Rozwój osobisty

What professional development can I expect at Oxford?

10 years of development or 10 years doing the same is a question often asked in EFL. I’ve been lucky to have the former in my career and it’s something that I believe we do very well here at OLC. By offering an extensive professional development programme we are fully committed to helping teachers achieve their aims of how they want to improve. The main components of this development programme are as follows:

Observations

Here at OLC we have a very thorough observation procedure. All teachers are observed twice a semester and detailed oral and written feedback is given by an experienced member of management. The teacher gets to keep a copy of the feedback to refer to when planning lessons there after.

Peer observations

Teachers are actively encouraged to observe other teachers and members of management in order to help them improve. The management team do their best to facilitate this crucial part of development.

Professional Development Plans (PDP)

Each teacher has a PDP with areas to focus on to help improve him/herself as a teacher. This is set up and administered by the DoS but is the sole responsibility of the teacher to fulfill their PDP within a semester. A plan may include anything from a peer observation to reading a section of a methodology book. They are a much liked and highly successful component of the development programme offered by the school.

Workshops

One of the best things about OLC has to be its extensive range of workshops. From phonetics, to inductive/deductive grammar approaches through to implementing the lexical approach in your teaching, weekly workshops are often cited as one of the best features of working at OLC. These are usually given by experienced DELTA-qualified members of management in the first semester and then by both teachers and management in the second semester.

Appraisal

All teachers are given an informal, oral appraisal at the end of the first semester and a written appraisal at the end of the academic year. This is a comprehensive record of all that a teacher has achieved at OLC with an academic year.