Caribbean mentor helps new foreign teachers blend in

Amanda Beepath

Email of the writer: zhqcindy@163.com

A new challenge for Amanda Beepath, a Caribbean teacher from Trinidad and Tobago, after teaching in Shenzhen for almost three years, is to assist new foreign teachers in adapting to their new lives and work in the city.

Beepath has been helping eight fresh teachers deal with challenges of both working and living in a foreign city since the new school year began in September.

Beepath now works as a mentor at a local personnel training center that recruits and trains foreign teachers. She is also a teacher at a primary school in Bao’an District.

Although all of the new foreign teachers working at public schools in Shenzhen are required to have college degrees and TESOL certificates, they have to also go through various training programs in different countries to become teachers.

“What we mainly do is to offer these new teachers some unified guidelines to settle in their work at schools. For instance, we provide a unified lesson-plan format to guide the teachers to plan their lessons,” said Beepath.

In between her busy life teaching 12 classes per week, Beepath arranges face-to-face meetings with members of her group and solves problems for them.

“Teaching in China is very different because these new teachers did not usually teach students at such a large amount (around 60 students in every class) in their countries, so there is a lot to adapt to,” said Beepath.

“Now they speak slower with more body language to help the Chinese students understand.”

Beepath thinks it’s important for foreign teachers to stay at the same school for longer periods in order to connect with the students and help them learn.

Extending contracts with the same school is not the foreign teachers’ choice and the Chinese students often have to adapt to new foreign teachers every year or even every semester. Beepath hopes that more foreign teachers will be able to stay longer at the same school.