In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, both the teachers and the students have been affected suggestively all over the world. In 2020, ESL/EFL teachers have unexpectedly confronted with the massive challenge of a way to continue their learners’ education. This situation affected the skilled TEFL teachers as well as the students too and educators were started looking for mental health tips for teachers during and post COVID-19.
How vital could be a teacher’s mental state and welfare for the standard education in an exceeding classroom?
How do pressure and anxiety influence teaching?
When schools all over the world switched to the online learning approach, it fell most upon the teachers. They were concerned and stressed out by safeguarding that education reaches their students effortlessly in the lockdown. Also, the ‘post-Covid-19’ working environments and what the future had in store for language teaching have been a major apprehension for the teachers, school counsellors, and school employees.
Well, as of the end of March 2020, the worldwide pandemic affected a predictable 1.55 billion kids and youth inaround 184 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South America. The schooling systems changed from face-to-face in-classroom teaching to making a rapid adaptation to online teaching. Also, in most cases, educators were not been accomplished in the essential techniques as well as pedagogical skills to integrate digital technology teaching.
Teaching has been always listed as one of the most stressful occupations even pre-pandemic. On the other hand, being the English language teacher prompts its unique challenges like –
- The emotional appeal of foreign-language training
- Self-doubts about own language aptitude
- Coping with the emotional concerns of students
- Heterogeneous expertise in student groups
- Pressures to a sense of self and individuality
- Energy-intense teaching practices
- Intercultural apparatuses to training
- Hazardous working circumstances
And so on…if you are a teacher and are struggling, you are not alone!
These stressors have already made language teaching a big and challenging job to perform. The global pandemic added new unique stressors like –
- Educators without enough resources to discuss pandemics along with the questions with their students
- Learners who are extremely anxious, secluded and unable to focus faced problems in the changed learning approach
- Parents who are overwhelmedandimprovised to train their kids about digital tools
- Parents also tried to balance work and homeschooling their children
- Maintenance of optimistic student-teacher-parent relationship
- Encouraging collaborative learning and socialization
These concerns were very much challenging.
Nevertheless, have you ever wondered how are language teachers coping?
There are certain things that no one can simply control right now however, there are some things that you can control. To name a few – how you spend some of your time, what you choose to line up,etc. Teachers and professionals gradually started focusing on the things that they can control and prioritizing the healthy ones. By doing these things, they can help to put their mental wellness front.
Even though physical health, and avoiding illness are the major things to do now but it is just as significant, for maintaining mental health. Also, one of the major tasks for numerous educators throughout this time is how hard it is to be sedentary. It is a fact that anything to get your body moving will aidin sustaining your mental wellness.
One of the biggest anxieties for language teachers is to continue to involve learners and keep an eye on their development. Tohelp educators and students, there are many reliable free online resources accessible by several organisations. These resources include that offer communicating activities for apprentices of all ages, to keep their brains active while also testing their aptitude. Nowadays, more and more young people are accessing online content therefore, it is a huge responsibility for both teachers and parents is keeping students secure.
It is a crucial thing to appreciate to be prepared, not be terrified. Panic is hardly beneficial and can extract us incapable to plan and prepare ourselves efficiently. Therefore, it is important to encourage awareness and forward forecasting. It is necessary to understand problems in the classroom in a pandemic are not a replication of your teaching skills.
Just like the teachers, students also feel anxious and they will likely need some preliminary assurance from trusted adults and teachers. Offer that to your learners. Being open, truthful, and encouraging with students is an ideal educational approach.With the online courses for English teachers with a certificate, ESL/EFL educators can empower students by giving them the tools to recognize the problem, categorize the possible resolutions, pick an explanation, and try it out.
At present, teachers are feeling the vast stress of re-creating their classes into effective digital forms. The last year has been a wake-up call for parents and teachers of students. For the last year, instructors have changed their lesson plans for online teaching. Some are using video conferencing technology which they’d never used before; others are having their children to take care of at home and so on.An arbitrary workload with crowded classesis a common reason for ESL/EFL educators’ discouragement.
After the pandemic,some new struggles for the language teachers comprise a lack of engagement and interest from schoolchildren, exhaustion, and more guidelines about what they can and cannot do.
Some of the new struggles include –
- The challenge of taking care of learners’ hygiene and imposing masking rules.
- The helplessness to get closer to students.
- Limited space in a classroom to place tables.
- Difficulty in practicing speaking skills and pronunciation in language classes due to masks.
- Teaching in-person learners and remote students at the same time.
- A bigger prospect that the class will have to go back to virtual teaching at any time.
In summary, the global increase of the COVID-19 pandemic has carried out several significant aspects that may affect people’s overall health.Definitely, language teachers with a 120-hour TEFL course online have practiced higher levels of suffering due to the workload produced during the lockdown. Mastering the distance or online teaching imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic was thought-provoking for numerous teachers. The massive majority of them experienced technical blockades, but most of them felt able to cope functionally with the pressure.
