Professional development is crucial to improving teachers' quality of teaching, their professional identity and sustained motivation, and their retention on the one hand and students' outcomes on the other. As such, continued professional development (CPD) during the career span has received the attention of managers, teacher educators, and supervisors. This speech aims to address the need for CPD among school teachers through a critical lens framed by the educational ambiance of the school context in Iran. First, I will delineate the meanings of CPD and its multidimensionality. Next, I will describe the methods for unpacking teachers' needs for CPD. Against this backdrop, types of self-directed and school-scaffolded programs and their enactment for teachers' CPD will be discussed. Further, I will suggest multiple criteria for the evaluation of the effectiveness and impacts of these programs on teachers' CPD and students' gains. I will conclude the speech by highlighting the exigency for concerted investment in teachers' CPD, school-university partnership for more effective CPD, and space to be created by all stakeholders from the micro- and macro-ecologies to improve the CPD of teachers in the school context.

This workshop aims to explore the fundamental concepts and principles of sociolinguistics, recent developments and how they relate to language education. The participants are expected to gain practical knowledge of research methods, data collection, and analysis techniques relevant to ELT sociolinguistic inquiries. Moreover, they are likely to learn about classroom strategies and activities that leverage sociolinguistic awareness to enhance language instruction.

Given the effectiveness of the use of tasks in ELT classes and the importance of task design, the purpose of the workshop is to familiarize ELT practitioners with the fundamental principles of task design and implementation. In this workshop, first, a thorough introduction to the concept of task and its classification(s) will be made. Then, the basic issues and principles regarding task design will be reviewed. In the final phase, the addresses will be engaged to practice designing tasks.