The Future of
English Language
Teaching Conference

PLENARY

Lessons from Disruption

Silvana Richardson

Saturday 26 June, 12:45 - 13:30 (UK time)

"The basic rule of a crisis is that you don’t come out of it the same."

- Pope Francis

Over the last year it has been wonderful to see teachers’ motivation and determination to develop the necessary pedagogic and digital skills to cope with the most significant global disruption to education in living memory. During this most challenging year of relentless just-in-time teacher development, many teachers had to learn to work remotely online and/or in socially-distanced and/or hybrid settings in a shockingly short space of time and with little or no institutional support in many settings.

In this session, we will explore how this perfect storm created such optimal conditions for teachers buying into their own learning and how, as language teaching organisations plan post-pandemic teacher learning, key insights and lessons learnt can be coherently integrated into teacher learning programmes.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Silvana Richardson

Silvana Richardson is Head of Education at Bell Educational Services, Academic Director at Bell Teacher Academy and Strategic Education Advisor at the Bell Foundation. She has been involved in English Language Teaching and Language Teacher Education for over three decades, working in different sectors and contexts as EFL, ESOL, ESP and MFL teacher, teacher educator, trainer and mentor of teacher educators and school leaders in the state and public sectors in primary, secondary, further and higher education institutions the UK and abroad, academic manager, quality assurance inspector, conference speaker and author. Her current interests include impactful design of teacher education programmes and sustainable staff learning and development.