“The basic rule of a crisis is that you don’t come out of it the same.” – Pope Francis
Over the last 15 months it has been wonderful to see teachers’ motivation and determination to develop the necessary pedagogic and digital skills to cope with the most significant global disruption to education in living memory. Paradoxically, during this most challenging year of relentless just-in-time teacher development, in which many teachers had to learn to work remotely online and/or in socially-distanced and/or hybrid settings in a shockingly short space of time and with little or no institutional support in many settings, it felt like teacher resistance to learning had decided to take a sabbatical and vanish to a galaxy far, far away.
In this session, we will explore how this perfect storm created such optimal conditions for teachers buying into their own learning and how, as language teaching organisations plan post-pandemic teacher learning, key insights and lessons learnt can be coherently integrated into CPD programmes without losing sight of the important place that learning from research and researching to learn, thinking critically, and developing adaptive expertise also have in teachers’ professional development.