WRITING A SUCCESSFUL CV

Over the past few weeks I've had the opportunity to get immersed in ESP, English for Specific Purposes. I was the instructor of a workshop aimed at students at my school on how to write a successful CV. Several students have had the possibility to attend these classes where they learnt the different parts of a CV, the layout and design, tips to catch the attention of potential recruiters and specific vocabulary and key expressions that would to improve the quality of their CV.

CONTINUING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON A BUDGET

Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is mandatory for teachers in order to stay up-to-date with current trends and innovations in your profession. Not everyone is able to enrol in development courses or start an MA due to time limitatons but also to money issues, but thanks to the Internet it is now possible to improve the quality of your work without spending too much (money and time). There are a lot of actions we can take to improve our CPD and I will comment on the ones I have found particularly useful recently.

OPEN LETTER TO MY #YOUNGERTEACHERSELF

Dear 24-year-old Miguel

I’m sending you this letter encouraged by the kind words of Ms. Joanna Malefaki, a great EFL teacher/blogger and better person. She has started a blog challenge addressing teachers to write a letter with advice to our younger self, and that’s the reason the hashtag for this blog challenge is #youngerteacherself.

SEMINAR WITH BRIAN ENGQUIST

This post follows on the one I wrote last week about the Pearson event for teachers held in Valencia a few weeks ago. Brian Engquist, head of the teacher training department at Pearson Spain was responsible for this second seminar. The focus of the talk was how to integrate exam preparation into our day-to-day teaching. The title of the talk, Stay calm and teach: making exam skills invisible, already suggests that our main focus as teachers should actually be that: teaching, and that exam skills should be implied in the teaching process.

FOLLOWING THE IATEFL 2015 CONFERENCE FROM ABROAD

One week after Manchester hosted the 2015 IATEFL conference I can now talk about my experience following all the sessions and workshops that were available online. Thanks to the British Council, which offered many of the talks and lots of interviews live, the work of those who attended the sessions and tweeted the main events happening, and those have been actively blogging during the last week, I must say it has been a very enjoyable experience that has provided new insights and thoughts about the concept of English Language Teaching. I would like to express my gratitude to all the people that took part and made it possible.