John Smith discusses Queensland's PD Fest success

 

 

John Smith photo

We chat with Griffith English Language Institute's, John Smith, about Queensland's PD Fest, what's involved in successfully running it and English for golf.

With over 300 delegates and around 28 sessions, Queensland’s PD Fest has achieved some impressive numbers. One contributor to this success, John Smith, Griffith English Language Institute’s Assistant Director of Studies believes this comes down to a simple reason, ‘it provides teachers with good access to solid PD.’ However, the simplicity of this reason belies the hard work that people like John put in to provide access to that solid PD. Hard work combined with inclusiveness and opportunity are all you really need for a successful PD Fest.

Ensuring your PD Fest has solid PD means pouring over abstract after abstract, selecting only the best and then making sure a highly crafted session flows from that abstract, or so I thought. ‘If they’re a teacher here and they’ve got an idea, we pretty much always accept it’, John tells me. A critical selection process just isn’t the focus. Instead, preparing and helping the presenter, who often hasn’t presented in a large format session, becomes the focus. This support, this inclusiveness underpins Queensland’s success and transforms their PD Fest into genuine PD by teachers and for teachers.

John captures this mantra with an illuminating analogy – ‘PD Fest is an expansion of the staff room’. The staff room can be that supportive space where teachers can share ideas, hear what works, debate grammar points and continue their learning. A PD Fest does the same only with canapes and drinks.

Expanding the staff room also means expanding who you can interact with, another important aspect of PD Fests. John sees this as one of the biggest benefits that they offer, ‘throwing people together who may not get to otherwise meet’. This can help you see beyond the sometimes high walls of your own school and hear different ways of handling the exact same problems you might be experiencing. John muses that, ‘this may be more valuable than the plenaries and sessions themselves’ especially when teachers get together.

The expanded staff room also offers schools incredible benefits because PD Fests often reveal areas where teachers need more support. John particularly sees this when he looks at the types of sessions that are submitted, ‘it started with grammar and switched to pron and now we’re back to grammar’. Session topics can reflect the teaching environment so turning to PD Fests can reveal where schools should invest their PD time for maximum impact.

This may be even more useful for PD beyond the traditional teacher skills – such as mental health. Because teachers generate the content, teachers inevitably tackle the topics that are at the forefront of their mind, and this makes PD Fests incredibly insightful. It’s no wonder that John rarely rejects an abstract.

Support and inclusiveness certainly contribute to successful PD Fests but equally important is hard work. John works tirelessly to ensure each PD Fest succeeds by creating the program, handling the abstracts, and administering many of the functional details. He is an experienced administrator given Griffith University sprawls over five campuses but he’s picked up other event management skills on the way.

Developing these skills helps him stay nimble, something he sees as necessary for both teachers and schools. This nimbleness allows teachers and schools to face many of the challenges that our dynamic industry throws up. Whether it’s specialised programs for teachers in Korea to English for golf, both courses Griffith has run, adapting quickly to where the market heads can make or break a teacher or school.

PD Fests can give us an early warning of where the market is headed and what skills we need to succeed in it. Importantly, PD Fests can actually train us in those skills that we need, and do so in a highly supportive environment, a supportive environment that John works hard to create.

Acknowledgements

Queensland’s PD Fest involves many hard-working individuals, so we would like to especially acknowledge the other members of its planning committee:

  • Julian Wilson, ICTE-UQ
  • Jo Kwai, TAFE Queensland
  • Donna Cook, ACU
  • Lauren Faull-Ortiz QUTIC
  • John Smith, GELI