ELEPHANT
ACADEMY

Natasha Belousova has been teaching for about 16 years and training teachers since 2011. She has taught students of all levels in various teaching contexts, including university under-graduate and master's courses, secondary and private language schools, as well as teaching online. She has also worked as a Director of Studies and is a senior member of the Russian National Exam board. After completing her Delta with IH London in 2010, Natasha has been teacher training a lot, working as an ICELT and TrinityCert trainer, and supervising Distance Delta teacher trainees for NILE. She has also been designing and running various courses for beginning and experienced teachers in Russia, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Slovakia.

With her colleague, Natasha is currently developing the ELephanT project for teachers of English, which includes co-organising schools, short-term and long-term teacher training courses for Russian teachers of English.

Zhenya Bakin is a language teacher and CELTA trainer from Moscow. As a Fulbright scholar he has lived in the USA where he taught Russian at college level. Zhenya has also studied in University of Oslo, Norway. Zhenya holds Cambridge DELTA with specialism in EAP. He has experience in teaching both in the private sector and in public schools. After 6 years at Higher School of Economics where he was responsible for Academic Writing Center. Zhenya spent 2 years as Head of Foreign Languages in New School, Moscow. He has designed a free app for Russian state exam preparation, shot a few demo in-class videos and is a co-founder of ELephanT project. At the moment Zhenya is working towards his MA with Norwich Institute for Language Education. He is also studying lesson evaluation under the umbrella of Danielson group. As a freelance teacher and a teacher trainer Zhenya now works mostly online providing professional and language support for language teachers.