In this blog post, the author shares their personal journey to becoming an ELT (English language teaching) teacher in Colombia, including their experience as a teacher and their decision to start their own educational consulting company, ELT Think Tank. The author encourages readers to join them as they continue learning and growing as professionals.
Teaching English is about much more than just what goes on in the classroom. As professionals, it goes beyond what we can do as individuals and is truly one of those professions that are done best when done with fellow colleagues. Collaboration is a competence that takes teachers to the next level, so we’ll explore who we could collaborate with to make our students’ learning experience more impactful and meaningful.
Collaboration with colleagues brings about a plethora of benefits for the teachers involved, so let’s identify just a few of the possible ways you could get started or continue collaborating with fellow teachers.
Our ELT Thinkers make part of a WhatsApp group where we do just this. Here are a few examples of how we collaborate daily.
Although we mostly consider collaboration to be with colleagues, we can also put into practice our collaboration skills with our students. We could do this in two ways.
Here are a few ideas when teachers collaborate with students.
We should also promote collaboration among students, as two of our ELT Thinkers mention here:
We can also take our collaborations outside of the classroom and extend them to other people within our community who can share their own experiences and knowledge. Through these connections, you could integrate language with culture, help students expand their knowledge on everyday topics, as well as promote lifelong learning to your students and the people in your community.
