June 17, 2019
Hello Everyone,
It is incredible to think that the summer solstice is right around the corner. It has been a busy spring at TESL Canada and for you as well, I’m sure. I am so pleased to be able to send you all two great reads- 1. The June edition of TESL Canada Connects featuring innovation and research! Thanks again to Celia Logan, our newsletter Editor, for putting together yet another informative newsletter. 2. With a generous support grant from IRCC, TESL Canada commissioned a two-part research project. The first part is a Literature Review on Professional Standards, which we are pleased to distribute to you all. Thanks to our researcher, Dianne Tyers, for this contribution. The second part will be a synthesis of the survey data collected on the same theme. We wish to thank the nearly 300 people who participated in this survey for their insights and input and we look forward to reading about the findings from this part of the research.
TESL Canada will be having a June Board meeting at the end of the month and then take a little summer break (although the “office” will still be operating as usual). There has been a tremendous amount of communication and work related to Certification and Teacher Training Program Recognition and we are happy to have the support of a part-time person to serve TESL Canada members. Joining Donna is Teri Fullerton, an experienced ESL educator and a similarly super-organized human; we are grateful to be able to have the financial stability to better handle the many TESL Canada tasks.
I just wanted to give a shout-out to our webinar leaders and participants who contributed to the success of this initiative. If you participated and did not receive your Professional Development Letter, please let us know and Teri will send that along to you. We are really hoping to put on more of these online professional learning events in the fall and we will be sending out a call for webinar proposals as we know that there are many of you who have ideas and expertise areas to share with your fellow members.
We were also thrilled to be able to offer TCEF professional learning bursaries and TESL Canada Teaching Excellence awards this spring and will also continue with these two initiatives moving forward. Recipients to date were recognized in our April newsletter.
Looking forward to early fall, we will be putting out a call for nominations for some of the TESL Canada Board positions and we invite you to consider putting your name forward for these roles. Our AGM will be held in October; details will follow in late August/early September.
All the best to all of you for a productive and rejuvenating summer,
Paula Kristmanson, TESL Canada President.