Welcome, new ETAs!

Last week I was back again at the orientation for Fulbright English Teaching Assistants. I am a former ETA (2010-2012) and presented one of the topics last year at the same orientation, which was two days long. This year, however, the program has changed; it is longer, more detailed and designed to provide a more comprehensive preparation for the new teachers. Working closely with other English teachers as well as the Department for English and American Studies at Sofia University, I helped carry out a five-day training for the majority of the 28 American Fulbright Fellows who will be teaching in Foreign Language Schools across the country for the next ten months. My sessions included lesson planning, online resources, classroom management, teaching multilevel students and cultural adjustment. I also presented information about some of the extracurricular activities and projects some ETAs have become involved with in the past, including my own (Learning Through Our Differences).

When Iliana at the Fulbright Commission emailed me to invite me as a lecturer at the ETA orientation this year, I was more than thrilled. I've had the pleasure to meet more than 70 American Fulbrighters in Bulgaria during the time I've lived here; I've also met many Bulgarian alumni who have studied in the United States and have since returned home. All of them have very different backgrounds, lifestyles, beliefs and interests but the one thing they do have in common is the desire to build bridges across nations, mountains and oceans, or perhaps more importantly, between people. As U.S. Ambassador Ries said in her welcoming remarks to the new grantees, the core of the Fulbright program is people-to-people diplomacy. I am proud to be a part of the Fulbright legacy in Bulgaria and a continuing supporter of the activities carried out by the Commission.

Now that I have had some more time and experience between my former role as an ETA and my current one as an elementary school teacher, it was easier for me to reflect on the early days of my teaching career. Three years ago I really had no clue what I was getting myself into; the first day of classes I just sort of showed up at school and hoped for the best because I had no idea how or what to prepare. Eventually I settled into a routine (at least until the second semester) and figured out what worked best in each of my classes. But in hindsight there are many things I would have done differently had I had the experience and knowledge I have now. I don't think that any experiences we have can be labeled as bad, really, because we always learn something from them. And it was through reading about (and observing) good teaching practices that I realized just how many mistakes I made that I didn't even know I was making at the time. I have just a few quick tips, most of which are based off some mistakes I definitely made, and a couple of which I continuously need to work on:

1. Don't sweat the small stuff. When an unexpected problem arises, find a way to diffuse the situation or simply move on. It's not worth it to over-dramatize trivial things, like a broken printer or last-minute schedule change.

2. Be an enthusiastic leader for your students. Accept the responsibilities of being a role model with grace, and listen to their needs. Give them whatever support you can to help them achieve their learning goals.

3. Be over-prepared. That means planning for lessons to take less time than you think they will, and having a back-up lesson or activity in place. Plan for technology to fail. This will happen, but you don't have to let it ruin your day.

4. Spend more time in Bulgaria. Yes, the opportunities for traveling abroad are enticing, and this may be your first time living in Europe. But don't overlook the amazing places to see here, or underestimate the importance of learning the language. See #5.

5. Learn Bulgarian! To the best of your abilities, even if that means hiring a tutor or spending some time online with a program like LiveMocha. Tell your friends and colleagues to correct your mistakes so you can be sure that others will understand you. Even if you can't roll your Rs, people will warm to you immediately if you start a conversation in their own language.

I hope that all of the new ETAs, researchers, lecturers, students and scholars will enjoy their time in Bulgaria. And I look forward to meeting all of you again (or for the first time) in Sofia. 

Добре дошли!

New (and Old) Beginnings

This week I returned to the Fulbright International Summer Institute as an alumna to share my experiences with the new group of English Teaching Assistants. Now that I've been in Bulgaria for two years, I keep thinking back to those first couple of weeks in Bansko: adjusting to life in a new place, making wonderful new friends, getting confused all the time by the language (oh wait, that still happens to me every day), and most of all being excited to learn about everything around me. I'm still just as curious as ever about everything Bulgarian, but things seem to move more slowly now. I feel comfortable here in Sofia, and I never would have imagined two years ago that I would be getting ready for yet another year of teaching in Bulgaria.

Meeting the new group of ETAs was a great opportunity to make acquaintances (hopefully many of them will come visit throughout the year!) and also to reflect on my time as a Fulbright grantee. I'm happy to have been able to share some of the best and worst parts of my tenure as an English Teaching Assistant, and I hope that through networking and sharing new experiences, this year's grantees will be even more successful in their projects. By the way, the topic of my presentation was "lesson planning and resources." I know that Maria promised to email all the presentation to the FISI group, but I wanted to also publish it here in case anyone else teaching English to high school students might be interested.

Fulbright ETA Orientation 2012

In the slideshow, I give a rough overview of what ETAs can do in the classroom, an example of a standard lesson plan, 12 activity plans and 9 links to helpful websites.

