Speakers
Description
Teachers are expected to guide students with different needs, communicate with parents with different expectations, collaborate with colleagues with different working styles, and support junior teachers, all before the first lesson begins. Yet when it comes to professional development, the mentor is almost always the helper, never the helped. This workshop turns that assumption around. Drawing on direct experience coaching and mentoring teachers in community school settings, the facilitator guides participants through three interconnected layers of a practical toolkit designed for educators who support others. The first layer names the relational complexity of teaching, honestly mapping who teachers work with, what each relationship demands emotionally, and where friction most commonly arises. The second layer turns inward, helping participants recognize and regulate their own emotional responses, particularly anger and frustration, through concrete self-maintenance strategies and a structured emotional regulation framework. The third layer turns outward, introducing the art of questioning as the core skill of mentoring, equipping participants with a four-level questioning ladder that moves from surface-level checking to deep reflective coaching. Through peer role-plays, real classroom scenarios, and structured reflection, participants leave with a personal toolkit grounded in one simple but transformative insight, “You cannot mentor others sustainably until you have learned to mentor yourself.”
Biography
Vanthon Chan is a Cambodian educator and teacher trainer with over fifteen years of experience working across community schools, international NGOs, and teacher development organisations in Cambodia. His work sits at the intersection of two questions that the shift from EFL to ESL makes increasingly urgent “how do young learners build the communicative and computational foundations they need to use English purposefully?”, and “how do the teachers guiding that shift sustain themselves professionally and emotionally while doing so?” His career has taken him through roles as an English teacher, instructional coach, coordinator, and curriculum developer, each role reinforcing his belief that repositioning English in the classroom begins not with policy, but with prepared, supported teachers and learners who have been given the right foundations. He currently trains teachers in English language teaching methodology and block-based coding, developing approaches that integrate coding with English language practice and coaching frameworks that address both the instructional and emotional dimensions of teaching in demanding contexts. An active participant in regional ELT professional development, he is committed to one core belief that “the most sustainable change in any classroom begins not with the most advanced tool, but with the person holding it.”
Mok Boda is a dedicated English language educator and youth development practitioner from Siem Reap, Cambodia, with over five years of classroom experience serving underprivileged communities. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in TESOL and has completed advanced English training at the Australia Centre for Education. As an experienced English teacher and Academic Coordinator, Mok Boda developed curriculum frameworks, mentored students’ academic and personal growth, and led community engagement initiatives. His professional interests center on integrating AI tools into ESL classrooms, teacher capacity building, curriculum development toward inclusive education, and innovative assessment methods that reflect the diverse needs of learners. He is particularly passionate about supporting the transformative shift from EFL to ESL environments across Southeast Asia. In July 2025, Mok Boda was selected as a Cambodian Delegate to a U.S. Department of State-sponsored academic exchange program at Michigan State University, focusing on Multimodal Approaches to Content-Based Instruction. Through this experience, he gained hands-on best practices from the U.S. educational model and had the privilege of collaborating with educational experts representing 23 nationalities from across the globe, further enriching his vision for inclusive and internationally-informed language education.
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