Balsamo Asian Scholar Speaker Talk: Teacher Learning Within and Beyond the Classroom Walls
Great teaching is an ongoing journey of continuous learning that takes place in the classroom, and perhaps more importantly, extends far beyond its walls. In this presentation, I explore how language teachers can actively grow and adapt by focusing on six essential areas of professional development: developing professional competence, becoming AI-fluent in a rapidly changing digital world, engaging in reflective practice, embracing student-centredness, committing to lifelong learning, and staying gritty when facing daily challenges. Drawing on current research and my own decades of hands-on teaching experience across diverse Asian contexts, I share practical, real-world insights. Through this discussion, I hope to support fellow language teachers in navigating these areas, helping them keep learning, adapting, and improving their craft every single day.
Balsamo Asian Scholar Workshop: Fast-Tracking L2 Proficiency via Extramural Learning
This hands-on workshop explores how language learning happens both inside and outside the classroom, and why out-of-class (extramural) learning often yields the biggest benefits. While traditional teaching often focuses too heavily on formal grammar, fast-tracking proficiency requires shifting our focus toward building fluency and vocabulary through a healthy balance of input- and output-based learning activities. Throughout the session, I will offer practical ways to leverage extramural learning for faster and more enjoyable results. Through interactive activities, participants will share and develop concrete strategies that help their students immerse themselves in rich and meaningful language and move toward spontaneous communication. Participants will leave this session with a toolkit of practical ideas and activities ready to use in their own teaching context to boost their students’ language confidence and learning autonomy.
The Lifelong Teacher: Six Areas of Professional Growth
Willy A. Renandya
Ask any experienced teacher and the answer is almost always the same: the day a teacher stops learning is the day they stop teaching well. Good teaching has never been a fixed skill you acquire once and then carry through a career unchanged. It is a living practice, one that requires constant attention, honest self-reflection, and a genuine willingness to grow. Yet much of the conversation around teacher development still focuses on what happens inside the classroom, when in reality, some of the most important learning happens well outside it.
Drawing on decades of hands-on teaching experience across diverse Asian contexts, alongside current research in language education, this paper explores six core areas that language teachers need to actively invest in if they want to keep improving themselves. Together, these six areas paint a picture of what it really means to be a professional in language education today.
Building and Sustaining Professional Competence
The first area is professional competence. A competent language teacher understands how people learn, how to design purposeful lessons, how to give meaningful feedback, and how to adjust when things are not working. Competence is not a destination; it is something you grow and develop over time.
This matters especially in language teaching, where research into how people acquire languages continues to evolve. What was considered best practice ten or fifteen years ago may have since been revised or even contradicted by newer research evidence. Teachers who stay curious and keep up with developments in their field are better placed to make informed decisions in the classroom.
Becoming AI-Fluent
The second area is one that feels particularly urgent right now: becoming fluent in the use of artificial intelligence tools. AI has moved from being a peripheral curiosity to something that is reshaping how students learn, how teachers prepare lessons, and how educational institutions function. For language teachers specifically, the implications are significant. As we all know, AI writing assistants, language tutoring apps, and automated feedback tools are already in the hands of students. We need to be AI-fluent if we want to guide our students in the learning process.
AI fluency here does not mean becoming an AI expert. It means understanding enough about how these tools work to use them thoughtfully, guide students in using them well, and think critically about what they can and cannot do. Teachers who engage with AI literacy are better equipped to prepare students for a world where these tools are part of daily life.
Reflective Practice
The third area is reflective practice. It is arguably the most foundational habit a teacher can and should develop. Reflection is the process of looking carefully at your own teaching: what worked, what fell flat, why students responded the way they did, and what you might do differently next time.
This is not simply about being self-critical. Effective reflection is structured and purposeful. It can involve keeping a teaching journal, discussing lessons with a colleague, or systematically reviewing student feedback. What it requires above all is honesty: the ability to look at our practice without defensiveness and ask hard questions. Teachers who reflect regularly tend to improve more steadily than those who rely on intuition or habit alone.
Embracing Student-Centredness
The fourth area is student-centredness, which has been a central idea in language education for some time. And yet it is one that can easily remain a principle on paper rather than a reality in the classroom. Real student-centred teaching means designing learning experiences around what students need, not what is easiest to deliver.
In practice, this often means giving students more agency over their learning, making space for their voices and experiences, and responding to their individual differences rather than treating a class as a homogeneous group. It also means being willing to step back from the front of the room and trust students to take an active role in their own development, helping them take charge of their own learning.
Committing to Lifelong Learning
The fifth area, lifelong learning, is closely related to the others. It is the commitment to keep growing as a professional across the entire career. It should not happen just during the early years when everything is new, but through mid-career and beyond, when it is easy to settle into routine.
Lifelong learning can take many forms: attending conferences, reading research, conducting action research, joining professional networks, trying new approaches in the classroom, or pursuing further study. What unites these activities is an attitude of openness: a belief that there is always more to learn, that learning never stops, and that it is worth the effort.
Staying Gritty
The sixth and perhaps most under-appreciated area is grit. Grit is the capacity to keep going when things are hard. Teaching is demanding work. Classrooms are unpredictable. Students come with a wide range of needs, motivations, and challenges. Administrative pressures pile up. Lessons don’t always go as planned. Days are exhausting.
Grit is what allows teachers to stay committed through the difficult periods of their career without burning out or giving up on their own development. It does not mean ignoring difficulties or pushing through without support. It means having a strong enough sense of purpose to return to the work the next day with care and intention, even when the previous day was hard and stressful.
Conclusion
What connects all six of these areas is a single underlying idea: great teaching requires ongoing investment in yourself as a professional. It does not happen automatically with experience, nor is it something that can be reduced to a checklist or a one-day training session.
This framework is a useful reminder that teacher development is both personal and professional, one that is shaped by individual habits of mind as much as by formal opportunities. For language teachers working across the diverse and rapidly changing contexts of Asia and beyond, that kind of sustained, self-directed growth is not optional. It is what keeps the teaching and the profession alive.
Willy A. Renandya is a language teacher educator with extensive teaching experience in Asia. He currently teaches TESOL courses in Singapore, including at Nanyang Technological University and Singapore University of Social Sciences. He is also a visiting professor at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and the Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City. He has given numerous keynote presentations at international ELT conferences, including at AsiaTEFL, IATEFL, KOTESOL, SEAMEO RELC and ThaiTESOL, and has published extensively in the area of second language education.