Now that I'm moving ahead and away from teaching high school, I wish the best of luck to anyone taking on the challenge of working with teens in the language classroom- especially the new ETAs working in Bulgarian foreign language schools. Have a wonderful school year!

Summer Update

A lot has happened in the past month or so. A lot of months have been like that over the last couple of years, in fact, but July 2012 was a particularly intense exception. I finished my last day as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the end of June, attended the farewell party for U.S. Fulbrighters and Bulgarian Fulbrighters who are going to study in the States next year, and I left for Poland to visit my family in Warsaw for three weeks.

Staying with my relatives is always a relaxing experience (lots of reading, picnics and swimming in the river by their summer cottage), and once again I took a trip with my cousin to a new destination in Poland. Last year it was the Baltic coastal city of Gdansk, but this time we headed south for the Tatra mountain resort town of Zakopane. While there I managed to check my email only rarely, but I did receive some startling and exciting news about my project, ""Learning Through Our Differences" (working title). Several months ago I applied for a grant from the Open Society Institute, who agreed to fund my project!!! So I'm working hard on that (more updates to come).

I hope that everyone is having a sunny and restful summer! 

"Learning through our Differences" project- part two

This post tackles some basic information about my side project, including its goals, my ongoing research, some favorite resources and an example of one very successful tolerance education program I participated in years ago.

Here's a quick list of my goals and objectives for the project:

1. To help make schools safer spaces for both students and teachers through dialogue and mutual understanding
2. To break down communication barriers, such as negative stereotypes, through hands-on activities that encourage critical examination of those barriers
3. To challenge students to be more self-reflective as well as empathetic, tolerant and understanding towards others
4. To develop a workshop curriculum, tailored specifically for a Bulgarian high school context, that can be further adapted for other contexts within the EU and the world
5. To help organize a network of facilitators prepared to carry out these workshops in schools across the country

A large part of my work so far has been researching the best methods and activities from professional organizations committed to tolerance education. There are tons of similar programs out there. Corporate diversity training, for example, often uses the same activities I've been researching to create more open and inclusive work environments. When I was in college I remember doing some of these activities for a seminar class in a Living-Learning Community Program. There are plenty of online resources available for teachers who want to incorporate tolerance and multicultural understanding into the classroom.

Some of my favorite websites:

- Multicultural Education Pavilion from EdChange (Paul C. Gorski)
- Diversity Learning Wiki from University of Wisconsin Whitewater (they also have a list of published resources here)
- Teaching Tolerance at the Southern Poverty Law Center

The only problem I've had with these is that most of their activities are very US-centric. So using them will involve some serious editing and adaptation for Bulgarian high school students to benefit from.

I gave a presentation last week to a group of high school principals, teachers, English Teaching Assistants and Fulbright staff on the project and I showed a segment of this documentary from Dutch television called "Over de Streep." This was the first time that Challenge Day, a San Francisco-based youth program, came to Europe and you can read more about it here. I actually attended Challenge Day when I was 13 at my middle school in Seattle. This program is particularly effective, and it's been around since 1987. I hope that what I can bring to Bulgarian schools with this project will also provoke discussion, awareness and understanding of differences in a similar way.

"Learning through our Differences" project- part one

I wanted to dedicate a couple of posts to this project I've been working on for the past year. When I accepted my Fulbright grant in 2010, I had the intention of working on a side project in addition to my teaching responsibilities. Apart from my volunteer work here in Sofia, I am now putting together grant proposals and meeting with local partner organizations and individuals to make this project a reality by the beginning of next school year.

"Learning through our Differences" is meant to address various problems with intolerance, bullying, name-calling and other issues in Bulgarian schools which I don't think are being discussed very often. In the past two years I have witnessed and heard about all sorts of incidents like these, from homophobic insults and racial slurs to actual violence or isolation from social groups. Like teenagers everywhere, Bulgarian high school students are susceptible to negative peer pressure and low levels of self-esteem. This leads to social anxiety, which can cause major behavioral problems (including self-destructive ones) in the long and short-term. I firmly believe that a sense of safety within the school community, backed up by a strong network of supportive adults and peers, is fundamental to assuring the emotional, physical and intellectual development of our students.

With that in mind, I am using existing models of tolerance, diversity awareness and community-building activities to adapt within the context of Bulgarian high schools for a series of one-day workshops with both students and educators as participants. I am lucky to have several contacts with years of experience in human rights education who have been kind enough to share their knowledge and also listen to me as I tried to formulate my ideas into a coherent plan. (THANK YOU!!!)

Stay tuned for more updates on the project, as well as example activities I plan to incorporate into the curriculum (still in the works, to be translated into Bulgarian for the final phase of the project). If you want to know more, or have a friend who might be willing to collaborate in either the planning or implementation of the workshops, please contact me at sophillarosa@gmail.com.