By Khalil Zakari
By Khalil Zakari
Morocco World News
Meknes, Morocco, December 23, 2012
Ongoing education is a requirement for English Language teacher educators, trainers and supervisors. Known as professional development, this continuous, ongoing and never-ending process of refection-in-action is defined by Schön (1983) as the ability of professionals to ‘think what they are doing while they are doing it’.
Professional development –usually in the form of workshops, seminars and training courses — helps ELT practioneers stay up to date with new trends and learn fresh strategies, techniques and methods for teacher education challenges. The overriding idea behind this professional development is that increased knowledge helps supervisors improve teaching practices, which, in turn, wil empower learning achievements.
On a yearly basis the number of ELT supervisors in Morocco is considerably decreasing and given that the very few supervisors operating in the field are accountable for a huge number of tasks, functions and responsibilities, continuous professional development is far harder to ensure. Being awkwardly aware of this inconvenience the Ministry of National Education and its partners are swatting hard to minimize risks of professional atrophy.
Within this framework of keeping the losses to a minimum the Moroccan Association of Teachers of English, in partnership with the Ministry of National Education, the British Council and the Regional English Language Office organized the 7th Supervisors Colloquium, the aim of which was to provide a platform for ELT supervisors to re-think their supervision methods and strategies and cogitate on a more structured and cost-effective approach to teacher supervision and in-service teacher training.
The colloquium took place in the National Training Centre in Rabat on 20th, 21st and 22nd days of December, 2012 and aimed to:
- highlight the main features of effective Continuous Professional Development (CDP)
- explore various appropriate strategies for effective CPD
- set the ground for ‘trialing’ Teacher Learning Communities (TLCs)
- cogitate on a national action plan for teacher supervision for the 2012-2014 period.
In addition to some thirty ELT supervisors from various academies and delegations, the ten supervisor trainees who are now being prepared for the job at the Centre National de Formation des Inspecteurs de l’Enseignement and a number of volunteering senior teachers from different regions and schools attended the colloquium and were thrilled to have bought themselves some time to meet their colleagues and road companions…
