Continuing Professional Development: Lessons from India

76 teaching life I was involved with in my professional context. In all these and more, there was a deep sense of equality and an egalitarian attitude that was both evocative and promising.”

No wonder then that we regarded the mid-80s and early 90s as a golden period of our progress as proficient practitioners who theorised from the classroom and were eager to share this excitement with a larger audience.

Moving Forward Since 2000, members of the disbanded ELTC have sought other modes of functioning better suited for their own CPD. The urge to sustain development in ourselves as classroom teachers and as senior practitioners has enabled us to reinvent our roles, responsibilities and domains. We felt that we ought to do something to preserve and propagate the processes of growth and development activated in the context of our TD group. The dynamics of the SIGs as we have already seen involved a dialogic mode of exploration, anecdotal accounts to capture an experience and examine the match between theory and classroom practices. We have constantly strived to share, guide in a non-threatening way and, in doing so, provide a context of interaction to any teacher or young colleague who has sought our help.

Collaborative Enterprise The need to challenge ourselves and move beyond the comfort zones of our previous experience was very strong in us. For instance, way back in 1997 when the Classroom Interaction SIG wrote the paper on researching heterogeneity in large classes, KN (one of the co-authors of the paper) had realised that understanding the way students learn something was overwhelming. Many years later in 2004, she undertook a sponsored project on ‘Learners’ Coping Strategies’, fully aware of the daunting nature of her research. Her aim was not only to make her learners aware of the learning skills that they deployed but also induct junior colleagues into the project and pass on the sense of excitement associated with a challenging project to them.

“I had undertaken a project on learners’ strategies in my classes and this involved audiorecording of my class. I gave the colleagues of my department (who were not ELTC members) the choice of listening to the tapes/reading the tape scripts, or to ‘observe’ my classes and give their feedback. My ostensible agenda was to demonstrate the value of multiple perspectives of the classroom processes and practices I had adopted. But in reality I hoped to show them the positive aspects of observation, and allay their fears ‘being judged’.”

The path to being a reflective practitioner is often a process of sharing one’s classroom practices and episodes, techniques or strategies that have satisfied or dissatisfied us. Maintaining classroom diaries, encouraging peer-observation and valuing anecdotal accounts of events have sensitised us to the possibilities of reflective procedures and teachers need to be encouraged to go through this process of introspection, debate and risk theorising on their classroom practices and procedures.

Mentoring Activities As team–leaders or senior practitioners we have always acknowledged the work done by others