Page 10 - ELG1702 Feb Issue 444

Page 10 ELpeople February 2017

s someone with three Follow your heart to succeed
decades of teaching
Aexperience in over 25
countries I realise how difficult
it is for EFL teachers to find
work that truly inspires them and Julie Pratten offers seven top tips that everyone should know when starting off a
makes their heart sing.
Ideally, we should all be career in ELT, and reminds teachers why they went into the profession in the first place
spending our lives doing what
makes us jump out of bed in
the morning. What I have real- Julie Pratten is the founder
ised is that we really should do 1 Follow the dream
what we love – we need to think If teaching really is your calling, try to work out what of Heart ELT Publishing, a
charitable publisher that
about it and not just go with the kind of teaching you enjoy. It may be general English,
flow. Like many other teach- teaching young learners, business English or you may produces crowdsourced
books to raise funds for chil-
ers, I started off wanting to be
a ‘proper’ teacher and trained want to go into coaching. dren who have no access
to education, and to sup-
as a primary school teacher; There are also other possibilities on the fringe of
however when I completed my ELT. You may find the teaching children with dyslexia port teachers working in a
low-resource classroom.
training there were absolutely is what you’d like to do. This could be within ELT or
Julie has taught for over
no jobs and I was forced to look you may want to consider retraining. But whatever three decades specialis-
elsewhere. you opt for, try to establish early on what you love and
I opted for adventure and the do that. It’s good for your health and good for those ing in business English
chance to travel. It was after around you. and soft skills, and is the
spending a year training horses leading author of bank-
ing and financial English
in the mild climes of Lake Kon-
stanz in a sleepy village called 2 Develop your niche publications. In 2015 her
publishing platform Aca-
Uberlingen that I hit the trail
of an EFL teacher. I remember Once you have thought about your dream – and it may demic Study Kit was the
joint winner of the David
to this day arriving at Frankfurt even take a few years to research it – try it out and
Hauptbahnhof at midnight and decide if it really is your dream. It may even involve Riley Award for A–Z of
Business English. Julie is
dragging my suitcase along the retraining, but even if whatever you decide to try
Kaiserstrasse, in the red-light doesn’t turn out to be your dream job (as you’d imag- a regular speaker at inter-
national conferences and a
district, to the sleazy hotel I’d ined), it will give you more skills to fall back on if you
been booked into by a language are between jobs later on. And you will be one step visiting lecturer at the Uni-
versity of Brighton. Doing
school I’d taken up a one-year’s Courtesy Julie Pratten nearer to achieving your goal.
teaching job with. Don’t give up – you will eventually find your niche, things differently in collabo-
ration with others is what
With many years of teaching and when you have, nurture it, refine it and put your
under my belt, what do I wish mark on it. inspires her. See http://
heartelt.org for more info
I’d known back then? n FINDING YOUR TRIBE Julie Pratten founded Heart ELT Publishing
3 Find your tribe or create a new one 4 Collaborate
Everyone needs a tribe. Collaboration really is the key This is the year of collaboration – I am sure of it. So
to making progress and achieving results. As an only many people in our profession are starting to realise
child and someone who always liked my own com- that if we get together with others we can strengthen
pany, I have always really done things on my own, and our skillset. At the same time, if we can find like-minded
creating projects was always something I loved, so the people who share our vision, we can really change
concept of creating a tribe is only something I have things. And the world really needs change right now,
experienced since starting Heart ELT just over a year more than ever, doesn’t it?
ago. Before I started Heart ELT, I only had a handful of My own personal experience of this started last
Facebook contacts, wasn’t a member of any groups year when I began a journey to create crowdsourced
and had absolutely no presence on social media. As ELT books to raise funds for children who have little
we all know, Facebook has its pros and cons, and the
same goes for Google groups, but whatever channel or no access to education and to support teachers
you choose to use it is easier than it ever was to start who are working in a disruptive or low-resource
a group, an initiative or a discussion. This is a great classroom.
starting point for finding or creating your tribe a la Through my experience of establishing a team and
‘birds of a feather’. working with ELT professionals all around the world, I
have the best on-the-job training possible. Obviously,
I have made mistakes along the way and I hope I have
learnt from them. Volunteer work is very different to
the work I have done in the past and one problem I
have faced is that teachers who volunteer to help have
many other commitments on their time.

5 Pass on your legacy

EFL teachers have such a wide experience as they
have usually travelled the world as part of the job and
many have acquired a Mary Poppins bag of wisdom
and intercultural competence. Many of us have also
stepped well outside our comfort zone – we have no
choice. Is there any other profession where you have
to spend your whole career reinventing yourself?
So how do you pass on your knowledge? Network-
ing has to be number one on my list, that’s why I think
the mainstream conferences have got it all wrong. We
need shorter formal plenaries and much longer cof-
fee breaks and stand-up buffets! I think many people
would agree that they go to conferences for the net-
working because this is how we pick up most of our
invaluable tips, suggestions and pearls of wisdom. 7 Teach with your Heart
That’s why the coffee table is always the most popular
place. Finally, on top of the list of six, this is the one we
all know about already. However, now and again we
need to remind ourselves why we are teachers. If you
6 Be a mentor, a tutor became a teacher and remained a teacher, I believe it
was your heart that led you there. It belongs on this list
– a supporter as I personally didn’t realise at the time that it was my

Another thing I only realised recently is just how heart that guided me down that road, ‘the road most-
many people are out there at the end of an email, a travelled’ by all of us.
messenger thread or a Skype call who are willing to If you have any doubts about how you got on this
offer support in your hour of need of mentoring when road and why you didn’t take the first turn off or any
you are having a presentation meltdown. Again, social turn offs on the way, I have a hunch why. It’s because
media really helps and a few kind words of support you are guided by your inner core, your ethical stance
mean so much when you are having your doubts about as human being, your desire to be a lifelong learner
your interview, struggling to finish an assignment or and an eternal adventurer-discoverer of the globe of
searching for the right course. knowledge.

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