The annual IH Toruń Teacher Training Day has become an ELT event to mark on your calendars. This year's event was due to take place in mid-March but of course a certain pandemic came along and scuppered all plans. The event was subsequently pushed back to 7th November.
As the pandemic continued to linger, the school decided to hold the event online. The organiser, Glenn Standish, DOS at IH Torun, wanted to do something that little bit extra special and decided to rehaul the original programme and turn the conference into a marathon 13-hour event, complete with an impressive line-up of speakers including:
Andrew Walkley, Anna Hasper, Chris Roland, John Hughes, Antonia Clare, Christopher Walker, Antoine Marcq, Sandy Millin, Jen Dobson, Andriy Ruzhynskiy, and many more.
There were also some ELT legends taking part. Opening the conference was none other than Jill Hadfield, who presented live from New Zealand with a session on creating tasks for online contexts. Next up was Young Learner expert Carol Read, live from Spain, who talked about the Whole Child Approach. Later in the day, the participants were treated to an hour-long session by renowned linguist Scott Thornbury, who gave us 10 communicative activities that work well online.
In the evening, Adrian Underhill answered some interesting questions proposed by the participants. We also had guest spots from the likes of Rob Howard, IH Toruń's Romek Poślednik, and IHWO's very own Lucy Horsefield and Monica Green.
The event ended with Jill Hadfield popping in for a second time. With such a long event, our evening was now her morning. The event had come full-circle and came to a fitting close.
IH Torun received much positive feedback and praise about the conference. Kata from Italy described it as "the most engaging online event this year", whilst Magda from Poland said it was a "brilliant event with absolutely great organisation".
The school would like to thank all the presenters and participants for helping make this year's IH Toruń Training Day the incredible success that it was and they look forward to the next one – whatever life has in hold for us!