The Teacher Training and Education Special Interest Group (TTEd SIG) had the chance to support two young colleagues in this year’s annual conference, as a consequence of their successful applications to the TTEd SIG’s Gillian Porter Ladousse Scholarship in 2018 and 2019.
Eleni Symeonidou from Greece was our 2019 scholarship winner and Liverpool 2019 was her first IATEFL conference ever.
Eleni presented her session called ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall: reflective meta-skills’. Her session highlighted how tricky oral and written reflective practices of novice teachers can be and involved practice-based techniques that were designed to guide developing teachers’ reflective skills. Eleni has been collecting feedback to improve the tools she has shared with the audience. More details of her work can be read in the TTEd SIG’s Spring 2019 Newsletter.
Elena Oncevksa Ager, who comes from North Macedonia, is our 2018 scholarship winner. Elena’s scholarship was postponed to this year as she was pregnant during the 2018 conference.
We are proud to announce that Elena’s joint workshop with Sarah Mercer took place on the Teacher Development SIG’s Showcase Day ‘Drawing on positive psychology to support language teachers’ well-being’. Elena and Sarah emphasised how the well-being of teache rs influences their work, which is instrumental to the quality of their everyday work with their students. Elena and Sarah shared the details of an online course that was inspired by the principles of positive psychology that they jointly developed and encouraged the participants to try out some ideas during the session. Further details of Elena’s talk will be published in our Autumn 2019 newsletter.