Access for Teachers Program

Program Description

The Access for Teachers (AFT) Program is an online teacher training program supporting English teachers in Brazil to develop as professionals and teach English in English using learner-centered, communicative methods.

Through the Access for Teachers Program, World Learning aims to improve the English proficiency of public-school English teachers in Brazil and support them as they shift to more communicative language teaching. The program is based on an experiential learning methodology in which teachers experience communicative language teaching as learners while developing their own English proficiency. The program is customized to meet the needs of public-school English teachers with a high A1 and A2 proficiency level.

While the English for Teaching (EFT) course in the ELTeach series developed by National Geographic Learning was used as the main learning resource in the program’s first phase, the second phase utilizes internally developed learning resources tailored towards the target group’s requirements. The program currently supports the professional development of four coaches, 26 teacher trainers, and 390 teachers. The coaches and teacher trainers participate in a four-day in-person training of trainers program that prepares them to lead peer learning hubs and mentor teachers as they implement communicative language teaching in their classrooms. The teachers attend 12 virtual synchronous two-hour peer learning hub workshops and carry out asynchronous learning supported by an online learning platform. They will reflect on what helped learning in these lessons and use these model lessons to explore the critical concepts in communicative language teaching.