Page 24 - ELG2406 June Issue 490

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COMMENT

Seeing the person in front of you

Fabio Cerpelloni speaks to Hadar Shemesh about the importance of
teacher recruitment and retention for her school, Accent’s Way English.

Q: How did you start your journey in I wasn’t able to manage it all by myself. into really learning or relearning what they
creating your team at Accent’s Way I needed administrative help too, so I hired knew so they could work with me.
English? people here and there.
I started on my own in 2014 as a teacher and The business grew even bigger in 2020 Q: What qualities do you look for
content creator on YouTube. I used to teach when I developed a training program for when recruiting educators and staff for
one-to-one and then started teaching groups. teachers. It was called ETA, English Teachers your team?
At some point, I felt I was at capacity and Academy. It was a program to help teachers Emotional intelligence. Passion and
realised I needed someone else, so I had to understand how to teach pronunciation in a compassion. I hire people who can actually
shift my marketing a little bit. simple way and how to build their own online see who’s in front of them. If a teacher can
Two years later, I found my first teacher. business. I opened it right at the beginning of understand what the person in front of them
She had a linguistic background, but I wanted the pandemic, which was good timing because needs and can adapt to and facilitate the
to make sure my students would still get the everyone was shifting to teaching online. content, that is so much more important to
same quality of teaching even if they didn’t Many different educators from around the me than just delivering the curriculum. The
learn with me. So I created the outline for my world joined. bar is really high. If I want the quality of
training curriculum for my new employee and I started approaching those who stuck teaching to remain the same as if I were to
trained her to do what I was doing back then, out and asked them to work for my online teach, then I need to be very strict about what
which was mainly pronunciation teaching. school. I was lucky because I got to meet a I expect from my teachers and how I want
Now it’s more varied, and I have several lot of incredible people who trained with my them to show up.
coaches who do different things. But back then, content. So, all the other teachers who work
I was only training her to be a pronunciation with me today come from the ETA. Jelena, Q: Do you require candidates to have
coach. That’s when it all started. my head of training, is someone who used any specific qualifications to work at
to be a student of mine. Marcela, who is our your school?
Q: How did your team keep growing? grammar queen in one of my programs, was a I don’t because our focus is pronunciation and
In 2017, I started my online business and member of that community, too. I feel the way we teach it is more intuitive
hired another teacher who used to teach The training process was an opportunity than other language aspects. So if you were
one-to-one with me. As the business grew, for me to see if they were really committed. to apply to work at our school, we would first
the number of students grew to the point It allowed me to see how much effort they put want to see if you can hear what we hear, and
24 June 2024