Teacher Development Webinars is a project to support teachers and educators with professional growth opportunities through online teacher professional development webinars. It is an initiative using the rise in online professional development (PD) to connect people around the globe with opportunities they might not have come forth due to the traditional face-to-face conferences and seminars.
This project has gone global and has been recognised worldwide and we are now a community of more than 20K members on our official ‘Teacher Development Webinars’ Facebook group. It has also been included in Active Citizens Annual Report 2020-21.
Calendar
Our Upcoming Events & Activities
26
August
Going Beyond Checking the DEI Box: Infusing JEDI and SEL in Pedagogical Practices
Presented by: Dr. Anastasia Khawaja
Adjunct Professor
University of South Florida
Event Info
From the “3Rs” of reading, writing, and arithmetic (Dede, 2010) to the multiple Cs including collaboration, critical thinking, character, and creativity (Miro Blog, 2021), educational practices have seen a shift towards more innovative techniques that engage and connect students more with themselves and with others. However, since covid, as educators we have found ourselves recovering and rebuilding as we seek to find a light at the end of the tunnel of COVID depending where we are in the world. As we have answered the call of shifting online, to hybrid, and back and forth again, we have indeed developed further ways to connect and educate around the world, meeting all of the demands that accompany this (Hirsh-Pasak et al. 2021). However, it is now crucial to take pause as we as a global society attempt to find our “newer” normal and understand where COVID times have taken us, what COVID times have revealed to us, and what we are left to work with (Doll et al., 2021). In this presentation, I discuss where we are in education “post” COVID and emphasize the importance of infusing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) (Pentón-Herrera & Martinez-Alba, 2021) and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) (Sears, 2021) into our classroom conversations and pedagogical practices as we move forward into a new era in education.
30
September
Leadership Support for an Integrated, Collaborative Service Delivery Model for ELs/MLs
Presented by: Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld
Professor, School of Education and Human Services,
Molloy University, Rockville Centre, New York
Event Info
Essential Question
How do you create and sustain a collaborative, integrated service delivery model?
Participants will…
· Determine how specific collaborative and co-teaching practices can offer effective support for inclusive practices to accommodate the needs of English learners and support language and literacy development
· Identify, describe, and evaluate several co-teaching models; view and analyze video clips of co-teaching in authentic and realistic situations
· Explore the collaborative instruction cycle and determine steps for implementing this in their context in order to foster integration of content and language instruction and support language and literacy development
30
October
Mentoring Action Research Experiences
Presented by: Dr. Araceli Salas
Professor/Researcher
BUAP, México
Event Info
Research has taken a relevant role in language teachers´ trajectories. Specifically, Action Research (AR) as it offers novice researchers a clear direction and purpose and it might have an immediate impact on teaching. AR seems to be appropriate for ELT contexts as it allows teachers to identify a problem in their specific contexts, plan, implement, observe, and reflect on the experience and then, re-plan for further implementation. However, introducing teachers into AR involves guidance, accompaniment, and scaffolding in different levels: field knowledge, teaching practice and affective elements that may impact positively on teachers ‘initial steps in doing research. This way, AR might become a useful research tool, however, it is also a demanding one for inexperienced researchers.
During this session, we will go through the cycle of AR, its benefits and challenges and some examples of mentoring AR will be presented. Hopefully, by the end of the session, attendees will have a clear idea of how to start mentoring teachers to explore and carry out AR in their own contexts.
15
November
Language Policing The Named Languages: Which English? Whose English? Towards Decolonising (English) Teacher Development: A Raciolinguistic Toolkit taking stock of Pakistani and Swedish context
Presented by: Dr. Alia Amir
Research Associate
University of London, UK
Event Info
The spread of English through British colonialism and American globalization has been the discussion of many academic grassroots research activism endeavours. At the same time, various varieties of Englishes have emerged which have created unique varieties of Englishes (Kachru, 1998) in several socio-linguistic contexts which also depict a sense of symbolic ownership rather than its mere association as the oppression imposed by the former colonizer.
However, the dominant ways of ‘doing being an English teacher’ are still steeped deeply in colonial ideologies, language policies rooted in ‘one nation, one language’ and the Direct method which historically assumed that languages should be kept separately in water-tight like containers and language mixing was considered blasphemous in such language teaching methodologies. In folk linguistics, language mixing and puritanical ideals are still assumed to be the best way to do languaging. Both in classrooms and everyday conversations, at micro and macro level, individuals do self-policing (Amir, 2013b) or do language policing to others (Amir, 2013) which has proven to be more time consuming and counter-productive to the goals of second/foreign language teaching (Amir, 2015).
