CPD and Accreditation of EFL Programs: A Quasi-Symbiotic Relationship

Abstract

Few question the importance of continuing professional development (CPD) in trying to promote quality in education. After all, teachers are the most significant factor in ensuring quality, but it is notoriously hard to identify and evaluate good teachers empirically. Therefore, CPD is of significant importance to an institution seeking to provide education of the highest caliber. At the same time, many institutions struggle to provide effective CPD. They may, for instance, feel that they lack the necessary budget or do not have the requisite institutional culture to embrace the concept of continual improvement. This article looks at how using the framework of a formal accreditation scheme can help institutions set up and run CPD as a means of promoting quality. It identifies a quasi-symbiotic relationship between accreditation and CPD and uses the experiences of two programs that successfully went through educational accreditations to demonstrate that there is a mutually reinforcing link between an accreditation process and the development of an effective culture of CPD within an institution. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.