Thanks to quarantine, I became a better teacher

I hope that many of you will agree that this quarantine, despite its devastating nature and the complete destruction of our routines, has also taught us a lot. I won’t go into the details of its lessons regarding our social lives but I do want to share with you my “lessons-learnt” as a teacher.

First and foremost, it made me look back at my teaching in general. More specifically, I started to think more practically, more efficiently and in a more goal-oriented way.

I had to reconsider my teaching goals.

• LPs

I started adapting the lesson plans in a way so that they would give more tangible results. While doing this I focused on a specific language skill to be covered during a session rather than aiming to cover as much as possible. If the focus of the lesson was “Listening”, I would develop all the activities around that specific skill, creating a warm-up task, set up the context, prepare pre and post listening activities, a follow-up discussion, etc. Initially, it would take more time to be ready with the lesson plan, as there was much to think about (which tools to use, how to set up the pair/group work, etc.), but with time, it all became easier and easier and now I can say I feel pretty confident in that sphere.

• An online teacher

I have always wanted to teach online, however it was either having no time to pursue it or mere postponing for me to polish my online teaching skills. However, during this long break I have managed to learn a lot about the challenges of teaching online and tuning up my skills to catch up with this current fad. I learnt a lot of new online tools that can help to create exercises, worksheets, games, etc. all in a very interactive and user-friendly way.

• Classroom Management

I do notice a huge growth in my classroom management skills. During face to face classes, sometimes it can be quite hard to manage the students in terms of who to speak first, how to make sure they don’t interrupt each other, how to give everyone a chance to have equal amount of speaking time, etc. While teaching online, the solution to these problems emerges automatically. You will need to nominate the students to give them a chance to talk. They will need to use some pre-agreed signs if they want to talk (using the ‘hand’ icon in ZOOM for instance), you will need to time the activities and keep to the timing strictly in order to keep the balance of the session.

• Instructions

One of the action points in my career development has always been improving my instruction giving skills. Sometimes, I would find it difficult to make sure all the students were clear with the task, however now, I find myself doing it naturally. How? Considering that the sessions are online, I always ask the students to look at my screen, explain what the task is and ask for ICQs (Instruction Checking Questions). This seemed very dull in face to face classes, but seems to work perfectly fine during online classes.

• Language feedback

Though in face to face classes I was always taking notes on the language use of the students, sometimes it was hard to focus, as students, seeing you in the classroom, tend to act more carefully when using the foreign language and rely on you to correct them every time they make a mistake. However, during online classes you have the luxury to switch your camera off and jump from room to room (in ZOOM) and gather language evidence in a more relaxed and focused manner. You also can easily identify the students who are making the mistake and send them personal feedback if you need to.

To sum up, I do think that the skills learnt during the online sessions can be very efficiently adapted back to the face to face teaching environment. In the end of the day, we have managed to improve our teaching SKILLS in general, becoming more confident in the light of the technological developments of the century.