Continuous Professional Development

As teachers, we should strive to be lifelong learners. It is important that we be willing to continually update our skills. During this year, outside of the course itself, I have engaged in some continuous professional development courses centred around literacy. These were the integrating literacy training offered by DALC and a short training programme offered by the National Adult Literacy Association (NALA) about how to teach using their Write On program. Both of these courses have proved incredibly valuable to me in both my teaching practice for the course and in the other places I have taught in besides them. There are many aspects of teaching and professionalism that I would like to work on over the next academic year.

First, I would like to do more training around literacy. It is an important topic to have an awareness of and I spend a lot of time teaching learners with varying levels of literacy. Second, I would like to increase my skill in Irish Sign Language (ISL). I began learning it because I often had deaf learners in my classes who relied on lip reading and I wanted to lift some of that burden from them. Lip reading is very tiring for the person doing it and it is impossible to look at the person that is doing it while speaking all of the time. I hold a level four in ISL at the moment and would like to complete level 5 by the end of the year. Besides that, I would also like to do a course on first aid. I am generally the only person in a classroom with up to 30 people. I would feel safer if I had some first aid knowledge and I think it would be a good skill to have on my CV when applying for jobs.

I would also like to develop a CPD course for teachers about technology in the classroom. A lot of teachers I talked to while on placement and out at various events, had little to no knowledge of the range of technologies available to teachers or how to use them. I would like to change that at some point in time although I don’t know when I will be able to achieve this particular goal.

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