July 2021 OPEN Alumni

Alumni Highlight – Danielle Zélin – Video Script Julie Jones, OPEN Enrollment Coordinator: Hello and welcome to our second Alumni Highlight!

My name is Julie Jones, and I am the OPEN Enrollment Coordinator on the OPEN Team. I am so excited to be interviewing a wonderful alumna of the OPEN program, Danielle Zélin.

Danielle is from Mauritius Island in the Indian Ocean. She has 25 years of experience in teaching and educating. She started her career in education as an Early Childhood Practitioner. Since then, she has been engaged in different educational roles such as serving as a School Coordinator, educational social project coordinator, TESOL tutor, Jolly Phonics Trainer and now running her own after-school English Club - Language Mood English Club with numerous innovative educational events and projects.

Danielle has been travelling and teaching around the world in South Africa, Latvia, Dubai, and The Maldives. Danielle is also a National Geographic Certified Educator, and she has been using National Geographic Resources together with SDGs to teach English and educate the youth about our world. You may have seen her fantastic posts on the Discussion Forum with activities about Earth Day and World Oceans Day. You can find the links to those posts in the comments under this video.

Welcome Danielle, we are so excited to have you!

Danielle Zélin, OPEN Alumna: Thank you for having me and for inviting me to be the July highlight.

Julie Jones: Thank you, Danielle. My first question for you today is what drew you to the teaching profession?

Danielle Zélin: You know I emerged from a big family. Being the second grandchild with twenty younger cousins, I’ve always had the role to look after them, you know, sharing cakes and drinks for birthday parties, organizing games to entertain. I think with years young children were automatically drawn to my funny side. I think this was a prediction of what I would do as a profession. For me it feels just natural to be a teacher educator.

Julie Jones: That’s incredible, and it shows just how much of an impact our early childhood experiences can have on our futures in education! Our next question is about your experience in the OPEN Program.

What was your biggest learning from your OPEN course?

Danielle Zélin: Ok. So, my first OPEN program was a GOC, Teaching English to Young Learners, naturally.

I have to admit that from this moment I started to follow loads of MOOCs and my latest one, is a GOC © 2020 by FHI 360. Alumni Highlight – Danielle Zélin – Video Script for the Online Professional English Network (OPEN), sponsored by the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. government and administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, except where noted. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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one, TESOL Methodology. It actually gave me a more meaningful approach and new techniques in teaching and learning English.

Julie Jones: Absolutely. It sounds like you have been very engaged with the OPEN program. We want to hear a bit about your experience in your OPEN program course. How have you been able to “cascade your knowledge” since becoming an alumna?

Danielle Zélin: That is a very interesting question. Very good. After my first OPEN program, I collaborated with the U.S Embassy English Department, English Speaking Union Mauritius and at that time there was, Mathilde Verillaud, an English Language Fellow , for the 1st English Language Learning and Teaching (ELLT) Conference in Mauritius in 2018. It was a first time for me. The first time I was presenting. I prepared two 60-minute workshops to be very hands on. One was about Teaching Grammar Creatively and the other one was Let’s Code in English.

The second ELLT Conference in Mauritius, I was part of the planning team. It was the same collaborators and Armen Kassabian, the English Language Fellow. So I presented again with two 60-minute workshops. One on Creative Chain, mainly targeted for the early years and Chant Out Loud, connected with using the sounds and pronunciation, which I presented twice with two different groups of teachers.

In my Alumni Made Resources, you will see the conference slides there and I can also put some pictures of the conference itself.

Julie Jones: Absolutely. That sounds like such a great experience to have and we will definitely link to some of those great photos in the comment section. Our next question is about what a day looks like in your current position. What does a day in your school look like whether that is virtual or in person?

Danielle Zélin: As you may know, I am having an after-school English Club; I am running my own. I have individual and group sessions after school hours. Most of my students are between 6-13 years old, and this is where I give specific or additional support in the 4 main skills. I have 4 groups of learners: Very Young, Young, Tween and Teen Learners. In that group, for the vey young ones, to teach them reading and writing first I am using the Jolly Phonics methodology. With my older groups, I transform my classroom with National Geographic Resources, Project Based Learning and every year we have a movie night and other creative learning approaches. So let’s say that on a daily basis, I usually teach from 3.30pm - 7.30pm in the evening. So it’s after school basically.

