Better together!

Almost a year and a half ago, I started my COETAIL journey. I have enjoyed it, and I could confidently recommend it to any teacher. It is a demanding program but worth the effort. It has helped me grow professionally and personally. The well-structured course plan, combined with the nature of the resources, challenged me to question my beliefs, unlearn, and continuously learn again. COETAIL purposefully creates an ideal scenario for constantly trying new things and reflecting on our practices. You will find yourself well-informed, provoked to make changes, and, equally important, empowered to make them happen.

Another essential aspect of COETAIL is community. In COETAIL, you are not alone. Your facilitator will guide the path for you and provide meaningful feedback, and your cohort members will always be a source of inspiration and motivation. I valued this community aspect tremendously. Being part of such a diverse group of international teachers living abroad in more than ten different countries (with many time zones) even made us learn to find the best time slot to collaborate and, even better, to learn from each other’s perspectives.

This sense of community starts with the required comments on our peers’ posts. For me, it takes significant effort to comment on their posts, sometimes even more than writing my own, but the process represents a big part of the learning journey. You get to experience the initiatives, strategies, perspectives, and struggles of all of your cohort’s members and their respective schools.

I have found myself as one among many others going through similar situations. When I published my last post, Speak up!, I shared it with my family and some friends outside of the international school world, and their reactions were encouraging. One of my COETAIL peers also shared a similar story with me that you can read in this comment, and after reading it, I knew that the situation I spoke about in my post is more common than I initially imagined.

These interactions take place via email, too, which gives them a more personal feeling.

I come from a family of educators on my mother’s side. Sharing with them doesn’t necessarily grow my community, but it creates awareness and helps them better understand what I do and the struggles I face as a minority.

After reading the post in my book club group, some of my friends decided they wanted to get more information about this and ask more questions, and we decided to meet through Zoom to talk more about it and educate ourselves on the topic.

I had forgotten about my Twitter, to be honest. With COETAIL, not only did I start using it again, but my followers increased a lot, with about 50 new followers since I started tweeting my COETAIL posts.

Twitter worked as our cohort communication tool as well. We reached out, asked for help, shared resources, encouraged each other, celebrated, and more through its messaging tool.

Another way that I have taken advantage of my blog entries is by posting them on my LinkedIn profile. It is an excellent opportunity to review my content, improve it if needed, increase my connections, and sustain engagement within my PLN. It comes in handy now that LinkedIn is adding more social network features.

For my final project, I met with many of my colleagues here in Panamá and worldwide. Some of them helped me out with my Podcast project:

• Billy, a private sector professional
• A Spanish teacher in India
• Susanna, an MS Science teacher at ISP
• Gabriel, a local Panamanian podcaster

Finally, I realized that even though I had met some of my COETAIL peers virtually, I never had the chance to interact with many of them outside our blogs. I decided that I wanted to make that happen and organized a meeting to get to know each other better, share our projects, and offer help.

After doing this, I am sure it needed to happen long ago. I suggest COETAIL organizers consider taking advantage of our now normalized video conferencing calls to create spaces in which more natural interactions are possible within our cohorts.