Philippa Parks, our guest blogger this week, is an associate professor and teacher educator in ESL at the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec. She is also the Quebec National Representative of the Canadian Association of Second Language Teachers (CASLT). Her research looks at how language teachers form their professional identity during teacher education, particularly how they build self-efficacy and resilience. 

This blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.

I thought teaching would be easy. It was something I was passionate about and something I had done for most of my life in one form or another, as a babysitter, as a swimming instructor, as a summer camp counselor. So, when I got my first contract as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in a French high school in Montreal in the late 1990s, I had no idea how hard it would be.

Continue reading →