Planning for a new pandemic semester. Editor's notes
by Ovidiu Leonte
Colegiul National "Mihai Eminescu", Iasi
What is going to happen in this new school year of pandemic? Will it be online learning, blended learning or face-to-face-learning with a focus on remedial measures? How can teachers prepare for that? Is it even fair to be asked to prepare when teachers are hardly told what to prepare for? Who is most responsible for our frustrations now and what could the fix be? Let us explore these questions and the whole debacle we seem to be in, as teachers of English.
To begin with, though it may sound surprising or even insensitive, one has to admit that this is by no means new to us. Our careers as teachers have always called for flexibility: that new class of students, those particular parents, the new textbooks or government regulations, even that particular colleague or head teacher who seemed to be intent on making our lives unbearable. All of that requires flexibility, patience and wisdom. Though some of our detractors claim that teachers always just apply age-old recipes indiscriminately, forcing new students into some old Procrustes’ bed, we know this is not what we do. Whether on a scale small or large, academic or mundane, we constantly innovate, adapt and improvise. It is what makes us teachers and, most probably, what will hoist us out of this pandemic mess.
Then, our tried and tested troubleshooting tools would not live up to their name if they failed to answer this crisis too. There may be lapses in lapses in language acquisitions for our students, but, before searching for new tools, we would do well to rediscover and reassess available ways to streamline our teaching and make it more effective. For example, simply focusing on developing communicative skills rather than transferring content and measure its memorisation may make our situation seem less hopeless; based on the underlying assumption of progression of skills from one year to the next, just properly teaching a new unit this year may fill some of the gaps left over from last year; at the same time, singling out the parts of last year’s syllabus that show little or no featuring in this year’s contents may help teachers properly focus on what truly needs to be included in our teaching plan now for consolidation. All of this, naturally, can get a good start from professional competence-based initial tests.
Finally, our famed communicative approach may find good use once again. If we fear that our classes may be more heterogenous than ever in this pandemic chaos and cringe at the thought of boring many students with revision that only some of them need, then complex contextualised teaching can truly simultaneously challenge classes at various levels of language competence. The same may occur with authentic texts, whether read or listened to, as well as discussions and debates, which would function at a range of levels of input and output. The key is merely to shrewdly devise and handle tasks that address the different students on our class.
New solutions do exist, however, and the promise of technology looms brighter than ever. Even here, we may be well advised to start by scanning our approach for prejudices and lapses in technical training. It is easy to succumb to the temptation to just use online teaching platforms for the same old lecture delivery style, oblivious to the opportunities for feedback, referring back to resources, clarifications and additional resources that the online environment can so effortlessly provide. At the end of the day, having proper digital coursebooks with interactive smartboard content that can be shared over the videoconferencing platform is bound to open avenues for teaching that we may not even suspect.
Indeed, this year is unknown and unpredictable in ways that no one can predict, but we need to remind ourselves that this particular battle is what we have been training for our entire careers. Let us welcome it as such!