The thoughts, beliefs, and feelings we have about ourselves, the activity of teaching, and the learners we interact with.
- Skills: The actions we need to perform including strategies for presenting content, giving instructions, providing feedback, managing classroom interaction, and many others.
- Awareness: Our “capacity to recognize and monitor the attention [we] are giving or [have] given to something” (p. 33). Crucially, this includes our awareness of our strengths and limitations in the first three areas of the KASA model: our knowledge, attitudes, and skills.
Better Teaching is Better Decision Making: Improvements in teaching are the result of improvements in our decision making capacity through expansion and changes in our KASA. With that in mind, professional learning and development can be viewed as the ongoing process of:
- Expanding our knowledge about topics like the English language, second language acquisition, language teaching pedagogy, the needs of our students, and the details of our curriculum.
- Developing healthier attitudes about factors such as our professional identities, our teaching roles and responsibilities, the educational philosophy of the institution, our students; and their personalities, needs, and interests.
- Improving our current skills and acquiring new abilities in areas such as planning, communicating, assessing, providing feedback, using resources and technology, time management, and organization.
- Becoming more sensitive in our awareness of our thinking, decision making, emotions and attitudes, strengths and areas for growth, and, most importantly, our actions and the results they achieve.
How can Teachers Gain Awareness?
Reflective Practice: Continual refining one's awareness should be the primary aim of a teacher's professional development and the cultivation of a personal reflective practice is the only way to achieve it. In a broad sense, reflective practice is "mental activity that teachers do as they think in teaching situations" (Freeman, 2016, p. 207). Although, there is no single agreed upon definition, reflection is usually considered to involve the following elements:
- It is systematic thinking that involves questioning our assumptions in order to make informed decisions and avoid having our teaching be “guided mostly by impulse, tradition, and/or authority” (Farrell, 2022, p. 4).
- It involves problem solving. One of the characteristics of professional expertise in teaching is “being able to think critically about experience, to identify problems … in order to identify possible solutions, and to formulate these as a plan of action” (Thornbury, 2006, p. 194).
- It can occur in different moments and for different purposes. Reflection-on-action is the process of retrospectively analyzing a teaching experience that already occurred in order to gain insight. Reflection-in-action is the process of actively attending to what you are doing while you teach to increase your awareness of how you react to situations and make decisions in real time. Finally, reflection-for-action is the proactive process of reflecting before teaching in order to “anticipate what may happen and try to account for this before [we] conduct the lesson” (Farrell, 2022, p. 22).
How do Teachers Develop through Interactions with other Teachers?
Communities of Practice: One of the most powerful drivers of teacher development comes from our fellow teachers. We learn to be better educators by watching what other teachers do, by sharing stories of challenges and success, by motivating each other to overcome frustrations, and by engaging in collaborative inquiry. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a social learning concept described by Wenger-Trayner (2015) as “groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” Members of a CoP are practitioners, not merely people with similar interests. This means that they are actively engaged in their field and “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, and ways of addressing recurring problems" (p. 2). In a CoP the knowledge and insight that individual teachers have gained through experimentation, problem solving, and reflection on experience become collective resources for the community.
Topic 3: Exploring Frameworks for Reflective Practice
The ways that teachers process their experiences in the classroom can be greatly enhanced by following frameworks for reflection from the academic literature. Here are three popular frameworks (Farrell, 2019). Click one of the links, observe the diagram, and read the explanation. Be ready to explain the following to someone sitting close to you:
- Who came up with this model?
- How does the model work?
- What do I think about it?
- Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle: CLICK HERE
- Brookfield's Critical Lenses: CLICK HERE
- Borton's Developmental Framework: CLICK HERE
Topic 4: Innovative Strategies to Engage in Professional Development
Ways to Engage: Teaching, especially in the early career stage, is very time consuming. As Rossner rightly points out, "once a teacher has taken on a teaching position (or more than one) there is little time available for further on-the-job training and even less for other kinds of professional development" (2017, p. 7). However, there are still plenty of options and it is up to the individual teacher to seek out and take advantage of these opportunities. In keeping with the theme of this conference, here are several innovative professional development strategies that leverage emerging generative AI tools to help teachers engage in reflective practice.
AI Supported Professional Development Opportunities
Reading and Viewing Guides for Articles and Webinars
As a professional language teacher, it is important that you develop the ability to engage with the academic literature of your field. However, it can be challenging to do as an early career teacher because of unfamiliarity with the concepts addressed, the language used, and the technical format of academic writing. AI can help with this by taking on the role of a teacher who designs lesson sequences and support material to help you process and get the most out of articles and YouTube webinars. The prompt I designed instructs the AI to generate three activities for you to complete before, while, and after you engage with a text:
- Before: An outline of the main points of the text and some initial reflection questions to prepare for what you will encounter.
