Will COVID continue to cause us problems moving forward?

One potential participant decided not to come to the meeting because they wanted to, in their own words, “bury their head in the sand” until they had to deal with it all again. This resonated with several of us as it’s been a long 15 months and we all need a break. We were determined to be realistic and positive, it turned out to be both! And so with a combination of looking at the reality of where we are now, where we might be in a few months time and what we can do about it all, the conversation began.

More of the same?

We largely agreed that moving forward there probably wouldn’t be many changes from where we are now in terms of the practicalities of ELT. We simply can’t take risks. We envisage a similar mixture of online, hybrid and face-to-face teaching as we’ve had up to now. All involved; students and their families, teachers and managers have been adaptable and we just need to keep going.

We need to remember that vaccinated people are, of course, testing positive and mask wearing will remain in place for the foreseeable future. We need to protect students and staff alike for everyone’s sake. We also reminded ourselves about how difficult the two-week absence has been for us all.

There is a concern about this coming winter and the perfect storm of COVID, the flu and a significant decrease in immunity across the board (after 18 months of social distance, mask-wearing and handwashing). We need o be prepared for it to be pretty bad again. We all commented on kids being in quarantine for 2 weeks at a time now and the rise in “stomach flu”.

In June we had felt more positive than we do now as numbers go up everywhere. We also noted that while numbers are shooting up, there are far fewer hospitalisations and deaths so perhaps we do need to learn to live with it.

Registrations for courses for the next few months generally seem to be down on previous years as some students are waiting to see what happens and when they are signing up a significant number are saying “only if it’s face-to-face” people seem to be tired of online and hybrid learning.

We talked about the distinction between the “concurrent classroom model” with students in quarantine join online temporarily and the “hybrid” model where the course is designed to be 50/50 online and f2f. Of course, our ability to run the concurrent classroom model depends on classroom sizes and available space and wasn’t an option for many of us. We talked about the changing restrictions in some places it’s back up to 85% of the normal capacity along with 1’5m distancing. We also talked about the problems of screens both in terms of usefulness in stopping the virus and also in terms of the challenges it poses for classroom management.

Hitting learning objectives… in whatever way

On a happier note, it appears that students had, generally speaking, been “successful”. Early exam results seem to be more positive than many had been hoping for. Importantly, we thought, our message needs to focus on our expertise in helping students reach their objective rather than how we get there. “Students with us are passing their B1, B2, C1 exams”. Why should students come to us? Because we’ll help you get where you need to go. Traditionally we have often focussed on the classroom experience in all it’s different ways but now perhaps we need to change that focus.

We are confident that we can adapt to whatever we need to do and should do so always with responsibility and safety as our highest priority. We talked about moving away from synchronous courses towards an interactive asynchronous approach where students can work in their own time and then have sessions where we all come together. We had a look at Miro as a really open and necessarily collaborative way of working. Here’s a few examples of what it might look like…

We appreciated that we had all learnt so much so quickly and that we need to continue to get better at it and make the experience as good as it can be. Most people want classes to be f2f but at the same time most seem to understand that it needs to be different given the current circumstances.

How can it work better for our young learners?

One manager talked about how their system had worked well with parents taking a greater role in the class with the school providing training to the families. In the 4-7 year old classes a parent was expected to be present and with 8-11 year olds it was sometimes necessary. The key is high-quality communication with parents; a handbook for parents coupled with a session where they’d be essentially talked through a lesson using a lot of the zoom features followed by a question and answer session. This kind of parent on-boarding and then a continual follow up seems to be one of the key elements in making it all work.

And so what’s next? How can we improve? We talked about encouraging students to use some more tools and continuing to work with parents to show them how, maybe we’d need a short list of “approved” sites to keep it all as simple as possible and at the same time to ensure sufficient safeguarding. We also thought we need to keep involving parents as much as possible, helping them see progress and that they’re getting “value for money”.

Are teens the biggest problem we face?

We shared the difficulties that we face with our teenage classes being hybrid and online; distraction, decreased motivation, cameras off and a general low level of engagement. School has to be the number one priority for many and “extra” language learning is not a priority.

We also recognised the mental health problems that are kicking in for many teenagers.

Better prepared?

We took comfort in the fact that at least now we are better prepared for what was ahead. Last summer we were guessing, now we have some experience. We need to think carefully about forward planning. One participant suggested planning around different scenarios and anticipating some difficult decisions in the worst case scenarios. We need to have plans and we need to be agile enough to react to the situations we face as they arise. Even if things are bad, if we have a plan, we can feel more comfortable.

And what about holidays? We need to look after ourselves and that means time to recharge our batteries.