18 fev 2015

by | in Career, Reflections about Education

I'm a teacher and a mentor,  which means I'm in charge of in-service training at  branch level at a large language institute with around seventy branches spread in my hometown and other capitals in Brazil. In practical terms, I welcome new teachers and conduct ongoing training with our teaching staff when I'm not busy teaching and grading students' work. Fitting all of these duties into our busy teaching schedule is not easy, so mentoring calls for a lot of creativity. My colleagues also teach at other schools and...

17 nov 2014

by | in Career, Classroom Experiences, Reflections about Education, Teacher Development

When I started teaching a long time ago, I didn’t have a mentor. I had colleagues and students, and occasionally I would seek help from a more experienced teacher. It was usually a question about the material or language that I couldn’t answer myself. Other than that, I relied pretty much on teachers’ guides even though I occasionally changed a thing here and there. When I started my present teaching job at a large language institute in Rio, I had a mentor, but I didn’t know she was my...

11 set 2014

by | in Teacher Development

At the beginning of 2013 I was invited to take part in a course about mentoring offered by EVO .To my surprise, I discovered that mentoring is something I have been doing for a long time. Furthermore, it is one of the things I like most as a teacher and a teacher trainer. The use of mentoring is widespread across the commercial, education and not-for-profit sectors as a developmental, supporting and helping activity. So mentoring is part of our professional development The origin of the term mentor is found in...