Teacher Training Plus is a Hit with Tutors Looking to Better Serve Students

Benjamin Scott, a retired engineer who has been a volunteer ESL tutor since 2017, often finds himself with pressing questions about how to teach.

“My student is Chinese, and the first class she couldn’t speak, and I didn’t know what to say, but we got through it,” Benjamin remembers about meeting Qingling Chen a little over a year ago at the local library in Pleasanton, CA.

When we launched Teacher Training Plus, Benjamin jumped on board, attending at least eight training sessions followed by small-group coaching sessions with the presenters where he could get the answers he was looking for.

Teacher Training Plus, generously funded by Dollar General Literacy Foundation, gives instructors access to practical training in the areas they identified as needing to better meet their learners’ needs.

The response was overwhelming, and over 3,800 practitioners registered for training sessions.

“I think where ProLiteracy really shines is that they have the coaching sessions,” Benjamin said. “It totally blew me away, because I could watch Ann Marie Barter’s webinar and then … a couple weeks later I can go ask her [my questions], and she’s sitting there, and I can ask her what to do. It’s absolutely amazing.”

He’s used the feedback he’s received in Teacher Training Plus to help Qingling stop pronouncing the e at the end of words, improve her conversation skills, and expand her vocabulary.

The difference between Teacher Training Plus and other classes he’s taken is that he leaves with a new knowledge of how to actually use various teaching techniques, Benjamin said.

“It’s like you buy a painting book and you want to learn how to paint, and so then [you realize], ‘Oh my god it’s just a list of dozens of techniques that you can use. Well, that’s great, but how do I use them?’” he said. “It seems like a lot of classes are like that. For me, I was looking for some systematic structure of how you teach.”

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