How the Coronavirus Helped Me Become More Involved at School

How the Coronavirus Helped Me Become More Involved at School

Jonathan Isaacson

Tohoku Fukushi University

The global pandemic forced me to make the best out of a bad situation. As with so many other schools around the world, the coronavirus pandemic forced classes to be online. This caused the start of our school year to be delayed by approximately one month. This delay allowed teachers to develop the skills and understanding needed to conduct classes remotely, either live through video conferencing or through “on-demand” pre-recorded videos. Being one of the more technologically well versed teachers at my school, this period of preparation thrust me into a teacher training role, something I had never done before. I’ve had several years of experience utilizing learning management systems to conduct paperless classes, experience that has proved invaluable for online teaching. In the month between the decision to postpone classes and their start, I conducted weekly online workshops over Google Meet to help both our full time and part time English language faculty acquire enough working knowledge of the systems available to us through our university’s online tools. For this presentation, I plan to briefly share the approximate timeline of events of the teacher training. Then I will discuss how the coronavirus pandemic crisis has helped me, a teacher in only my second year at my current institution, become more involved with the larger faculty as a whole and has made me feel more an integral part of the language teaching team at my school. I was able to realize the importance of my particular skill set as a teacher, both in the classroom and as a teacher trainer.