Personal and Professional Development for TESOL Teachers
Long before resolutions became annual rituals, Charles Dickens, the nineteenth-century English novelist and social critic, offered a rather effective alternative. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge does not sit down and draft a list of behavioural targets or learning outcomes. He is shown his life—where it came from, how it currently unfolds, and where it is heading if nothing changes.
In humanistic teaching, creativity is foundational because language itself is creative. Every sentence a learner forms is an act of risk-taking and self-expression. When instruction becomes reduced to test preparation, we mute the very capacities we claim to nurture: voice, imagination, identity.
Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Those words, simple and graceful as they sound, have extraordinary weight in professional life—especially in education, where trust, empathy, and perception form the unseen scaffolding of every classroom and workplace.
