The Bridge is celebrating 15 years and the director Klaudia Bednárová talked about changes the language school has gone through.
That’s a long story. I got into teaching English by accident and was rather pushed into it by circumstances. I finished high school in economics and since it was quite difficult to get a job in the 1990s, I went to England to work as an au pair. When I came back there was still high unemployment in Slovakia, but there were just as few English teachers then as there are now. Teaching English was pretty much the only job I could find then. Although I knew English, I spent the first six months learning more than I taught, but to my own surprise I enjoyed it very much. After three years of teaching, I was sure that I wanted to devote myself fully to learning. Alongside my work, I studied English – Education and have been living it ever since.
Knowing the language perfectly is a must. But what is really important is that they know how to teach English. Knowing English and teaching English are 2 different skills. I have experienced this myself. I still remember breaking out in a cold sweat in front of the blackboard when I couldn’t for the life of me explain to my students the differences in grammatical tenses. I’m sure my students were not interested in my pretty accent at that point, they were frustrated because they couldn’t grasp it. The fault wasn’t with them, it was that I hadn’t had proper training. I felt first-hand how important it is that our teachers and lecturers are qualified teachers. Having a degree – a university degree or an international certificate to teach English as a foreign language is essential, every profession has to be able to use the language. We made a mistake when we started to think that anyone can teach and then it looks like that. Many people can stand up in front of students, but to push the students, to develop their strengths, to motivate them and to teach them, that’s a different story.
Probably the hardest thing was finding the balance between what I wanted to do and what I had the realistic ability and money to do in the beginning. I had my own ideas about what all a school should do and how a good school should work, but in reality it was hard. For example, I had an idea about the curriculum and setting goals for both lecturers and students, but the companies weren’t interested and the lecturers didn’t know how to do it properly, nor did they want to do it. In fact, the companies’ low expectations of teaching quality allowed us to be better than the competition quite quickly and easily. I used to repeat my obligatory phrase “in the country of the blind the one-eyed person is king”. To this day, we often see that corporate training is misunderstood as a benefit rather than an investment in the company.
The beginning was challenging; being able to teach English and running a company are two completely different things. I practically changed jobs and again had to (and still have to) learn a lot about working with and in a team. In retrospect, I realize that I wanted everything to happen too quickly. A lot of effort was put into team building by my colleague Andrea, who has built a really good team of teachers over the years. I am very pleased and proud that together we have managed to build a school that is a pleasure to work and teach in.
Our ambition is not to be the biggest school, we want to be the best, which is why we focus on clients who know that time is money and that results count. They realise that the 21st century is the age of education and information, and that if 60% of the internet is in English and 0.01% is in Slovak, therefore knowing English really is key. It gives us the opportunity to work with people who are educated, smart and inspiring. Having good students is half the battle.
Qualifications are essential, but it doesn’t matter what nationality the lecturer is. A passport or a birth certificate does not make a good teacher. We currently have almost forty lecturers in our team, about 70% of whom are from abroad, from about thirteen different countries. “Native speaker” is a good keyword to google, but in a multicultural world, “native” is a completely irrelevant attribute of a teacher. For one thing, it’s hard to tell who is and who is not a “native” nowadays, because if someone was born in England, for example, and doesn’t have at least a first-class university degree, there’s a pretty good chance that their English won’t be as good as someone who doesn’t have a British passport, but graduated from a university in England.
Excellent English is certainly essential, after all it is the language we teach, but in reality, as I mentioned before, it is more important for the student that the teachers are able to pass on the language. To teach it. Having a teacher who has excellent English is like having a coach with a “sixpack”. It’s nice to look at, it’s motivational, and naturally we have a greater sense of trust in that teacher, but more importantly, they have to be able to teach us, to be able to motivate us, to get us through the times when we have a lot on our plate at work or at home, when we don’t feel like it. Learning a language is a long haul and foreign language teachers are more like coaches than lecturers.
Over the years, we have built our own internal teacher training system and have set up a company ecosystem and team dynamic that naturally encourages those teachers who want to learn, work on themselves and care about their students as well as to naturally discourage those who don’t share our approach to learning. Maintaining and developing a healthy ecosystem is constant work in which it is important not to slack off.
A lot has changed in recent years, we have more lecturers outside of Slovakia. Firstly, Brexit has changed the situation and online work has opened up completely new opportunities, but it has also taken away from Slovakia. It is getting harder and harder to convince a person from abroad who is good at what they do to come and live in Bratislava.
We have learned, or rather experienced first-hand, how extremely important a good team and shared values are.
One of our values is lifelong learning; we live what we do. That’s what unites us. We enjoy learning and finding new methods all the time. We have to, but we also want to move forward because the world is progressing and we can’t stand still.
It is an advantage to have people from different countries on the team; information converges from all over the world in our school. Someone has family here, someone has family elsewhere. So the topic of the pandemic actually started to buzz around in our school at the beginning of February. We have two or three people on the team who had previously taught in Asia and were already at home teaching online at that time. They were instrumental in helping us quickly get the training plan for the lecturers up and running and the online teaching up and running. We formed small teams, identified mentors, and trained in ZOOM. We chose it based on the experience of our colleagues and also because it already had “breakout rooms” and worked very well even with a poor internet connection. If you have transmission delays and people are jumping in to talk, it’s hard to have a good conversational class. When technical complications come into it, especially with a foreign language, it’s not exactly easy to keep the conversation interesting and the atmosphere quickly worsens.
