Videoclubs as a Form of Professional Development: The Research-based Benefits and the Experience-based Pitfalls

In the Czech Republic, considerable attention has been given to designing pre-service teacher education courses in all subjects and levels. Teacher education for prospective teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) is in the forefront of such efforts. However, continuing professional development (CPD) has not received so much attention. In our efforts, we focus on CPD for teachers of English as a foreign language. Inspired by other programmes, we prepared and realized a similar course, so-called Videclubs. In this chapter, we shall present the story of videoclubs for EFL teachers and the lessons we learned through their implementation and evaluation. We will introduce our approach, focussing on its theoretical grounding, and the benefits and pitfalls as we encountered them. To provide a deeper insight, we will illustrate our account with examples from the accompanying research we conducted. We believe this will be of interest to teacher educators who organize similar CPD courses or wish to do so in the future.