The 18th of May marked a great moment in our Globe community. We opened the virtual café for the first time for a ‘Coffee and Chat’ event. Trainers from six different countries came together and talked about the challenges of taking teacher training events online. Whilst we all acknowledge that there is a place for online events and digital content, recent experiences have shown how challenging it is to conduct online synchronous training for new teachers in order to equip them effectively for a face-to-face teaching context.

We exchanged stories and experiences, identifying what did – and what didn’t – work, and discussed strategies that had shown promise in overcoming the physical divide. We also talked about the dearth of advice in education literature about setting up and conducting successful online teacher training. More and more training is taking place online, and yet recent research that resonates with the world we live in today is conspicuous by its absence.

Finally, we acknowledged that – like it or not – a larger proportion of online training (both synchronous and asynchronous) may well be here to stay. Given that this is a strong possibility, we began to talk about whether we could carry out some research to inform a quality framework that trainers could reference. As the big hand indicated the end of our hour, we agreed to come back together soon, with the aim of taking this idea forward.

Jen Law

May 2021