Our experiences conducting English teacher-training with a church on Zoom – and could your church benefit?

What is one of the most exciting things about working for Christian TEFL?

I think it’s the opportunity to train church members seeking to reach out to marginalised communities around them through teaching English.

In doing this, these committed Christian trainees provide a fantastic community service. They seek to build up community cohesiveness and offer practical support with everyday functional English lessons. This helps those who are disenfranchised and give them the opportunity to build community relationships.

They then pray that they will have an opportunity, when the time is right, to share the good news of Jesus with any who want to hear.

We have been blessed this month with an opportunity to provide training, practical help and English language materials to Inspire Saint James church, Clerkenwell, London.

In January, six members of the church joined us across five Zoom training sessions. We focused on what we can do through online English language teaching, on Zoom in lockdown.

It’s been great to take advantage of the technology that zoom offers. We have been able to show this church how to give practical, high quality lessons to their learners.

Across the sessions, the Clerkenwell group have:

• Learned how to use Zoom effectively, through break out rooms, share screen, video and images. We have also looked at chat facility for fun lessons and how to use the whiteboard.
• Analysed how we manage different levels of ability in our Zoom classrooms. This means differentiating a piece of material, or using break out rooms effectively for level.
• Thought about how to structure beginner level classes and keep things really it simple.
• Got lessons off to a great start with interesting and effective engagement activities. In this way all learners get to speak and warmed up to English at the start of the class.

While this training focuses on Zoom classes, all of the final three sessions are perfectly suitable for when we come out of lockdown, because the principles apply just the same to the classroom-based environment too. Even better, they are available to everyone through our Spotlight series.

However, the great news is that all of the programmes above are available for your church too! We now have a subsidised programme that discount training fees and materials by 80%. It’s only available for a limited time, so get in touch today if you or your church would like to partner with us.

So, like Clerkenwell, does your church have a heart for your community and sharing the gospel? Do you want to use English language teaching to help you reach out? Then we would love to help support your church as well.

Read more about our online and Zoom-based courses and get in touch with us today to see how we can support your church.