Scholarship / Chevening, Networking - The spider spins its web [4]

The spider spins its web

In order to improve my personal and interpersonal skills, expanding my networking is perpetual activity whereas it will determine your success and how important everything you do. There are two types of networking for me: those who have influenced me and those have been influenced by me.

In my daily activity as a teacher, I am building rapport with my students and their parents. It is so important regarding the fact that students and parents behavior towards education are so much different from now and then, teacher cannot only give them what it should be given as I learned 10 or 15 years ago, but also what they need, such as interesting activities and method in learning. Influencing their attitudes toward education and life, has given me personal satisfaction as the result of my teaching career. In fact, it works both ways for me and them, I believe that developing networking with my students and their parents have evaluated my teaching style as well.

I have been actively involved in many organization, some of them are islcollective, TEFLIN, and ISELT. As for islcollective, it is an online forum about sharing ideas related to teaching method and media. The members are basically English teacher all over the world. Joining this forum has given me the opportunities to develop my creativity and loyalty toward teaching. For example, I believe that It's an investment to spend personal budget and time in creating new teaching tools; modifying traditional or online game into a learning activity, and sharing ideas are part of learning; various feedback in discussion forum with limitless number of teachers across the world.

To begin with, I joined TEFLIN because it was recommended by my professor at University of Indonesia, a.k.a the president of TEFLIN since 2014, Silsilia Halimi. Meanwhile, ISELT is a pioneer International teaching forum In West Sumatera which the founders are my lecturers in State University in Padang. For the past three years, I have participated their annual event as a speaker; I shared my knowledge about teaching method and perspective. Which simultaneously has inspired me that a teacher has career path; a teacher can do more than just teaching in the classroom, I can be future leader as well.

Networking have influenced, and evaluated me in many ways. Those forums are continuously growing as my perspective towards education and life. They also provided me with a lot of options regarding my future career path and choices. I hope I can be the next chevening awardee, so that I can give more contribution in my networking, be inspiration for others and be one of the future leader in educational institution; like a spider spins its web.