Chapter 26: Synergizing Professional Development Through Video Recording, Critical Reflection, and Peer Feedback

The inspiration for this chapter was the aspiration of two English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers who sought to develop their individual teaching practices through collaborative reflection. Accordingly, each teacher video recorded two of his own lessons during the same semester before undertaking a six-step procedure of critical reflection for each. The underlying purpose to each step was to raise the self-awareness of each teacher in regard to the qualities of their lessons. The direction that unfolded for this professional development (PD) project subsequently became based on the following three premises:

EFL teaching contexts and policies can vary significantly from institution to institution. For that reason, this chapter proposes a context-independent framework that all teachers will hopefully find helpful to their own PD. Due to their irrelevance to individual teaching contexts, the observed teaching qualities themselves shall not be discussed.