Professional Development

Professional Development

Overview

The School of Languages offers its teaching staff a variety of professional development opportunities. Whether you would like to learn from experienced colleagues, share your knowledge and best practice, conduct research, or earn further qualifications, the SoL has a strong community of practice here to support you.

3 Annual Professional Development Symposia

Each year, the School of Languages hosts three all-day Professional Development Symposia, in which guest speakers and our own language lecturers share innovative and effective practice, research results, and more. Past sessions have included:

  • Online Course Design Strategies and Good Practice (Xiaoying Yuan and Haiyun Zeng)
  • The ADDIE Model for Instructional Design (LaTasha Simms)
  • H5P: A New Moodle Plugin that Makes Creating and Sharing Interactive Content Easy (Yao Wu)

Weekly Professional Development Sessions

Throughout the semester, each Wednesday afternoon sees language lecturers sharing best practice through a variety of professional development, training, and community of practice workshops. With everything from assessment moderation and action research training to best practice sharing sessions and hands-on TELL workshops, opportunities for lifelong learning and teacher training abound.

Service Opportunities

The School of Languages has a wide range of in-house roles that offer all manner of meaningful professional development opportunities. Roles available include but are not limited to Heads of Division, Deputy Heads of Division, Internal Moderators, School Committee Chairs, IT Officers, and Student English Association Coordinator. Roles are appointed via internal interviewing.

Research Opportunities

At the School of Languages, teaching staff with research interests can take advantage of several support structures, ranging from our informal SoL Research WeChat Group through Professional Development Workshops to financial support via the Teaching Development Fund (TDF).