The story of impact: Lessons learnt and feedback on training teachers to teach online, Ben Beaumont

Ben Beaumont (Head of Teacher Education) of Trinity College London presented on 'The story of impact: Lessons learnt and feedback on training teachers to teach online' at the 6th annual Future of English Language Teaching Conference (FOELT) in June 2021.

Abstract

Amid the widespread disruption caused by the pandemic, educators have been incredibly innovative in finding ways to support the ELT profession and ensure that learners are able to continue their studies and achieve their language learning goals. This talk will report on one such area of professional innovation: the development and trialling of Trinity’s new Teach English Online course, a course to support teachers working in an online environment. In this talk, I will first explain how we arrived at the underlying pedagogical underpinnings for the course, go on to talk about how these were implemented in the course design and move onto explaining how we trialled and measured the impact of the course on teachers’ professional practice. Reviewing pre and post-course survey data, collected across three groups of pilot course participants, I will also report on two key points:

1. Areas of training content that teachers found most beneficial when developing their online teaching
2. Lessons learnt for developing future courses to support teachers’ needs when working in an online environment

With examples taken from the course content, linked to participant feedback, this talk will be of interest to teachers looking to improve their practice in an online environment and also to teacher educators/materials developers with an interest supporting teachers’ work in a medium of instruction that has not only been legitimised by the pandemic, but has, for the time being, become the new normal.

Video

Download the Powerpoint slides from this Breakout Session.