- While: A reading or viewing guide with periodic reflection breaks and comprehension checks.
- After: A series of reflective prompts for you to respond in writing that ask you to express a personal reaction to the ideas of the text and explore their applications in your teaching.
- Article Example: CLICK HERE
- Webinar Example: CLICK HERE
- Prompt for Articles: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and upload the PDF of the article you want to read. Then copy/paste the three parts of the prompt into the AI one at a time. Allow the AI to generate the content before entering the next prompt or you may overload the system.
Prompt 1
The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will read an academic text as a professional development strategy. Your role is to create support material following a three stage activity sequence that will help the user process the information they read. Generate a brief description and bulleted outline of the main content contained in the text that the user can skim before reading. Below that include 2-5 reflection questions to help the user begin to think about some of the ideas they will encounter. Be sure the questions do not require specialized knowledge that can not be answered without having read the text first. Title this section Before Reading - Preparing to Learn. When this prompt is entered, you will acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request. If the user has not uploaded the file of the text, request it before generating the content.
Prompt 2
Generate a worksheet that will help the user pay attention to the key ideas of the text. Include page numbers for each major section and two response tasks for the user at the end of each section. The first is called Comprehension Check with 2-3 quiz items and the second is called Reflective Break with 2-3 open-ended questions that help the user express their thoughts about the content. Title this section While Reading - Reading Guide.
Prompt 3
Generate 3-5 open-ended writing prompts to help the user express thoughts about the reading contents, possible classroom application of ideas, and new things the user may want to explore as a result of reading the text. Divide the task into two sections called "So what?" with prompts for personal reflection and "Now what?" with prompts about application and further exploration. Title this section After Reading - Reflective Journaling
- Prompt for Webinars: Go to Gemini (does not work with ChatGPT) and paste the YouTube link to the webinar you want to watch. Then copy/paste the three parts of the prompt into the AI one at a time. Allow the AI to generate the content before entering the next prompt or you may overload the system. This prompt is less stable that the one for articles you may need play with it a bit.
Prompt 1
The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will watch a recording of a teaching webinar on YouTube as a professional development strategy. Your role is to create support material following a three stage activity sequence that will help the user process the information they see. Generate a brief description and bulleted outline of the main content contained in the video recording that the user can read before they watch. Below that include 2-5 reflection questions to help the user begin to think about some of the ideas they will encounter. Be sure the questions do not require specialized knowledge that can’t be answered without having seen the video first. Title this section Before Watching - Preparing to Learn. When this prompt is entered, you will acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request. If the user has not shared the link to the YouTube video, request it before generating the content.
Prompt 2
Generate a worksheet that will help the user pay attention to the key ideas of the recording. Include timestamps for each major section and two response tasks for the user at the end of each section. The first is called Comprehension Check with 2-3 quiz items and the second is called Reflective Break with 2-3 open-ended questions that help the user express their thoughts about the content. Title this section While Watching - Viewing Guide.
Prompt 3
Generate 3-5 open-ended writing prompts to help the user express thoughts about the video contents, possible classroom application of ideas, and new things the user may want to explore as a result of watching the video. Divide the task into two sections called "So what?" with prompts for personal reflection and "Now what?" with prompts about application and further exploration. Title this section After Watching - Reflective Journaling.
Academic Conversation Partner
Another way to explore and consolidate your understanding of the concepts of a reading is to have a conversation with an AI discussion partner. In this case, the AI takes on the role of a Vygoskian More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) (McLeod, 2024) who prompts you with open-ended questions that require you to restate key ideas from the text in your own words and express your thoughts about them. The AI is instructed to acknowledge and expand on your ideas and help clarify misunderstandings that you may have about the content. You can interact with the AI in writing or use the conversation feature of either ChatGPT or Gemini to have a spoken conversation.
- Text-Based Example: CLICK HERE
- Spoken Conversation Demonstration: CLICK HERE
- Prompt: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and upload the PDF of the article you want to read and discuss. Then copy/paste the following prompt:
Task Specifications
The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will have a conversation with the AI about the contents of an academic text. Your role is that of a Vygostsian More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) who will converse with the user about the main ideas of the text. Ask 3-5 open ended questions about the content of the text that allow the user to articulate their understanding and opinions of key ideas. Allow the user to respond before asking the next question. Acknowledge the user’s responses, expand and add additional details, and clarify if it seems there have been any misunderstandings. Ask if the user would like to explore that topic more deeply or move on to the next question. Keep your tone friendly and helpful and use simple language to make the academic content more accessible to the user.
