ESOL Tutor, United Kingdom 

Life before COVID-19 

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a long career teaching English in both state and private sectors ranging from primary to higher education settings in various European countries. But for the last 5 years I’ve been teaching ESOL for Work at an adult education institute in the UK and I would say this has been the most challenging yet most rewarding job I’ve ever had. I absolutely love everything about being in the classroom - it’s a mini community with learners from all corners of the globe and every day I learn something new in this space. In the past, I’ve had classes of 30-40 but my ESOL classes are relatively small with about 15 learners, so catering for differences in language skills and competencies is not really a challenge -  I have time and space to work with individuals, stretch, challenge and all the other buzz words.  But there are 2 major challenges for me:  

Managing learner needs and expectations when they collide with those of the job centre/institute and working within a system that does not allow for, or even acknowledge, the out of class difficulties many of our ESOL learners face. 

These difficulties make commitment to a regular timetable almost impossible for our learners so it seems that I am constantly being harassed by managers to improve attendance and punctuality scores. And in answer to this I’ve become the attendance police, passing on the harassment to my students. We have to get on the phone if they miss a class and this is followed up by recording the reasons on the tracker system, all incredibly time-consuming. The fact that ESOL for Work students are sent by the job centre and do not choose to enrol is often quoted as a reason why attendance on our courses is so poor.  I’ve heard of desperate tutors threatening students that the job centre will stop their benefits if they don’t show up. Personally, I haven’t found this to be the case. 

I’ve found poor attendance can be due to a multitude of factors that range from boilers blowing up or ceilings collapsing, to not having the bus fare to attend. Unfortunately, for anyone teaching funded courses, attendance and punctuality are the be all and end all as markers of success. So getting students to class, on time has to be seen as a priority. 

My current students are mostly refugees who have been referred by the job centre so the aim of our course (from their work coaches’ point of view) is to get them ’work ready’, whatever that means. Our syllabus suggests it’s learning names of professions and their duties, as well as how to be a good employee. This is often at odds with learner expectations so my second challenge is a struggle to balance a tired but compulsory syllabus with the actual needs and desires of the learners themselves.  

Prior to being uprooted due to political turmoil in their home countries, many of these learners were living successful professional lives.  They understand about attendance and punctuality, about commitment, about working collaboratively with colleagues and they don’t need me to tell them how to complete a form or structure a CV. 

Many have already had and lost jobs here in the UK (cleaning and warehouse mainly) and they tell me their disillusionment (or failure) comes not from the work itself but from the fact that they have found it a struggle to communicate with work colleagues. They complain of isolation in the workplace and maybe they miss that camaraderie that I think is so essential to overall job satisfaction. And then again maybe they don’t want to be ushered into cleaning jobs if they have the skills to teach quantum physics! It seems to me the key to everything is having the language they need to ‘do the job’, whatever that job might be: to explain their concerns to the job centre or health worker, to continue their studies, to join in the banter, to reclaim past lives and to make plans they actually believe in.  

So it is really important to me that I give time and space to set plans in motion, to bounce ideas off each other and have conversations with the group where they not only talk about their future but they also learn how to ‘do chit-chat’ about what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in their own worlds, to take an interest in each other and even begin to use humour to forge relationships. 

Life in lockdown 

So the things that were most important to me …the time, the space, the chat…all disappeared over a weekend. 

Of course, Coronavirus had penetrated our lessons for a month before we closed. When the story broke in China, my students knew my daughter was living there so they brought the topic into class out of concern, and from there we kept up with the news together.  

I also felt it my responsibility to give them the tools to talk about this as the situation worsened so we learnt relevant vocab, read government advice leaflets and discussed illness in general. 

But then I could see learners getting more and more anxious and I wasn’t sure that it was actually helping. I tried to steer away from Covid talk but whatever activities I’d planned we seemed to end up with Covid again. Then we noticed that news stories from their different countries were very contradictory, so discussions became more heated – whose news story was accurate? Which media reports could be trusted? Just before we closed, some learners were really beginning to panic - a student came in with her shopping trolley full of hand sanitiser, hand soap, masks and gloves. She’d been to all the chemists and markets in the area before class even started. They were all getting worried about using the bus. And when an Iranian student brought in news of a family member contracting Covid, it all became very real and scary and attendance declined rapidly.  

