Silvana Richardson (Head of Education) of Bell Educational Services was a plenary speaker at the 6th annual Future of English Language Teaching Conference (FOELT) in June 2021. Silvana presented on 'Lessons from Disruption'.
Abstract
"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.