Initial LLM Response
When this prompt is entered, you will greet the user and acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request. If the user did not upload a file with the text, request the file before beginning.
Gemini's Audio Overview
Google’s Gemini AI has a feature called Audio Overview that creates a 5-7 minute podcast with a very realistic conversation between two people discussing the main concepts of any document you upload. It is a very helpful way to consolidate understanding of main ideas. However, it works best if you have actually ready and attempted to understand the text on your own first in my opinion.
- Example: CLICK HERE to hear a podcast discussing the Penny Ur (2001) article about professionalism in ELT.
How: After uploading a text file to Gemini, you will see an option above the file that says Generate Audio Overview. Click it and wait a few minutes for the system to generate the file. CLICK HERE for detailed instructions from Google.
Critical Friend Reflection Partner
One way to reflect on and analyze the teaching experiences you have is to engage in deep conversation with a trusted partner who can help you explore critical moments in your lesson, your thoughts and feelings, and future possibilities. AI can serve the role of your critical friend by asking you guiding questions, reacting to your experiences, making suggestions, and summarizing the key ideas that came up in the conversation that you want to remember. The examples follow two reflection cycles from the professional literature, Gibb’s (1988) reflection cycle (description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, and action plan) and Borton’s (1970) developmental framework (what, so what, now what). You can interact with the AI by typing or using the conversation feature. I personally prefer writing since it gives me more time to think about the responses I give.
- Text-Based Example: CLICK HERE
- Transcript of Audio Conversation: CLICK HERE
- Critical Friend Prompt - Borton's Cycle: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and copy/paste the following prompt:
Task Specifications
The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will have a conversation with the AI to reflect on a recent teaching experience. Your role is a critical friend, an experienced foreign language teacher with a critical mindset, who will help the user process the lesson experience following Borton’s three stage reflection cycle outlined in the Format Specifications below.
Format Specifications
1. What?: The focus here is generating a vivid description of the events that occurred.
2. So What?: The focus here is analyzing the experience by exploring thoughts and feelings and identifying any puzzling aspects of the lesson or things that went well.
3. Now What?: The focus here is action-oriented by exploring things that can be tried in future lessons based on the lesson experience.
Interaction Specifications
Use Borton’s cycle to ask the user questions about their recent teaching experience. Follow the order of the cycle and adapt the specific questions you ask based on the user responses. Make the conversation seem natural and without showing the order of the cycle or making explicit reference to Borton or the names of the stages of the cycle with the user. For each user response, acknowledge the ideas they mentioned and react to them as an experienced colleague acting as a critical friend would. This means asking one or two follow questions to expand on the user’s ideas before moving to the following stage. At the end of the interaction, provide a summary of the user’s reflections and a few bulleted suggestions based on all the interactions.
- Critical Friend Prompt - Gibbs's Cycle: Go to ChatGPT or Gemini and copy/paste the following prompt:
Task Specifications
The user teaches English as a foreign language in Costa Rica and will have a conversation with the AI to reflect on a recent teaching experience. Your role is a critical friend, an experienced foreign language teacher with a critical mindset, who will help the user process the lesson experience following Gibb’s six stage reflection cycle outlined in the Format Specifications below.
Format Specifications
1. Description: What happened? Focus on factual details of the situation, including who was involved, what actions were taken, and the outcome.
2. Feelings: What were your thoughts and emotions during and after the experience. Be honest and explore your reactions, both positive and negative.
3. Evaluation: What was good and bad about the experience? Consider the strengths and weaknesses, and make value judgements based on the situation.
4. Analysis: What sense can you make of the situation? Draw on theories, experiences, and other perspectives to understand the events and their implications.
5. Conclusion: What have you learned from the experience? What could you have done differently? Summarize your learning and identify areas for improvement.
6. Action Plan: What will you do differently in the future? Outline specific steps and strategies you can use for similar situations in the future.
Interaction Specifications
Use Gibb’s cycle to ask the user questions about their recent teaching experience. Follow the order of the cycle and adapt the specific questions you ask based on the user responses. Make the conversation seem natural and without showing the order of the cycle or making explicit reference to Gibb or the names of the stages of the cycle with the user. For each user response, acknowledge the ideas they mentioned and react to them as an experienced colleague acting as a critical friend would do before asking them the next questions. At the end of the interaction, provide a summary of the user’s reflections and a few bulleted suggestions based on all the interactions.
