Photo by Clark Tibbs on Unsplash
Here we present the first part of Divya Madhavan’s plenary speech from IATEFL 2023 in Harrogate.
We ELT teachers lean on each other an awful lot. It is essentially how we grow as teachers. There are more traditional disciplines in education where teacher growth is more of a straight line- you go from a Bachelors to a Masters to a PhD or some sort of certification and then a job where you teach and you do research. ELT is not like that, our realities are far messier: some of us fall into ELT from other professions, most of us study and get qualified while we work as teachers- because it’s the only way we can afford to do so- and all of us understand the value of moments like an IATEFL conference as so many of us pay own our way for professional development.
In looking around us at the incredible journeys that we all represent in coming together in spaces like the TDSIG or IATEFL, I think you’ll agree with me that our community is fuelled by an energy that goes beyond just professional ambition; we are fuelled by a deep love of teaching and an infinite joy in discovering new dimensions to teaching and learning.
I’ve been an English teacher for 25 years, I’ve done most jobs in ELT, from private tutoring to teaching in companies, from primary school to higher education and everything in between and I have grown a lot in the process. Today some of the choices I make influence how the teachers I work with are able to grow; and I’ve come to realise that many of the everyday choices we all make influence how the people around us grow. So, I’d like to invite you to reflect on what it means to be a teacher who supports other teachers; to reflect on how we nurture each others’ trust, how we help each other find confidence, how we give each other courage, and how we show each other perseverance.
I grew up in Malaysia in the 1980s. English was the language I spoke at home, and like so many kids who grow up in Southeast Asia there were status issues on what kind of English, what accent, what register, what variety… and of course like so many of us I’ve had to casually and not-so-casually justify my connection to the English language at many moments in my career: and the most incredible thing I’ve observed in my time is a levelling of the playing field when it comes to questioning the cultural, racial, and gender privileges within our industry. Things are far from perfect but today we can say and do so much more than we could before, thanks to spaces like this conference. Today, I am the director of a large language centre in France with English teachers from Taiwan to Turkey via South Africa and Sweden. Teachers like us define the quality of English language teaching through, not only, how rich it is, but how far it reaches.
This cultural shift of English as the world’s international language has been moving our community forward for a long time and with each stage, things get better and move forward, despite the journey being a little messy.
Change is messy because we human beings are messy. Messiness is perhaps one of the most profoundly human qualities because every human success is built in countless moments of failure. And so the starting point for my talk today is a mess. Well, not a mess, but the mess; the big mess of the huge gaps in teacher pay around the world compared to other professions requiring similar levels of education, the mess of severely low-resourced environments, the mess of most of us having to work more than one teaching job to pay our rent and look after our families. Our current IATEFL president, Alex Popovski, gave a talk in Malta in October where she raised more than one sore point regarding the working conditions of ELT teachers. I sat in the room and watched her full of admiration as she spoke her truth and took quite a lot of heat with incredible grace during the questions.
And as I reflected on this powerful but disturbing talk in the weeks after the conference, I realised that the incredible thing is that, in all this mess, we still show up. We have this incredible capacity to put aside the difficulties and show up for our students. And teachers showing up is what has kept education moving since the beginning of time.
A millennium ago, teachers (there weren’t English teachers yet, they were Latin & Greek teachers) witnessed the birth of higher education and began teaching critical thinking. They taught language, but also probably had to persuade parents to send their children to school and standardise language to make it more accessible.
Five centuries ago, English teachers like us had access to the printing press and taught literacy and English grammar- and they helped students aspire to higher-level jobs as education, and language competence became more widespread.
A century ago, English teachers like us had the singular status of teaching not just a language but the language of the most powerful colonial force in the world. And as the political world shifted and re-centred, English became everyone’s language, infused with the diversity that makes it all our own today.
Now, in 2025, we are English teachers in the era where computer scientists are flirting wildly with biologists, as philosophers tag along on the date as a bit of a third wheel, we are in the era where higher education is being turned on its head by artificial intelligence. We are in the era of “how-to” guides, where advice on everything from dieting to dreaming abounds: expertise has become ubiquitous.
And so, we are in the era of information overload, where language inundates us from every direction. The winners who will write this phase of history will be those who can see, think and communicate clearly. Clear communication has never been more essential to advance society, and as teachers of language, our role is more crucial than ever before, and we continue to show up.
