Chris Bain is a CELTA and DELTA qualified EFL and EAP teacher with almost ten years’ experience teaching students of all ages and levels in language schools and Universities in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, the UK, China and Japan. He is currently the Assistant Director of Studies for Young Learners at AKCENT International House Prague, where he works with new teachers to provide the best possible learning to students from 3 to 18 years old. Email: chris.bain@akcent.cz

A brief summary of the talk

When first asked to do the conference, with the theme ‘From the Heart’, my first thought was what a traumatic, pressurised, stressful year we’ve all had as teachers, and how this has impacted us on both personal and professional levels. I decided to speak about ‘how COVID-19 has influenced my teaching beliefs’ because I think all of us have undergone a profound shift in our attitudes towards many things in life, and in particular the job that we do. I focused in one some key areas that I held as concrete beliefs at the beginning of the pandemic, and how the experiences of online teaching, working from home, and a closer, more intimate experience with students shaped/altered those beliefs. I tried to keep the focus on positivity, as I feel there have been a lot of positives to take out of the pandemic experience, on a professional level at least.

How you felt before the conference

This year, I have presented at three online conferences (this was my third) and it has been my first experience presenting in this format. My main concern on the day of the conference was WiFi connectivity - my WiFi began playing up around mid-afternoon, when I was due to speak at around 4pm, and I ended up tethering data from my phone to make sure I wouldn’t cut out during the talk (as a closing plenary, it would have been exceptionally embarrassing). I also prepared a much more detailed PowerPoint as I’m aware (from my experience now attending online conferences) how easy it is for one’s mind to wander, or get involved in doing other tasks, so I wanted a clear PowerPoint that would show the main points, so someone watching, rather than activity listening, would still have a good idea of the main points. This meant my Powerpoint was more wordy than I would usually want, but it made sense, in the context.

What your feelings were during the talk itself

As mentioned, my main concern was just making sure I was constantly connected. This is a fear of mine at conferences: when everyone has their cameras off and they are muted you are getting no feedback, so there’s every chance my Internet could cut off and I wouldn’t even realise until I’d been speaking for 10/15 minutes. Then suddenly you look and see there’s been a problem. This makes the whole experience more worrying, and it definitely limits the ‘interactivity’ of the conference. Without using breakout rooms (which are cumbersome, and can by annoying for e.g participants who are eating a meal during the talk, and don’t want to turn their cameras on to speak to others), there is really no option other than to present your talk as a monologue to the audience, so it becomes more like a TedTalk than an actual interactive session. This is really a shame, but it does open new opportunities: I like how I can Google a website / idea someone has mentioned during the talk and research it as they are speaking, rather than having to make a note during a talk and go and look it up later

(hopefully - if I remember).

Post-conference reflections

I feel that the conference atmosphere and experience will never be fully replicated in an online environment; no amount of advanced technology will ever replace real, genuine, person-to-person interaction. For the time being, it remains a valuable resource to ensure that we and our teachers get appropriate professional development, but it shouldn’t be a long-term solution. I’m also not convinced by the synchronous nature of online conferences - the best online one I attended this year used a ‘Netflix’ - style approach; they pre-recorded all the talks and released them all at the same time on their platform, so people could watch as and when they wanted. They arranged live Q&As with some speakers, and also ran ‘chat’ rooms where people could mingle and speak - I feel these kinds of ‘asynchronous’ conferences may be more suitable to the format. As people are getting busier and busier, they could offer a great supplement (but not replacement) for traditional, face-to-face conferences.

Please check the The Art and Skills of the Humanistic Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.