Teacher Training Videos

Hopefully it's clear by now that volunteers are welcome regardless of teaching or language background.  Of course, there is value in professionally trained teachers, but for our community-based ESL classes, we hope to stand in the gap of training volunteers in order to make English classes more easily accessible for students' schedules. 

That being said, we do recommend a modest amount of preparation before putting teachers in front of your classes.  At minimum, we ask that each teacher watch the following recorded training videos.  You can also get together and watch them as a group if you want. These videos were created by Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell, a language teaching professional, who originally created the COFFEE (Community of Friends Focused on Effective English) ESL model that Refuge still uses under a different name. 

Alternatively, you can reach out to Refuge and request an in-person teacher-training workshop at your site. Our workshops are interactive and highly customizable to your teachers' needs and your curriculum.  We also encourage you to have your teachers spend some time reviewing our Refuge Teacher Site, which covers a lot of frequently asked questions and problems in the classroom.