Professional Associations and the Changing Face of Professional Development

Professional membership associations are natural nodes in the network of faculty development for international schools: affiliations include, but are not limited to, shared geographic scope, curriculum offerings, technology, ideological alignment, and more. Historically, the sine qua non of associations has been to offer annual teacher conference that features a two- or three-day main conference, usually preceded by a one- or two-day grouping of pre-conference sessions. That structure has been associations’ operative delivery model for fifty years. International research, however, shows what effective professional development requires, whether from the perspective of the school or the provider, yet associations have been slow to identify and adopt structures that align to these research-evidenced successful practices due to fundamental disruption to the association business model, which includes (but is not limited to) the aforementioned delivery model for faculty development. This alignment challenge begs a set of critical questions for professional associations, treated in this chapter, with the goal of providing associations with a framework for acting as a catalyst for change, starting with their own structures and practices.