George Chilton Writes for Cooperativa de Serveis Linguistics de Barcelona

It’s still only February, but we haven’t let the bitterly cold, snowy winter in Barcelona slow us up one bit. While bracing against the north wind, all bundled up in our mountaineering gear, and icefishing on the Llobregat river, we actually got some work done; 3 public workshops, 2 new members, a bunch of teaching resources for our library, and…a new co-working space!

First of all, we would like to welcome our new members to the cooperative. The SLB team is very pleased to have teacher trainer Melody Philip, proprietor of the Barcelona-based Seahorse English, on board with us. We are excited to have such an experienced, dedicated teacher and trainer partner up and show her support. SLB is really looking forward to our continuing development and collaborating on many new professional development and training projects.

We also offer a warm welcome to Sergio Jimenez. Sergio is a multilingual translator and teacher, who speaks Castilian, Catalan, German, English, and French – though hopefully not all at the same time. Sergio recently graduated with a Masters in Audiovisual Translation. He also teaches all of the languages he speaks, which is doubly impressive! Sergio is clearly an excellent and highly skilled addition to the team. He is busy working on a project to develop our translation resources. Molt be tio!

As you may have read, Cooperativa de Serveis Linguistics de Barcelona has also been busy running workshops for Barcelona teachers. Irene Almazán, our very busy head of Legal, financial and administrative services ran a highly informative session on becoming an Autonómo in Catalunya for the Barcelona TEFL Teachers Association. The demand was so high, we think we’ll be running another one on the same topic for the association soon.

SLB also held another information session outlining the cooperative services, with an interesting Q&A and a lively chat with tea and cakes. We really enjoyed meeting all of you who attended – and if you didn’t come along, we hope you’ll make it to the next one!

We’re also very grateful to Geoff Jordan, who came along to deliver an excellent workshop and TEFL clinic, looking at learner motivation – “Drop off and Drop Out” – a topic that’s important to every teacher.  We’ll have some more posts summarising these sessions shortly.

Our final bit of news, is that SLB have acquired a new co-working space. We’ll leave the details for a different post (this is news in brief, after all) – but we have an office and classroom space of our own! We’ll outline how we plan to develop and use this space, and how both members and non-members can benefit from this very soon.

Thanks for reading and, as ever, please get in touch if you would like more information on joining our growing and dynamic team.

 

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