{Interesting Webinar} IATEFL Research SIG webinar

Dr Richard Smith shared a post at the facebook group

Teaching English & Teaching in English in global contexts

Here are the recording and slides from our IATEFL Research SIG webinar on ‘Enhancement Mentoring for Teacher-research: a hopeful response to Covid-19’ (a kind of ‘lockdown diary’ of an approach that Erzsebet BekesMariana Serra Seden Tuyan and I and then a wider group including Manjusha SagrolikarSuchita MahorkarVinayadhar Raju have been developing!

‘Enhancement mentoring for teacher-research: a hopeful response to Covid-19’

by Richard Smith, Erzsébet Ágnes Békés, Mariana Serra & Seden Eraldemir Tuyan

16 January 2021

The recording of the webinar can be accessed at rb.gy/6nmgk0
PowerPoint slides (pdf) are here
Mentimeter feedback from the warm-up activity is hereIn this presentation we describe the development of an innovative approach to mentoring for teacher-research, termed ‘enhancement mentoring’, which we collaboratively developed online during lockdown and have since then been trialling successfully with international groups of mentors and teachers. We characterize this as a ‘hopeful’ response to Covid-19 because, rather than focusing added attention on problems – with attendant dangers of exacerbating perceptions of difficulty – we were concerned to meet the crisis by supporting teachers to identify and explore further the pedagogic successes they had resourcefully achieved, as a basis for charting pathways forward. Whereas teacher-research tends to begin with a problem or puzzle, we felt that the idea of building research on understanding success – as outgrowth of an overall ‘enhancement approach’ (Smith, Padwad & Bullock 2016) – deserved to be developed further, for the sake of teachers’ wellbeing. The feasibility and potential value of mentoring and peer-coaching according to this model have been confirmed by the cycles of research and development we have been engaged in. In this webinar, we introduce the practical set of questions we have developed, presenting this as a toolkit to help others – including teacher-researchers themselves, as well as mentors of teacher-research, teacher educators, leaders of teacher associations, and so on – to derive value from and chart a path through and beyond the pandemic experience.

For more information, please visit IATEFL website:

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