Teachers show up, and that’s amazing. We show up as teachers, as coaches, mentors, nurturers, lifelines, supporters, role models, underdogs and cheerleaders in the complex landscape that is language teaching. Showing up deserves celebration, and showing up for each other deserves recognition.
I’d like to focus on two neighbouring roles to teaching: coaching and mentoring. Why are they relevant to our context? Because they help us frame the different roles that teachers can take on and better envision the kinds of spaces we, teachers and education managers, create and invest in for our teachers’ growth.
What is coaching?
Coaching is all about honing specific skills and behaviours related to a task or role. As a debating coach myself, I select and train students for competitive debates. I build an incredibly close bond with my debaters and yet this bond is laser-focused on our debating goals. And the same goes for a football coach or even a careers coach, where there’s a specific area that needs to evolve and the coach’s role is to guide their person, their client, their student, their colleague towards evolving successfully. Today, I will stick to this broad definition of the practice of coaching as a natural extension of the teaching persona, I am respectfully disassociating the professional certifications related to coaching from this discussion because those are actual career paths that people choose and grow into- they stop being English language teachers and become a professional coach so it’s different.
Now, here’s the thing – a successful coach doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert in the subject matter. What really counts is their ability to bring out the best in the person they’re coaching and help them achieve their goals. Coaches themselves need coaching sometimes- at a difficult time in my job, I was coached by a crisis management coach with whom I had the most amazing journey- and I found out much later that he mainly worked with firefighters to help them manage their stress. His coaching was so effective because he had the skills and methodology and it didn’t matter which industry his clients were from. Coaching is perhaps the more natural relationship we have with our students
What is mentoring?
Mentoring is different, you can’t mentor a team of debaters to win a tournament, you can’t mentor a squad of footballers into winning a championship. Mentoring takes time, this time spills across multiple spaces and these multiple spaces reveal multiple goals. Having a mentor is like having your own personal Yoda, someone who can guide you through the ups and downs of life with their expert knowledge of the Force. In mentoring, subject knowledge is key – you need someone who really knows their stuff to help you navigate complex challenges and grow as a person.
And here’s the thing with mentoring – you have to know your stuff, you have to be on an expertise-building journey yourself before people can look up to you and be mentored. Mentoring is perhaps the more natural relationship we have with our fellow teachers.
In each of these three roles, the positioning of the teacher shifts- we go from teaching to enabling learning, to facilitating development and performances that thrive, to supporting and inspiring. Each of these practices create a sort of echo within us: they provide spaces for reflection and introspection, they encourage us to rise above and take a different perspective and most importantly hold up a profoundly human mirror for stories that resemble our own.
We don’t all know each other but there are a few things I’m pretty sure I share with each and every one of you- I’ll venture a couple of examples:
I love my students so much that I do things that really aren’t in my job description: I bring them food, cake in particular, when I have quite a lot of work for them to do. I’m a debating coach and during tournament season my debaters work very hard as I churn out these vast amounts of cake- my main coaching strategy is that of an army on its stomach.
I love my students so much that I dedicate evenings and weekends to rewriting perfectly good teaching materials to make sure I adapt them perfectly to the particular class I have that particular week- I also make sure I complain to my whole family how annoying it is to have to spend my weekends on my teaching. These going-the-extra-mile gestures are universal in the world of teaching. It doesn’t matter that I teach in France and some of you might teach tens of thousands of miles away. We all know what it is to find that little bit of extra energy in the tank when it’s necessary (and when we deem it necessary) and show up.
The question I asked when I started writing this piece was “So, who shows up for teachers?” I don’t need 3000 words to answer that- it’s fairly straightforward: it’s other teachers!
Check back for part two of Divya’s article next month to hear the stories of educators who inspire Divya.
About Divya: Divya is the Director of the Department of Languages and Cultures at CentraleSupélec, an engineering school in France. She teaches courses in English and coaches debaters for inter-varsity competitions. Divya is also the Founder and Director of Université Paris-Saclay’s Academic Writing Center, which provides publications support and communications training to France’s most prominent research communities. Through these experiences, she has come to value professional development that is truly meaningful and useful to busy teachers who so often have even busier lives. She is a graduate of the universities of Warwick, London, and Exeter and a Fellow of the RSA with extensive experience in building language policy, designing curricula, recruiting, and training teachers. As she has journeyed from a young language assistant over 20 years ago to heading a faculty today, Divya has leaned on the IATEFL community in so many ways, at so many moments, which is why she is so excited to share these stories with her community.