Comment on Alastair Grant’s blog post ‘Share and Share Alike’

http://alastairjamesgrant.wordpress.com/2011/07/30/share-and-share-alike/

Some excellent points here from Susan, Brad and Colin, responding to Alastair’s excellent post on a conference I can’t believe I missed (I blame my school’s director – ha ha!). While I agree with everyone’s sentiments and have shared similar experiences both as a developing teacher and then as a Director of Studies, I do think Brad’s questions are difficult to answer. Some of the problems we have to overcome are pretty challenging and I see two of the biggest as: – the costs of bringing native speakers out to your institute almost prohibits letting them go if they don’t come up to (the CPD) scratch – getting practising teachers to realise they have as much (or even more) to contribute than the learned non-practitioners can be almost impossible But the solution to both seems to be the same – championing and focusing our efforts on developing, or should I say ‘providing opportunities for them to develop themselves’ the committed, locally-based teachers, such as those here in Argentina who went to the Share convention and hopefully those I’m going to meet this weekend starting out on the Delta journey in Uruguay, And one way of doing this is to stop organising conferences and presentations where a big name says a lot about very little and organising more conferences like the Share convention where the focus is on practising teachers collaborating to the benefit of all. See you next year at Share!

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