Imagine crouching at the starting line of a race, ready to launch into motion. You hear the starting gun and push off of your back foot…only to trip. You could recover, but you’re starting with ground to make up.
A stumbling start makes everything harder with any new thing in life. The bigger the new endeavor, the harder it is to come back from a bad start, and moving to a new country and culture can be a steep learning curve. With the decades of sending teachers overseas, ELIC has learned how to make sure you have a head start that will set you up for success.
Let’s dive into what that looks like on the ground.
Learn to Make the Most of Your Resources
Providing support resources while you are in your host country is a primary focus for ELIC, but you have to know how to navigate them to make them useful. A big part of pre-departure training is dedicated to teaching you how to access all the tools available to you: emergency services to help with health and safety concerns, newsletter design and processing to help you connect your friends and family with your work, and a whole library of resources for personal development, among many others.
One-on-one Meetings and Connection with Staff
Every teacher at long-term training spends one-on-one time meeting with the Global Support Services team. You dig into the details of your specific journey and address any questions you haven’t had a chance to ask in the large group sessions. We build in opportunities for you to get to know the North American staff and put faces to the names of the people working to support you while you’re living overseas.
Cultural Training
We are fully invested in the local communities where we teach. This is essential to making our work effective. Rather than living in the little bubble of Westerners on your team when you leave the classroom, your team members work together to connect with the local community. This essential skill is a major focus of the training process. Sessions on cultural transition in general break out into regional and then country-specific sessions led by experienced team leaders from the long-term teams already in place. Unique situations, like couples with only one spouse teaching, are also addressed in specific sessions.
TESOL Certification
Regardless of your degree, the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) certification course will prepare you well for your overseas classroom. This master’s-level credential covers everything from lesson planning and classroom management to phonology and grammar. People without teaching backgrounds are equipped to step into the classroom with confidence, while those who have taught before find their expertise contextualized for cross-cultural work.
Send-off
Training wraps up with a celebration and ceremony attended by the staff and the teachers’ friends and family. There is significance to marking important beginnings. This send-off tradition is designed to remind you of one of the most beautiful and significant aspects of this jou rney: you are not in it alone. Your friends and family, ELIC’s supportive staff, and the teachers on your team are with you and for you, working for your success.
As you head into a new life in a new culture, the way you begin makes a world of difference. ELIC training is set up to ensure you can start off on the right foot to run a strong race living and teaching overseas.
To find out more or get started fill out an interest form.