We closed on Friday 18th and online learning began on Monday. We weren’t ready. Not the Service, not the staff, not the learners. What seemed most important was to not to close as a Service. We were (and still are) constantly reminded that we were one of the few adult education services that didn’t close and that we offered (and still do) more courses than anyone else. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and looking back I’m sure management wish they had given time to work on a plan that all the staff knew about and were comfortable delivering. The lack of direction was a little disconcerting and also ironic. We had just emerged, battered and bruised, from a 2 year slog towards reinspection and had been given an A-Z roadmap of how to be an outstanding teacher. 

Personally I had been grilled about asking open questions, my failure to nominate, too much TTT(!) to name but a few.  Now we were left to our own devices with course design, and it seemed ‘anything goes’ as long as you keep the students logging on to prove engagement to our funders.  

So now they wanted us to draw on our knowledge of what was right for our own learners, to use our creativity and to use our expertise as professionals that had been so rudely questioned months earlier.Irony indeed!

 We also had an absolute nightmare with access; not only were students getting locked out of the system but so were staff frequently. And then there were practical issues.  

We had spent 2 years working on IT skills in a new, well-equipped IT room but very few learners had a pc/laptop at home. So although they had developed the skills, half of my class just could not continue.  

It upset me that there were so many devices sitting idle in every room and yet we weren’t allowed to let students borrow them so they could continue studying with us. It just didn’t seem fair. 

At a time when many were so desperate to have something to do (I have several learners who were isolated without families) we couldn’t help – I couldn’t help. We also discovered many of our learners didn’t have WiFi and couldn’t afford to use data on mobile phones. Most worrying was the fact that not all learners responded to phone calls and emails and we had no idea whether this was due to the Coronavirus issues or them not being able to access.  So I worried. I spent weeks searching, chasing, hounding. 

But I had to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t have a magic wand and I couldn’t do more than I was doing. 

Writing now in June, any appearance at a Zoom lesson is a bonus and getting emailed homework is a reason to crack open the champagne! Zoom lessons are an eye-opener. I now have some insight into living conditions and it’s no wonder some learners turn up without homework on their regular courses. None of my current learners have more than 3 rooms at home and there’s not much peace for most. They are trying to talk while other family members have the TV on or while children are climbing all over them, grabbing the phone, running round and generally just being children. 

Today one of my learners sat peeling potatoes and she looked into the camera and lamented ‘teacher, I really miss my classroom’. Well so do I. 

Well so do I. And that is another thing. At first I was preoccupied with what my learners were losing but as time has jogged on I realise I am also losing. I miss my learners. I look forward to our morning chats, I’m interested in their lives, their opinions on all sorts of things. I enjoy their company. And we just can’t recreate that vibe on Zoom because it’s so hard to manage a normal discussion when you have to keep muting and unmuting. 

I soon discovered that to allow any kind of conversation I had to reduce group sizes to 3 or 4. So I ended up repeating lessons, working extra hours for no extra money. But paradoxically that reduced my stress levels; it gave me peace of mind that I was able to offer a better quality of teaching and tailor my lessons to those in the virtual room rather than giving a teacher monologue to a larger group. And I feel that I’ve really got to know the students who have turned up religiously, we have all become closer and that’s something I will cherish going forward. 

What has also been positive is the support from colleagues and the care that has been shown to those struggling to work online effectively. We have bonded in small teams and that has been a life saver. 

Also our managers have seen what we are capable of when allowed to pull together and take some initiative for developing useful ways of working.  

On the other hand, what I’ve found overwhelming is the pressure to be an all-knowing all-seeing technological guru. I have been in and out of training sessions, which is great, but some of this was essential and should have been delivered well before lockdown. 

And then there is simply too much online that I feel obliged to dip into. I’m inundated on a daily basis with new resources on teaching websites, every social media community I belong to is pushing creative ways of being online. So far I’ve used Quizlet, Kahoot, Quizizz, Microsoft Forms, Padlet, Zoom, all of which now need to be embedded in my Moodle course.  I  feel guilty that I haven’t made enough videos of myself giving ‘outstanding lessons’ and even guiltier that my learners haven’t recorded  their own  stellar performances to show to colleagues just how we’ve progressed and how creative we’ve been. Of course I can’t deny the amount of upskilling for both teachers and learners won’t be a real asset in future but right now I’d kill for a flip chart and some markers!