Julie Jones: That sounds like a lot of age groups and a lot of energy! What is your favorite age group to teach? What makes that age group great? What might be some challenges you face when teaching that age group?

Danielle Zélin: When I left the schools, or let’s safe the mainstream schools, I don’t have a favorite group; I love teaching all of them. Each group has specifics interests and needs and different perspectives, which gives me the opportunity to teach different ages. For me professionally, there is so much value in that and also in terms of sharpening my professional approach and style. I have to admit though with Teen Learners, they are a very specific group, as you already know, you need to get under their skin so you can understand how they feel, their world and their interests, the music. And at that age, they are in between choices of interests, so one day it could be this and another day it could be that. But I call it a valuable challenge for me.

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Julie Jones: Absolutely. I think a lot of educators that work with teens would agree with that. What is your favorite topic to teach your students?

Danielle Zélin: Very good question and straightforward I would say first, being a nature lover, and now that I’m a National Geographic Educator; I use the National Geographic Learning Framework, which is about building the skills, attitude, and knowledge of an explorer. I try to bring that in the classroom and the resources to inspire and empower my students to understand the world around them, a real-world issue. I hopefully want to transform my classes into an English Nature After-School Club, which means it will be totally immersed in nature. I live next to the coast so there will be field trips and other activities and projects that are in line but with all that I will use it to teach English.

Julie Jones: That’s wonderful and such a creative approach to teaching English. What is one of the topics you find most challenging to teach? What makes it tough and how did you overcome that?

Danielle Zélin: I think like for all professional educators, the huge thing that you have to do is observe, to read in between the lines, to read through the eyes of your students, that is very important because this helps you to give them a safe space to experience the language with engaging, exciting and interesting topics. Firstly, knowing your students is a key factor in bringing that spirit into your classroom. Let’s say that the choice of topics involves loads of time to plan together with my students. If sometimes, the topics can be not so interesting, I will immediately change and sit together with my students and say, “ok guys, what do we want to learn about?” because we are using the English in that conversation, everything is done in English. Giving them that space and giving them that freedom of speech to say, “yeah we would love to talk about…”. You know with my teens, they asked me about Schizophrenia, and I said, “ok cool guys, let’s try to find out”.

Julie Jones: Absolutely! That collaborative planning process with your students sounds really helpful in keeping students engaged and motivated. I bet you will get some questions and comments about that!

Danielle Zélin: Oh yes! I sometimes say to myself, “Oh gosh! I am not like a Psychology teacher or Philosophy teacher” but this is what they wish to learn about. As a professional teacher and a professional educator it is my job, or my passion, to be able to engage them in that.

Julie Jones: It sounds like a really engaging process for your students and for you. For our last question, can you tell us how you have been using the Community of Practice to further your learning as an OPEN program alumna?

Danielle Zélin: First of all I am very happy to be a part of the OPEN CoP and to have been chosen as a Community Lead, because I love everything exciting and engaging and for me, where I am in my teaching stage, in my professional career of 25 years, I’ve gathered so much information and experience and I just want to share. This is my time to share. It is a very dynamic place where you can exchange ideas. I am on the platform everyday because I love all the discussions happening. The platform itself is a learning hub. So yes we go for the MOOCs and we go for the GOCs and everything but by exchanging with others and of course they provoke and it gives me the opportunity to adjust or review and rethink or to have new methodologies in my teaching. Like last week, or this week, there was somebody talking about Corpus Assisted Learning and I was like, “Wow! This is something I need to check out”. So I went into a discussion about that and it was simply amazing.

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Julie Jones: That is wonderful to hear! I am really glad you’re using the CoP for resources and discussions.

Thank you so much Danielle for sharing your experience with us. It has been a pleasure to hear about the important work you are doing with your students on the island of Mauritius. Though this isn’t a live session, Danielle will be answering questions and comments of this video all week, so feel free to share your thoughts on what she has shared or ask her a question!

Our next video, coming out in August, will be our second in a series called Get to Know a RELO, where we will speak with Danielle’s RELO in Pretoria, Rick Rosenberg. We hope you’ll tune in to hear him share a bit of his experience as a RELO with us!

Danielle Zélin: Thank you again Julie. Goodbye everybody and see you on the platform!

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