Laetitia Kokx

Throughout the year, biweekly hybrid meetings are held with the cohort and mentors. These meetings run smoothly and typically include a personal or emotional check-in, a moment of reflection, and discussion of the materials we prepared or engaged with for that session. The conversations are usually grounded in pre-assigned readings or activities, which helps keep them focused and meaningful. What is especially important to highlight is the human dimension of these meetings. Rather than moving directly into the topic, space is intentionally created to connect on a personal level. This approach humanizes the cohort experience and fosters strong friendships and trusting relationships both among cohort members and with mentors. Overall, the biweekly meetings provide a safe space to share, while remaining highly manageable in terms of commitment and consistently productive. Over the course of the year, these interactions culminated in a rich and dynamic Mural board, where each participant contributed something different toward a shared goal, capturing the unique and collaborative spirit of the fellowship.

During the spring semester, our meetings transitioned into a book club format, where we discussed chapters of a book we selected together: Zacarian, D., & Silverstone, M. (2021), Teaching to Empower: Taking Action to Foster Student Agency, Self-Confidence, and Collaboration (ASCD). We used an open Mural space to share our reflections on each chapter, which helped guide and deepen our follow-up group discussions. Reading this book was both highly informative and transformative for me as an educator. It reframed how I think about student agency, confidence, and collaboration in the classroom. The book’s strong reflective component encouraged ongoing dialogue, allowing us to move beyond individual reading into collective meaning-making. These discussions made the ideas more concrete and applicable, helping transform reflection into practical teaching strategies. Overall, the book club created a collaborative and engaging learning environment in which shared insights enriched our understanding and strengthened the connection between theory and practice.

A central component of the fellowship was the development of a project connected to teaching and learning. One of the most valuable aspects of this process was the strong, ongoing guidance we received, which allowed us to develop our projects at our own pace and in clearly structured steps. This approach made the work both manageable and meaningful over time. The year-long timeline was especially important, as it gave us the space to reflect, revise, and gradually refine our ideas rather than rushing toward a final product. Each stage of development built on the previous one, allowing the project to evolve in a thoughtful and sustainable way. Feedback from both mentors and cohort members was essential throughout this process, as it helped sharpen the focus of the project, and ensure that the work remained realistic and applicable to our respective contexts. This experience not only strengthened the final project but also deepened my understanding of how to design an initiative grounded in critical reflection.

My project focuses on supporting International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) in building teaching confidence beyond their accent by shifting attention from how they speak to how they teach. While ITAs often navigate accent-related bias that can impact their confidence and classroom presence, students may also hold assumptions about language that affect their learning experience. This project addresses both sides of this dynamic by developing workshops and an open-access training module that support ITAs’ pedagogical identity and raise undergraduate students’ awareness of linguistic diversity. Grounded in a pedagogy-first approach, the goal is to foster more inclusive classrooms where ITAs can teach authentically, focus on their instructional skills, and where students engage more meaningfully with diverse voices. To ensure sustainability and feasibility, I refined the project’s scope based on feedback from the CTLI showcase. Instead of creating and addressing both ITAs' and undergraduate students' training separately, it now focuses solely on ITAs, providing them with tools to address accent and bias directly in their own classrooms. This also showed how valuable feedback is in the fellowship.

https://app.genially.com/editor/69e77bed2b8aa77eeb6c6b21