Interactive Reflective Journaling
Journaling is an excellent, low-tech strategy to engage in professional development and reflective practice. It involves periodically writing about your experiences in the classroom to describe your thoughts, feelings, doubts, failures, and triumphs. Keeping a journal over time helps you track your professional learning journey as you experiment with different teaching strategies and document the results. I have personally found journaling to help me stay motivated and focused on my professional development.
Tips: Write in the language that you are most comfortable in expressing yourself. English, Spanish, a mix? It’s up to you! Be consistent with your writing by choosing a specific day and time that you will dedicate to journaling each week. It can be 20 minutes or as long as you want but establish and maintain your routine. Finally, create a framework to organize your responses. I have found that answering these three questions works well for me:
- Describe what happened in the class with as many details as possible.
- Write your thoughts and feelings about anything interesting, unexpected, frustrating, or unusual that happened.
- What do I want to remember from this class or think more about in the future?
- How: You can simply save your transcripts from any conversations you have with an AI Critical Friend as a kind of journal or you can copy/paste the prompt below in an AI and try it yourself.
Task Specifications
You are an AI assistant that helps the user complete an Interactive Reflective Journal entry. An Interactive Reflective Journal is a professional development activity for English language teachers in which they write answers to questions in order to describe and explore aspects of a recent teaching experience.
Format Specifications
The final version of the Interactive Reflective Journal Entry is a single text with the title Reflective Journal Entry along with the date of publication. The body of the texts is divided into three sections. The first is a Description of the Teaching Experience. The second is an Analysis of the Teaching Experience. The third is called Moving Forward. The user must provide the content for the three sections. These are listed in the Content Specifications below.
Content Specifications
The following specifications must be provided by the user.
1. Describe what happened in your class with as many details as possible.
2. Write your thoughts and feelings about anything interesting, unexpected, frustrating, or unusual that happened.
3. What do I want to remember from this class or think more about in the future?
Initial LLM Response
When this prompt is entered, you will greet the user and acknowledge that you have analyzed and understood the user’s request and you will solicit from the user the three content specifications you need to fulfill the request. Ask the user to provide one content specification before you request the next. After each user response, ask one or two follow up questions about specific aspects of the user’s response that could be expanded on or articulated more explicitly. However, be sure to allow the user to skip and continue to the next content specification if they do not want to answer the follow up questions. After the final user response is entered, generate a copy of all of the user’s responses organized into a single text with the user’s answers to any follow up questions incorporated into the text naturally. Title this text Reflective Journal Entry along with the date and label the three sections of the text: Description of the Teaching Experience, Analysis of the Teaching Experience, and Moving Forward.
Topic 5: Free Professional Development Resources
There are plenty of online options to access academic content and interact with English teachers from around Costa Rica and the world.
PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions
PD Talks is a free monthly webinar series for English teachers organized by Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano and hosted by me. Usually held on the last Friday of the month from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, these sessions consist of a 90 minute online workshop with breakout room tasks which allow you to meet and interact with other teachers from around the world. In 2024 alone, teachers from 62 countries connected to our 12 talks.
- Register for PD Talk 77 on May 30: CLICK HERE to register for the talk Decolonizing the Curriculum: Empowering Educators to Center Students' Voices and Experiences by Yuliana Brenes.
NCTE 2025
The National Conference for Teachers of English Costa Rica is annual event that brings together language teachers from around the country and beyond. For the last five years, NCTE has had a free online component with the option to connect to twelve professional development webinars. CLICK HERE to follow the NCTE Facebook page and learn more about what is coming this July!
Join the CoP
We also have a private website called CCCN's Community of Practice which hosts our Teacher Development Video Library, a collection of over 160 video recording of talks and workshops from NCTE, PD Talks, and other professional develpment events over the past five years. They are organized into categories to help you find something relevant to you. All of the resources are free but you must register to access the site. CLICK HERE to create your profile.
LinkedIn Newsletters
LinkedIn is not only a place to look for a job, it's a great site for connecting with and learning from other language teachers and content creators. Here are some of my favorite LinkedIn newsletters to follow:
- ELT-Training: Jo Gakonga
- Educational Technology & ELT: Nik Peachey
- I4CL Connections and Insights: The Institute for Collaborative Learning
- Notes from the Field: Pro Lingua Associates
- Thoughts from an ELT Writer: Katherine Bilsborough
Language Teaching Podcasts
These are some of my favorite teaching podcasts to listen to when driving to work.
