Our team of external mentors

Mike Shreeve served as a school director and an HR manager. His management experience became useful in his current professional training role, where he acts as a coach and a mentor to managers and HR professionals. He has designed the NLP and Coaching Skills, and the Teaching Students with Special Needs and Inclusive Learning courses at the Pilgrims teacher training centre.

He is an active relationship coach as well as a certified instructor at the European Mentoring & Coaching Council. Other than business coaching and mentoring, Mike is also involved in coaching children with learning disabilities.

Some of his most recent projects include a teacher training programme in Ethiopia aimed at improving coaching skills and feedback, together with a programme for our teachers here at The Bridge aimed at using coaching skills in teaching English.

Philip Kerr lives in Vienna, where he trains teachers and authors professional publications, methodological guides and English textbooks. His latest textbooks include Evolve (Cambridge University Press), Studio (Helbling), Straightforward (Macmillan) and Inside Out (Macmillan). He has significantly contributed to the research on using one’s native language in teaching foreign languages and has authored the prestigious award-winning book Translation and Own-Language Activities (Cambridge University Press). He was involved in the development of several language learning (predominantly vocabulary) mobile apps, regularly publishes in professional journals and writes a blog on technology in language learning at https://adaptivelearninginelt.wordpress.com/. He inspires us to keep getting better.

Rakesh Bhanot has been teaching English, training teachers and lecturing at conferences aimed at teaching English worldwide since 1972. He has been active as a teacher trainer all over the world, mainly however in the UK, Russia, Germany and Italy. He spent a large part of his career at a university …… and as an inspector of a language school network in Germany.

Today, Rakesh volunteers as an English teacher and mentor to other teachers at state schools – in central Europe and Greece. He publishes extensively and is a member of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language IATEFL Publications Committee. Rakesh is one of the founding editors of several professional journals, including Language Issues – the National Association for Teaching English and Community Languages to Adults’ (NATECLA) journal.

Mario is a founding member of the world-renown PILGRIMS Teacher Training Centre. He served as a teacher trainer at PILGRIMS from 1974 to 2019, and for many years he has also acted as a trainer and mentor for language teachers at the annual University of Oxford summer school.

Mario has had a significant impact on the methodology of teaching English. He is the main advocate of humanism in language education, lecturing and training at conferences and educational events for teachers worldwide. He has co-authored numerous books, most famously including Grammar games, Once upon a time, Vocabulary, Creative Writing and Humanising Your Course Book.

Here at The Bridge, Mario has helped us to design a feedback system and consulted our teaching methodology. We are currently collaborating on the HLT.digital project, an online teacher training platform.