Teaching English online amplifies every feeling of self-consciousness that you might feel as a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language. Teaching online is more than just a change in your learning environment: it obscures subtle body language, requires you to become more direct with what you say, and, of course, introduces new disruptions that come with technical mishaps.
As the Lead Content Architect of the 2020 Tōshin English Workshop, a three-day digital ideathon for Japanese students to develop their confidence as English speakers, I worked with the programme’s distributed team of USA- and UK-based coaches to help them overcome the challenges that they faced in making the transition from working with groups in a physical classroom to operating online.
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What’s “the difference that makes the difference” that can have you feeling confident and able to roll with anything that comes at you as an online English teacher? After delivering two successful weekend ideathons with over 30 coaches and over 180 students between them, these were the coaching insights that made the biggest difference.
1 · Relate to your students’ experience: be vulnerable.
Were you ever forced to learn a language in school? I know I was – and I utterly hated it. After 7 years of learning French and outright living in France, I couldn’t properly ask a cashier “do you speak English?” After 5 years of learning Spanish, I had to ask for the definition of a “hard word” in a reading exam, only to find out that it was the word for “woman”. Years later, even after doing a complete 180 and falling in love with languages and becoming conversationally competent in Italian, I still feared ordering a meal in Florence after spending 5 minutes in my head trying to anticipate all possible dialogue.
Have you ever had a hard time learning a language? Share your experience with your students.
The biggest fear most of your students deal with isn’t a lack of knowledge but a lack of confidence to use what they know – however much or little it may be – to express themselves. When you share your struggle with them, you are not just normalising their fears and making them realise that they are not alone; you are creating a classroom where it is okay to be vulnerable.
In my personal experience, this has a much more powerful effect on their self-esteem compared to lavishing them with positive praise alone. Try it out with your students, and you will feel the positive impact it will have.
2 • You ARE a great teacher: trust yourself.
Have you ever spoken in front of an audience and felt anxious? Chances are, you have – and that’s because of where you’re directing your focus. When you’re teaching students, it’s easy to feel self-conscious. While you’re speaking, you may be overwhelmed with all manner of thoughts from, “Do they understand me?” to “Have I missed anything?” to “Do they think I’m bad?” to countless others.
Stress and anxiety arise through focusing too much on yourself, and this makes you question your abilities. Trying to “fight” your doubt is exhausting, and it ends up distracting you from what made you decide to teach in the first place: your students.
If you’ve taught before, you’ve lived to tell the tale – and you’ll do it again, and you’ll do a great job. Trust yourself, and you’ll do just fine – and I know that’s easier said than done sometimes. What do I do when I’m feeling uncertain? I ask myself, “What do I want to give to my students?” What do I want them to remember about this session? What do I want them to take away from our time together? It’s asking this question that gets you to stop focusing on yourself and instead start focusing on what you want to give – and this makes a huge difference.
Self-consciousness, fear, and doubt can be tough to beat, yet so much of it comes down to your mindset and what you choose to focus on. Focus on the difference you want to make, and trust that you can make that difference. You’ll be amazed at how it will affect your energy, too.
3 • Allow your students to lead: let go.
Teaching online in a group is tough. Looming mute icons and dreaded patchy internet block the normal fluidity that comes with being in a group, and before you know it, you’re likely to feel like your students won’t speak unless you call on them one after another. Halfway through the first ideathon, I was concerned at how the group I was teaching was going to develop an entire presentation to be delivered the next day if I had to be the constant middleman trying to wring discussion out of them.
Then, with 10 minutes to go before a break and completely out of ideas for how to make it work, I asked them, “What’s the best way for us to work so we can deliver this presentation tomorrow?”
This ended up being the single most important question I asked them the entire weekend. My intermediate level group of four wanted to research two different topics and wanted to work in pairs. Each of the two pairs got separate tables in Remo (the equivalent to two Zoom breakout rooms) and worked for the next two hours after break, then a further two hours the next morning, and they did it without me being there for 70% of the time. I only entered occasionally to see how they were doing and to offer help. By being willing to take the risk and letting my students take the lead, I went from being “the constant middleman” to going almost entirely hands-off.
This wasn’t an advanced group: this was a mid-level group of students who still made mistakes, still had to think about what they wanted to say, and were not outspoken at the start of the programme. By the end, they were speaking without needing to be prompted and they were confident in their ability to express themselves even when they weren’t completely fluent.
Trust your students, and they will fly – that’s what I learned in the first weekend. From beginner to intermediate to advanced, your scope will definitely vary, yet, give your students the chance to be responsible for their own learning, you will be astonished at the results.
Have you been teaching online? What’s made the biggest difference for you? What challenges are you facing?
Let me know in the comments below, and let’s start a conversation!
