Chengdu, the home of all things panda.  A lovely and ancient city in Sichuan Province, where Mapo dofu and Gong Bao chicken are considered to be home-cooking, and spices are fiery and mouth-numbing, and a “mild” hotpot can sear your tongue and vaporize all foreign bodies in your sinuses.  Chengdu, ground zero for the heroic tales of the Three Kingdoms Era so beloved of authors, poets and artists (and Asian comic books known as manga or manhua), and famous for its poets such as Du Fu and Li Bai.  

It is to this Chengdu that JESIE sent us for the first SAFEA TEFL Trainer Training Workshop in China, from May 10 to 12. The workshop was held in the over-the-top Global Center, an enormous building full of amusements, shops, restaurants, and business offices.  Ten foreign teachers from cities across China met to learn the basics of teaching TEFL to new teachers, especially those new to China.  Our instructor, Heather Petersen, is a very experienced teacher and trainer, and did a great job of covering a large amount of material in a very short period of time.  That’s something quite remarkable when you consider that she was in charge of a class made up of teachers with a fair amount of experience of their own, which can be like herding cats since we tend to take over teaching workshops.  

The culmination of this workshop was a day of demo lessons, where teachers demonstrated how they would teach parts of a TEFL-training course.  I did 30 minutes on how to teach Bloom’s Taxonomy (with a little scaffolding thrown in), and like to think that the other teachers took away some helpful ways to improve their own lesson planning strategies.  I was lucky enough to see some amazing examples of teaching activities for pronunciation, young learners, and explaining Chinese culture and culture shock to newcomers to China. The entire experience was a wonderful chance to meet new teaching comrades and see a very special city.  I hope to visit Chengdu again!