The Importance of Personal and Professional Development
You can’t draw water from an empty well. You can’t make a meal with no ingredients. You can’t light a fire without fuel.
Choose whichever metaphor you like and apply it to teaching. You can’t teach knowledge you do not possess, and it is difficult to encourage thriving in your students when your own growth is floundering.
This is why professional and personal development is essential to the life of the teacher. And yet, it is all too easy to get caught up in simply checking items off the daily to-do list and stopping there.
However, you teach out of who you are. Therefore, I would argue that continuing to grow and develop yourself is an essential part of what it means to be a teacher, not simply an optional activity.
I’d like to suggest a few things that may be keeping you from engaging in development opportunities, then provide a response to each one. You may find that you’ve been believing things that are not true or need to be gently encouraged to push yourself. (Please know, the intent of this article is not to make you feel guilty or like you are falling short. However, as humans, we sometimes choose to stay in our ruts, preferring the status quo to being pushed).
Perhaps you are legitimately tired from a difficult classroom situation. You are overworked already by prep and grading, or your students’ behavior is pushing you to the edge of insanity, or you have students with severe learning challenges.
The truth is, if these things are making teaching consume all your time and energy, that is not a sustainable pattern. If you want to be able to thrive in teaching, you will need to find ways to make these pervasive struggles manageable. Spending some time learning how to use your prep time more efficiently or developing your own knowledge in a difficult subject will help you to spend less hours at school in the long run. Reading books or watching videos about classroom management can help you to handle difficult student behaviors better. Educating yourself about learning disabilities can give you strategies to accommodate for learning struggles.
Perhaps the thing holding you back from engaging in professional development is a skepticism of the concept itself. I’ve been there. In my early years of teaching, an older teacher suggested that I should go to Faith Builders for summer term. I pretty quickly rejected the idea. Looking back, I think fear was largely driving my decision—it looked big and scary to me to go into an unknown environment for five weeks, far from home and all that was familiar. However, I remember having a “nobler” reason that I stated as my driving mindset. I was pretty sure that you can’t learn to teach by sitting in a classroom. Isn’t the best way to learn to teach just teaching and gaining experience over time?
After a good friend attended summer term and had a wonderful experience, I began to glimpse the benefits that can be found in committing yourself to studying the craft of teaching. And when I finally attended a summer term a couple of years later, I learned so quickly how wrong I had been.
Teaching well is a skill. And yes, like any skill, it is honed by doing. But also, like any skill, there are tips, techniques, and best practices that will greatly enhance your teaching—things that you might never learn on your own even after years of experience.
And while something like summer term is immensely beneficial, summer term is not the only way to develop your teaching skills. If you find yourself wanting to learn how to teach better but simply not knowing exactly how to go about doing it, you’ll find ideas near the end of this article.
Another thing I learned through my years of teaching is that worthwhile development can come in many forms. It’s easy to think that developing your teaching skills means targeting your weaknesses head-on.
And that is often true. If you struggle with planning robust lessons, read books or watch videos on how to structure a lesson. If you struggle with classroom management, put time and energy into developing plans and systems to make your classroom run more smoothly. If you struggle to properly teach the math concepts in your curriculum, take a math course to deepen your understanding.
However, don’t underestimate the power of developing you as a person.
I had a moment of this become startlingly clear to me when I was at Faith Builders for two years as a TAP student (yes, I went from not wanting to go to FB for five weeks to choosing to spend two years there—that’s how much I realized the value of training in helping me become a better teacher).
In the first weeks, we had apprenticing term, which is when we spent our days intensively working alongside a classroom teacher, observing lessons, teaching lessons, and having our teaching assessed by others. After those weeks, one thing I took away with me was that I wanted to get better at asking my students good questions. It had become apparent that I tended to present questions on a surface level most of the time, and that I could grow in learning to ask questions that really engaged students’ minds in deeper ways.
The year continued and I spent it immersed in the college-level history, science, math, English, etc. courses of the training institute. When the next year’s apprenticing term rolled around, I had forgotten about my desire to improve my question-asking.
After teaching a few classes and being observed and assessed, though, I suddenly remembered that I had wanted to grow in this area, but not for the reason you might think. Surprisingly, several of my assessors commented on my strengths in asking deeper-level thinking questions. This is when I had a revelation. I realized I had become better at asking questions—much better—even though I had completely forgotten to focus on it.
So how did that happen? I hadn’t consciously been trying to learn how to ask better questions or reading books or watching instructional videos about question-asking technique. I realized that my ability to ask thoughtful questions had improved because I was a different person than I had been a year earlier. The many hours reading, writing essays, engaging in deep conversations, and stretching my own mind had changed me in significant ways. And I was now the kind of person who could more naturally ask good questions without even consciously thinking about it.
Developing as a teacher does not always look like attending a teaching seminar or reading a pedagogical book. It might look like doing something that stretches your mind in deep ways, even if it seems inherently unrelated to the exact lessons you find in your teacher’s guide. Listen to the podcast about molecular biology or quantum physics. Dig deep into the fascinating stories surrounding World War II, even if that era of history doesn’t show up in your history textbook. Become deeply interested in a hobby, learning everything you can about kombucha or leather-working or running. Ask someone in your community who is an expert on something to go out for coffee with you and ask them all the questions about beekeeping or crop rotation or accounting.
In short, become a life-long learner.
Find ways to constantly dig deeply into all the things there are to learn in this vast and wonderful world, whether directly related to teaching or not.
You teach out of who you are. And if you are not a learner, how will you teach your students to be one?
Practical Ideas for Professional and Personal Development:
Professional Development (directly teaching-related)
Attend:
This page provides a list of upcoming training opportunities within the Anabaptist community, lasting anywhere from five weeks to four days. You will find information about events located in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Ontario. There are also opportunities to receive more specific training in Christian Light curriculum, public speaking, and TESOL.
Read:
A (non-exhaustive) list of book recommendations for teachers, organized by topic.
A free quarterly magazine designed to encourage and inspire teachers throughout the year
Articles pertaining to all aspects of teaching. You can also subscribe to receive a weekly email featuring various posts you may find helpful.
Bullet-point guides on various aspects of teaching, including links to further resources on each topic.
A thoughtful collection of teaching books and resources for sale.
Listen:
A podcast specifically for those in administration, but teachers will find much of the content to be helpful as well.
Hundreds of recordings from teacher development events over the years.
Watch:
Short videos about many topics related to teaching.
A classic training opportunity for teachers, recorded many years ago, but still pertinent today.
Personal Development (developing your own knowledge or skills)
Please note that I’ve put effort into creating a list of quality suggestions for you to peruse, but it is impossible for me to personally vouch for all of the content you will find in these resources. Your own discretion will be required as you choose which content to consume.
Podcasts (from Anabaptist creators)
Everyday Expertise—long-form interviews with various people who share their expertise about their occupation or hobby (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YT Music)
Anabaptist Perspectives—essays and articles from Anabaptist Christian thinkers, writers, and workers (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YT Music, and here)
Online Courses for Bible Study
Heralds of Hope— Guide Through the Bible provides in-depth exploration of the Bible, available as video or audio (also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YT Music)
Bible Project—videos, courses, and podcast options covering Biblical book overviews and exploration of Biblical themes and word studies
Online Courses for General Study
The Great Courses—video courses in a range of subjects, including art, history, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy and religion, and science
College classes online—There are many opportunities to take college classes online (often for free). The following are a few places to start looking for a class that interests you:
Developing Hobbies and Skills
Craftsy—skill-based training videos in categories such as baking, cooking, sewing, quilting, embroidery, gardening, home décor, painting, photography, drawing, woodworking, and writing