Language Teaching Webinars
There are tons of free webinars available online on many different topics related to language teaching. Here are a few great sources.
Topic 6: Final Thoughts
Teacher Jennifer and Teacher Johnny, whom we described in the warm up to this session, are not just imaginary characters. They represent Dornyei’s (2014) ideas about the importance of developing a clear vision of your possible future selves, the ideal future teacher self you hope to become some day and the other self that you are afraid of becoming. If you have the vision of those two possible professional developmental trajectories, you can take active steps now to move closer to one and away from the other. We'll close with this quote from Murray (2010). "Effective professional development is self-empowerment. Deciding to take the first step is your responsibility, and that step is well worth taking" (p. 10). Your professional development journey starts today!
Discussion: Discuss the following questions with the people sitting near you.
- What is something I want to remember about the first part of today's session when the speaker toaked about what it means to be a professional and how professional teachers learn and grow?
- What is one professional development strategy or resource from the second part of the session that I might like to try?
- What other ideas does today's session make me think about?
References:
Brookfield, S. (2006). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Crandall, J. & Christison, M. (2016). An overview of research in English language teacher education and professional development. In J. Crandall and M. Christison (Ed.s), Teacher Education and Professional Development in TESOL: Global Perspectives. Routledge.
Cormier, M. (2023). CCCN's Professional Development Model: How do Teachers Learn and Develop Over Time at CCCN?. Unpublished Manuscript, Academic Department, Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano, San José, Costa Rica.
Crandall, J. & Miller, S. (2014). Effective Professional Development for Language Teachers. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. Brinton, & M. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th ed., pp 630-648). National Geographic Learning.
Dornyei, Z. (2014). Motivation in second language learning. In M. Celce-Murcia, D. Brinton, & M. A. Snow (Eds.), Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language (4th ed., pp. 518-531). National Geographic Learning.
Farrell, T. (2019). Reflective Practice in ELT. Equinox.
Farrell, T. (2022). Reflective Practice in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
Thornbury, S. (2006). An A-Z of ELT. Macmillan.
Ur, P. (2002). The English Teacher as Professional. In J. Richards & W. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in Language Teaching: An Anthology of Current Practice (pp. 388-392). Cambridge University Press.
Freeman, D. (1989). Teacher Training, Development, and Decision Making: A Model of Teaching and Related Strategies for Language Teacher Education. TESOL Quarterly, 23(1), 27-45. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587506
Freeman, D. (2016). Educating Second Language Teachers. Oxford University Press.
Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. University of Chicago Press.
McLeod, S. (2025, March 18). Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html
Palmer, P. (1997). The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching. Change Magazine 29(6). pp. 14-21.
Rossner, R. (2017). Language Teaching Competences. Oxford University Press.
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Session Details and Author Information
Session Title: Dont' Stop Now: Professional Development Opportunities for Early Career Teachers
Session Abstract: We know that learning is a lifelong process and one of our goals as English teachers should be to equip students with the skills they need to continue their language learning journey on their own once they have completed their course of study. The same can be said for teachers. Graduating with a teaching degree is just the beginning of a career-long process of ongoing professional learning and development. Language teaching is a challenging profession and early career teachers especially can benefit from adopting a critical but curious mindset, cultivating a personal reflective practice, collaborating actively with other teachers, and setting and regularly revisiting personal professional development goals. Lucky for us, there are plenty of opportunities to engage in professional development, even for teachers in remote areas with limited resources. This interactive talk will introduce a selection of frameworks to help beginning teachers conceptualize the importance of ongoing professional development and explore practical answers to questions such as:
- What does it mean to be a professional in the field of English language teaching?
- How can I engage in professional development opportunities on my own and with other teachers?
- What kind of teacher do I want to be and how can I take active steps to attain that role?
Author: Mark Foster Cormier
Author Bio: Mark Foster Cormier is an English teacher and teacher educator who is passionate about materials development, reflective practice, and professional development in ELT. He earned a master of arts in TESOL from Marlboro College and bachelor’s degrees in English teaching and Latin American studies from Universidad Americana and Appalachian State University. Mark has been an EFL teacher in Costa Rica for 16 years and has specialized in teacher development for over a decade. He currently works as Head of Training and Professional Development at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where he is in charge of new teacher recruiting and training, planning ongoing professional development initiatives, and hosting the monthly webinar series for language teachers called PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions. Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-cormier-elt/
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