How Concern Can Lead to Professional Development

Casablanca – Teaching reading comprehension has always concerned me. How can I track my students’ understanding while they are reading?

In grammar, we, as teachers, can check understanding through exercises to have an idea of how well students grasp the grammatical structure. However, in teaching reading and asking comprehension questions, we might have an idea about the “product” (answers to comprehension questions), but we have no idea about the process.

How do we measure and check students’ thinking while reading? I wanted to have a process that leads to the right product. This concern made me start searching for solutions and trying different strategies to see which one would enable me to track my students’ understanding and, at the same time, which one is suitable for the Moroccan context.

As my process illustrates, being concerned is a path that leads to professional development.

Being concerned with reading comprehension made me reflect on my way of teaching as a whole. I believe that teachers should always adopt a reflective mindset, and reflection permits teachers to follow their interests and their needs as they examine what they and their students do.

To put it another way, every teacher should be a researcher. Being a teacher-researcher is highly important for teachers who are concerned with their professional development. Turning the classroom into a laboratory for experimenting with new strategies and analyzing one’s own practices is fundamental for teachers to become the directors of their own professional development.

Read also: PISA: Moroccan Students Have Poor Reading, Math, Science Abilities

Classrooms are complicated social communities. Students come to them with their own assemblage of native language and culture, proficiency level, learning style, motivation, and attitudes toward language learning. Teachers have their own distinctive styles and use many different materials and teaching techniques in the course of a single classroom session.

Teachers play their tune and expect students to dance. Instead of setting ready-made classroom rules, why not share about concerns? Students are worried about their education, and teachers are worried about their way of delivering lessons.

Before each class, we, as teachers, should ask: “What will my students teach me today?” The answer to that question can only be attained through listening to, observing, and asking students about how the lesson went and how to make it better.

Living the classroom life with students can provide new insights into how much our students can teach us.

There should always be a notebook to document reflections and ideas. It is like reading and making inferences, but it is teaching and writing reflections. Studying the notes plays a major role in the teachers’ professional development and makes them innovators and agents of school change.

Both research and reflection are essential to refine one’s teaching. Research encourages teachers to escape the “echo chamber” situation in which they merely know what is going on in their own classroom and school. Teachers who do research find that it widens and enriches their teaching skills.

By the same token, students are also a source of learning for teachers. Teachers should not overlook the role of students as valuable assets who complete the puzzle of professional development.

Being concerned with what works and why might be frustrating and discouraging in some cases, but what makes the differences is a willingness to develop and to break out of the comfort zone.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial views.