Episode Fifteen

Interview With Stephanie Vogel: Building a TEFL Career

Show Notes

This week, we welcome Stephanie Vogel as our guest on the show. Steph has had a long and successful journey through the TEFL industry. After dropping out of med school, she felt inspired to try something totally different, so she went to Istanbul to get a CELTA certification. From there, she wound up in Vietnam, where she spent six years progressing from ESL teacher to assistant academic manager to CELTA and DELTA trainer. She then moved back to the US to further advance her career, eventually becoming the director of Teaching House, the largest provider of CELTA courses in the US. Join us as we talk about how she built her career in TEFL, share insights into the world of teaching and training, and probably have a little too much fun recounting hilarious teaching disasters.

“One of the special gifts of teaching is that you come away with a lot of amazing stories. The people you meet… it’s a way to create a life of stories. ”

In this Episode

• How Steph became a “late entrant” into the field of ESL

• Her CELTA experience in Istanbul and why she thought the trainers were “magic”

• Her teaching experience in Istanbul, including being chauffeured to work!

• Going off-site for business English classes

• How to avoid burnout in your first year of post-CELTA teaching

• What realistic lesson planning might look like after a training program

• Her embarrassing first ever day of teaching, in which she found herself asking all her students about their underwear

• How studying German refreshed her passion for teaching English

• Why she decided to go to Vietnam

• What her job was like there

• What her daily life was like in Vietnam

• The advantages of working in a large, well-established school

• How she progressed from teacher to academic management

• The fact that it’s not typical to be on a 9-5 schedule in the TEFL industry

• How she achieved her goal of becoming a CELTA trainer

• The DELTA course: CELTA on steroids

• The training up process to become a CELTA trainer

• The advice she’d give someone thinking about moving abroad to teach

• What she wishes she’d known before she started teaching

• What makes a teacher successful

• Why authenticity in the classroom matters

• The difference between a good lesson and a great lesson

• What kept her in Vietnam for so long

• How she transitioned back to the US and continued on her TEFL career path

• How she became the director of Teaching House, the largest CELTA provider in the US

• The pros and cons of moving into an admin role in the TEFL industry

• Making TEFL a career and not just a “gap year”

• How skills developed as an ESL teacher translate into other fields

• Her favorite travel destination(s): Hoi An, Vietnam and the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep, Turkey

• And of course, a shout-out to her hometown of Detroit

---

Thinking about doing a CELTA certification? Check out our free email course: Ready, Set, CELTA! You’ll get a thorough overview of the course and our best trainer advice delivered right to your inbox.

What do you want to hear about? Do you have questions about teaching you’d like us to answer on the show? Or interest in teaching in a certain place? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Episode Five

In This Episode…

How Theresa got started

• Why she decided to try teaching

• How she chose a certification program: why she landed on CELTA

• How her four weeks in the CELTA program compared to four years of doing a BA

• What she really got out of her certification

• What she wishes she’d done before doing CELTA

• How grammar for teaching is different than grammar for speaking/ writing

Her first local teaching job in Washington, DC

• What it’s like to teach in a private language school in the US, and what incoming teachers should expect

• How she transitioned from CELTA to teaching in her own classroom

• What affected her students’ motivation

• What she found so helpful about being in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual classroom

• The biggest challenges she faced

• The practical advice that most helped her in planning and teaching successfully

• How she got ideas for lesson content from her students

Da Nang, Vietnam

Her teaching experience in Vietnam

• How she decided on a location

• Why she says teaching in Vietnam was completely different from teaching in DC

• How her expectations compared to reality

• What the teaching schedule was like

• The three big differences between teaching children vs. teaching adults

• What to expect in terms of teaching resources- what you’ll have access to and what you’ll need to seek out

• The meaning of “edu-tainment”

• What kind of teachers different schools attract

• How she went from teacher to school director in a very short time

• Her duties as the Director of Studies

Hoi An

Theresa’s recommendations for traveling

• Da Nang’s white sand beaches and paragliding

• Hoi An’s gorgeous old town

• The Cuchi tunnels in Ho Chi Minh

• The Beer Corner in Hanoi (but watch out for pickpockets!)

Top advice for living/ working in Vietnam

• Why you’ll want to know the differences between options for working environments: whether you’ll be around partiers/ backpackers or more serious teachers

• Decide whether you want to be in a big language center vs. a smaller private school vs. a public school

• Just go! Get to Vietnam and find a job once you’re there, not before

• How to rent an apartment

• How to make sure you get to stay in the city where you want to be

• Choosing between Vietnam and Taiwan depending on your personality

Interview with Theresa Troyer: Teaching Locally and in Vietnam

Show Notes

Have you ever dreamed of changing careers and running off to Vietnam to teach English? Theresa Troyer did just that. In this episode, we’re talking with Theresa about how she decided to teach and what it was like to dive into the field of TEFL. She gives us the lowdown on why she chose to get a CELTA and how intense it really was, and then tells us all about what it was like to teach locally before transitioning overseas to teach in Vietnam. If you’ve ever thought about Vietnam as a work or travel destination and you’re looking for some advice (or just a good breakdown of expectations vs. reality), then you won’t want to miss this episode!

Theresa in Da Nang

Daily life in Vietnam

• Living in Bắc Ninh for three months

• Living in Hanoi

• How English teachers live lavishly

• Saving money while still going out/ traveling often

• The dangers of driving

• What the food is like

• Healthcare

• Whether you need to learn Vietnamese

• Finding a community: expat groups vs. locals

“...You can live very lavishly for not a lot of money (. . .) Also, you’re in Vietnam, and in Southeast Asia it’s so easy to travel to anywhere else in Southeast Asia. ”

At the beach in Phu Quoc

The best things about living in Vietnam

• Her favorite food: bun cha

• The cost of living- affordable!

• How easy it is to travel around Asia

The less ideal aspects of living in Vietnam

• Food-related health risks

• Driving risks

• That time a live cockroach crawled out of her dinner

with a very young learner group in Hanoi: “edutainment!”

“Be really honest with yourself about who you are and what you value. If you are someone that likes a lot of structure and order, things being on time, a lot of organization (. . .) Vietnam is not necessarily going to be the place for you. But if you are very ‘go with the flow,’ if you don’t mind rapid changes at the last minute, if you aren’t particularly bothered by doing what’s required (. . .) then Vietnam might be the place for you. ”

---

What other destinations do you want to hear about?

Leave us a comment or question below and let us know what you think! If you’re enjoying Expand Your Horizons, we’d love for you to share this episode, or subscribe here on iTunes and leave us a review. Your support means everything to us.