Therefore, this talk will creatively explore the coloniality and racialization of (English) language teaching in Pakistan and Sweden beyond the universalizing Euro/American centrism (Bagga-Gupta, 2022) and “with a whole ecology of knowledge formations, not a monoculture” (Cornell, 2019)
30
November
Assessment Strategies to Promote Learner Agency and Self Reflection
Presented by: Grazzia María Mendoza Chirinos
Researcher, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Event Info
This session explores varied strategies to support learner agency and how to make connections to self-reflection. It will demonstrate varied tools to assess learning that are formative as well as leading to critical analysis. Participants will leave with clear examples to adapt and utilize in their own classrooms and contexts.
13
May
Thinking about Critical Thinking
Presented by: Gregory Hadley, Professor, Niigata University, Japan
Andrew Boon, Professor, Toyo Gakuen University, Japan.
Event Info
With the proliferation of fallacious arguments, “fake news,” and untrustworthy sources in today’s multimedia landscape, critical thinking skills are vital not only in one’s native language, but also when engaged in the task of language learning.
Written with the language teacher in mind, Greg and Andy will talk about their new critical thinking book that provides a springboard for teaching critical thinking skills in multicultural, multilingual classrooms.
They will explain what critical thinking is, outline critical thinking classroom activities that teachers can incorporate into their classes, and discuss ideas for researching the impact of critical thinking activities with second-language learners.
We Cover
Our webinars cover a wide range of subjects, including but not limited to teacher education and professional development, digital literacies/language learning and technology, programme management and leadership development, intercultural communication and global competencies, pluralism, translanguaging and multilingual education, linguistic human rights, World Englishes/English as a Lingua Franca, language planning and language policy, methodologies and teaching approaches, curriculum, syllabus design and materials development, assessment and evaluation, learner autonomy, discourse/genre analysis, creativity and critical literacies, research and publishing, teaching young learners and teacher wellbeing. They also include teaching tips for making classrooms more engaging, inclusive and enjoyable for both instructors and students.
Testimonials
I had the pleasure of being asked to give a webinar as part of the Teacher Development Webinars project, which took advantage of the rise of online professional development, to provide high quality sessions to practitioners who ordinarily may not have had access to such PD face-to-face. It is an honour for me to be included among such luminaries in the field, and to contribute to such a well-organized and worthy project.
Teacher Development Webinars is an impressive initiative. It offers teachers worldwide unique opportunities to engage with their own professional development interests and to participate in presentations by some of the most internationally well-known presenters. I only wish this kind of opportunity had been available to me when I began my teaching career.
TDW is an unprecedented platform in the Pakistani context. Since its inception is doing excellent job to bring expert voices, skills and experiences on teacher education and applied linguistics from all across the world for the benefit of in-service and pre-service teachers.
Teacher Development Webinars is indeed a unique platform for profound knowledge sharing and dessimination. The selection of the speakers at each webinar, their expertise in research and experience in teaching and speaking on different topics, is remarkable. This has all been made possible by the excellent organizational skill of the TDWebinars organizers and most especially, it’s coordinator Amanullah. Think of an exceptional research, teaching and professional development platform as a teacher, scholar, student, educator, researcher etc. think of TDWebinars.
I highly recommend The Teacher Development Webinars to teachers all around the world. Its host and organizer, Amanullah Saand, has created a high-standard global platform for cordial conversation and up-to-date knowledge sharing. I encourage teachers to join these free webinars; they will not regret it.
More than ever, educators from around the world need consistent access to good quality online professional development. The webinars offered by Teacher Development Webinars meet that need. Whether an educator is new to the profession or an experienced educator who wants to refresh or upgrade their skills, these webinars cover a wide range of content to fit a variety of teacher and educator interests and needs.
MEET OUR FOUNDER
Amanullah Saand hails from a small village ‘Hashim Saand’ in District Matiari, Sindh, Pakistan and is a MPhil scholar at University of Sindh having graduated from the same university majoring in Linguistics. Amanullah has been an Active Citizen since 2017 and has contributed much in the realm of teacher-training, consultancy and education.
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