1. Teachers can change the world: scaling quality teacher professional development is the title of a recent Brookings Institution blog post which raises a number of the issues to do with teacher impact, cost and supply https://www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2022/10/04/teachers-can-change-the-world-scaling-quality-teacher-professional-development/ and includes some useful links

like this Rand Corporation report, Teachers Matter: Understanding Teachers’ Impact on Student Achievement https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR4312.html (PDF below as well)

and this very comprehensive World Bank piece, Teachers https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/teachers Be sure to click on the Strategy, Activities, Impact/Projects and Resources tabs at the beginning, too.

2. The October issue of HLT (Humanising Language Teaching) is out https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct22/ It includes

TESTING TIMES – A Special Boris Johnson Resignation Edition: The Boris Johnson Taxonomy of Failure Excuses from Geoff Tranter https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct22/testing-times and

The Didactic Usefulness of Proverbs in ELT Classes from Azzeddine Bencherab & Cigdem Cetiner https://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct22/didactic-usefulness-of-proverbs

One of my own all-time favourite lessons involved the comparison of English and Croatian proverbs: ‘Don’t prepare the barbecue while the rabbit is still in the forest’ in Croatian becomes ‘Don’t count your chickens till they’re hatched’ in English, and whereas ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer’ in English, in Croatian the appearance of a single swallow doesn’t mean it’s spring!

3. I’m not on Facebook, so don’t always spot stuff there very quickly (or at all). Here’s a page of short and lively TeachingEnglish videos covering a wide range of professional development for teachers of English https://www.facebook.com/TeachingEnglish.BritishCouncil/videos/1044828352858760/

4. And, finally, here’s Bernardine Evaristo’s Read Your Way Through London from yesterday’s New York Times https://tinyurl.com/45bu5yns