A professional development roadmap for English teachers in Colombia

"Professional development" usually arrives as a list of things you should be doing, none of them sequenced, all of them at once. This is an attempt at a sequence instead: what is worth doing early, what is worth doing later, and what can wait.

It assumes what is actually true of most Colombian English teachers: limited time, limited budget, and a full teaching load.

Years 1–2: survive well and build habits

The first years are about the classroom, and that is the right priority. Two habits are worth installing now because they compound.

Keep a teaching journal. Not a diary. Ten lines after a class that surprised you: what happened, what you think caused it, what you will try next. This costs five minutes and becomes, years later, the raw material for a conference proposal or an article. Almost every teacher who publishes wishes they had started this earlier.

Attend free things. Monthly webinars cost nothing and require no travel. Attend even when the topic is not immediately useful — it builds a map of the field and tells you which questions people are arguing about.

What can wait: postgraduate study, publishing, running for a board.

Years 2–4: go to a conference and talk to people

Attend a national conference before you present at one. It removes the mystery. You see what a workshop looks like, how long forty minutes really is, how people ask questions.

Then present. The first proposal is the hardest one, and the shape of what you already have usually fits a pedagogical experience session: something you tried, with evidence of what happened.

This is also the moment to join a Special Interest Group. A SIG is the cheapest professional network available: a group of people who care about the same narrow thing you do, meeting through the year. It is where co-authors and collaborators come from.

What can wait: an M.A. — unless your institution is paying and the timing is right.

Years 4–7: write something down

By now you have three or four years of practice and, if you kept the journal, a lot of documented experience. This is the window for a first publication.

Start with the format closest to what you have. A pedagogical experience article is a real, peer-reviewed, indexed publication — it is not a lesser category. Many Colombian ELT journals publish exactly this type precisely because it comes from practising teachers.

Realistic timeline: three months of writing, one cohort deadline, four to eight months of review and revision. Working backwards from the next cohort closing is how it gets done.

This is also when postgraduate study starts to pay off, because you now have questions worth spending two years on rather than a general wish to study more.

Years 7+: take the work outward

Three directions open up:

Depth — a doctorate, sustained research, a research group. Slow, demanding, and the route into teacher education.

Breadth — teacher education, materials development, teacher training, curriculum work at institutional or regional level.

Service — reviewing for a journal, facilitating a SIG, joining a board, organising events. This is unglamorous, unpaid and it is what keeps the professional community alive. Review a manuscript before you complain about reviewers.

The budget question

Most of this is free.

• Free: webinars, reading open-access journals, publishing in most Colombian ELT journals, joining a SIG, keeping a journal, reading what your colleagues publish.
• Cheap: association membership, short online workshops.
• Expensive: conference travel and accommodation, postgraduate study, international events.

If money is tight — and for most Colombian teachers it is — the free tier alone is a serious development plan. A teacher who attends twelve webinars a year, reads one article a month, and writes ten lines after difficult classes will develop faster than one who does an expensive course and nothing else.

The trap to avoid

Collecting certificates is not development. It is possible to accumulate an impressive list of attendances and change nothing about Monday's class.

The test for anything you do: can you name one thing you now do differently? If the answer is no after three courses in a row, the problem is not the courses — it is that nothing is being transferred. Fix that before signing up for the next one.

The mechanism that transfers it is almost always the same: try one thing, watch what happens, write down what you saw.

A plan for this year, if you want one

1. Pick a fixed time for one webinar a month.
2. Read one journal article a month, in the area you already care about.
3. Write ten lines after any class that surprises you.
4. Submit one conference proposal.
5. Join one SIG.

That is roughly two hours a month, most of it free, and it is more than most teachers manage in a decade.

Keep going

• Browse the webinar library, all free and recorded.
• See the Special Interest Groups and pick one.
• Look at the call for proposals for the next conference.
• Check the journals network for where your first article could go.