Professional development can be really hard to engage with during your average week at school. The continuous planning, self-reflection, and study that it requires can be hard to achieve when your marking pile is as high as your students are tall or all your spare time is wrapped up in the latest events on the school’s community calendar.

When there isn’t time for CPD, there isn’t time—and school holidays are far too precious to spend them worrying about career or skill development. Instead, we’ve compiled some resources to help you decide how you want to engage with CPD throughout the school year, regardless of your capacity level.

As we count down to BTS season this year, ready with our new diaries and planners, full of good-intentions to start the year right and not spread ourselves too thin, it’s normal to be feeling apprehensive. At Twig, we’re always here to support you, and we know that teachers often need a reminder to work on helping themselves rather than helping others.

PD is typically regarded as something important for career development, and for maintaining teaching standards, but we think that it is often overlooked as the perfect tool to prevent burnout and take care of yourself, as well as being a way to continuously improve in your practice. By looking at CPD as a professional form of self-care, you might find it easier to engage with. After all, if you think of it as professional and academic maintenance—rather than an activity to build additional skills to climb the ladder at work—it may feel like a more attainable “need”.

Did you know that almost anything involving improving your skills or knowledge, or trying something new “on the job” can be classified as professional development?

If you’re a big reader, you’ll be pleased to know that simply picking up a book like Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks or reading pedagogy like Make It Stick by Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel, and Peter C Brown is an easy way to engage in continuous professional development.

Even just discussing past experiences of learning (or that book you finished recently…) with your co-workers can be an excellent development tool, as it helps you explore and identify new areas of development, activities to try, and can even help you refine and consolidate your own knowledge.

This next one should be obvious now, but Ted-Ed talks and podcasts are also a great way to build your knowledge bank for the classroom. We’ll leave our substantive educational video and podcast recommendations for the end of this blog post, but if you’re experiencing some of that previously referenced burnout, here’s a short Ted talk from Rita Pierson—a teacher with more than 40 years of experience—who will remind you exactly why you do what you do.

Schedule in some thinking time

Set up a mutual mentorship program

Learning alongside your peers can be a wonderful shared experience, as you help keep one another engaged and motivated through common goals, aspirations, and a common sense of empathy. By setting up a mutual mentorship program with your fellow teachers, either one-to-one or as a wider community, you can benefit from a system of advice and support in a format that tracks your progress and provides boundaries.

Remember—we all have different life experiences and all bring different perspectives to the table. Regardless of age, years spent in the profession, or formal qualifications under your belt, we can all learn something from each other.

Engage with your learning community

Try a training day

Still feeling overwhelmed? You’re not alone—there are so many different places to start engaging with professional development and it can be hard to choose which areas need your attention most. While they’re not always an option, attending training events, conferences, or seminars with your peers can be the boost you need to start considering how to develop and maintain your skills.

Groups like our friends over at NSTA offer CPD learning units, webinars, and in-person events through their professional learning page, and can provide you with all the support you need to perfect your STEM instruction. For a broader range of support options, check out Imagine Learning‘s continuous and collaborative support, available across all the disciplines. Delivering self-paced, asynchronous, and on-demand courses, IL allows you to customize your own professional development journey, helping you to hone your skills whatever your needs might be.