VietTESOL International Convention 2026

How can English language teachers build, sustain, and benefit from Communities of practice that genuinely improve classroom learning and contribute to their professional careers and wellbeing? How can creating a professional development network benefit ELT teachers?
Based on the British Council funded project Empowering Language Teacher Development through Teacher Activity Groups: A Focus on Facilitator Capacity Building and Teacher Strength Enhancement (see more at www.tag-vietnam.com),this hands-on workshop translates research into teacher training and lived experience into practical steps that teachers can use and adapt to build supportive professional Communities of practice.

The workshop will focus on how Communities of practice support, enhance and enrich professional experience through mentoring, inclusive practices, decentralised knowledge exchange, and mutual learning (Wenger, 1999; Lamb, 2012; Herrero, 2016; Herrero and Spence, 2023; Berbain and Polastri, 2025; Hoan Le et al., 2025). In the first part of the workshop, we will define Communities of practice and explore Vietnam-relevant scenarios emerging from our project. The second part of the workshop is a practical session. Participants will be guided to co-design a plan for creating a Community of practice and/or a Special Interest Group tailored to their own contexts. Participants will receive resources and templates for running teacher development sessions (a Community of practice Canvas, Special Interest Group template, mentoring and peer-observation models) and a list of low-~/ or no tech tools to keep communities growing both online and offline. We will also share successfully tested facilitation techniques for teacher development that balance structure with teacher voice and suggest realistic ways to ensure professional development via local networks, Zalo groups, and micro-professional development routines.