For me personally, experiencing the cognitive fitness of the team in practice was a great experience during the pandemic. I observed what functional learning does to the company as a whole. A lot is written about the importance of education, but to actually experience it was very different for me. I suddenly saw the real impact that education has on flexibility, mental health and even the quality of life of people and the company. It is not just about acquired skills and knowledge.
From a student’s perspective, online learning is easily accessible and time-saving. From the lecturers’ point of view, on the other hand, it is more challenging. You lose the ability to observe the people in the class and it is very important to know what you are doing, not to rely on the group to sense it. You need to be able to consciously choose methods, tools, to be able to assume that if I do this, this is probably what will happen. Having a qualified and experienced team has become a necessity for quality teaching. At the same time, completely different possibilities of functioning have opened up, especially when it comes to corporate training. It has always been the most difficult and expensive for us to attract trainers to Bratislava for our lecturers. Now we can afford to work with different experts on a completely different frequency. Today, we have opportunities to learn with anyone, anywhere in the world, and this is basically true for any company where employees can actively use English. For example, I’m currently taking a marketing course where Seth Godin and Philip Kotler are lecturing.
Mostly yes, but we also run weekend workshops and have had a summer school for a few years now. Since our trainers are not in Bratislava, most of the training is online.
We are a company whose working language is English, and just like our clients, we also adapt to the different situations that arise in an international team.
As we have an English-speaking work environment, it is important for us, for example, that our office manager and receptionist are also fluent in English. However, it is virtually impossible to recruit a person with fluent English for this position. So we know first-hand what it takes in terms of investment on our part and effort on our colleague’s part to get from B1 to C1.
The big change after the pandemic is also that we no longer have a team under one roof in Bratislava, but in different countries and even continents. It’s constant work and effort to improve ways to develop a team that doesn’t physically meet. It´s difficult to find ways to build team spirit, professional, as well as human relationships that are the basis for mutual professional respect, trust and cooperation. We have found it very useful to use joint training and educational projects to strengthen the team. Although I feel that this is still an under-recognized but nevertheless important added value of online learning in Slovakia, we already have clients who have branches all over Slovakia and care about quality online learning. Through online learning, they not only train in English, but also connect employees and strengthen relationships between people who don’t know each other and wouldn’t normally communicate with each other at work. They improve their language and at the same time get better connected and better acquainted.
That’s a good question. Technology gives us new tools, but it’s important to realize that our brains still work the same way. The technical revolution is far faster than evolution, so to learn effectively it is still more important for us to enjoy learning and have good social interaction than a new cool app. Neuroscience is advacing quickly, but for now it can simply be said that the old adage “in a healthy body and healthy mind” still applies. The healthier we are – physically and mentally, the more we learn. The more stressed we are, the less we sleep and the more we eat poorly, the worse our brains function. Technological development brings great and constantly new possibilities, but I still have to learn things because knowledge doesn´t just pop into my head. The advantage is that I have a lot of help tools at my disposal, I have the possibility to listen to podcasts, interact with ChatGPT, get my email corrected by it, or find friends all over the world and be in touch with them quite easily on a daily basis.
Humans are not just a cluster of functional processes. In many ways, educators and psychologists are sounding the alarm because technology is having a degenerating rather than a developing effect on the general population. We have social networks that we initially thought would help us maintain family relationships and friendships with people who live far away from us. Today, however, we are experiencing exactly the opposite – alienation, a decline in communication, we are talking about an addiction to social networks that often produces anxiety and feelings of inferiority. My point is that technology has enormous potential to move us forward, but whether it actually does so is up to us. For now, it is more likely to overwhelm us and trap us in a snare of perceived success.
Just because we know how to do things better and have the capacity to do so does not mean that we do. Life is still about the quality of our relationships, our health, our strong will and our discipline. We have food in pills nowadays, yet the experiential food business is growing, because food is not just about nutritional value. It’s the same with learning; we’ve known for a very long time that if we spent an hour a day on language, the progress is multiplied many times over. So why do we have to explain that homework and work outside of class is absolutely necessary if someone really wants to improve? We know what to do, but do we have the real discipline to do it? How many of us practice? Is it healthy? We’re better off than at any time in history, but we’re struggling with back pain and obesity in our forties. We have all the information in the world under our fingers, yet a growing number of people think the Earth is flat.
I’m not worried that AI will displace humans and humanity. I use both ChatGPT and deepl daily, it helps me save time and do things better, but figuring out what I want to write and evaluating whether the result communicates the message I want to get out there is still up to me. Having a translator in your ear is a great thing, but language isn’t just words. Communication is complex. It’s also culture, historical and contemporary context, relationships, and psychology; it’s an interplay of many things that each of us interprets a little differently.
We have public classes, corporate training, and in recent years we have been doing English coaching and teacher training. It’s a wide range of people, but I think they’re all smart and very nice people. What really matters is that they learn English. They are people who know that although we as a school will give them everything they need, the outcome is mainly equal to the effort they put in.
It is important to us that our students get real results. When you pay for a course with us, we want you to actually take it. Therefore, our students’ attendance also goes into the remuneration of our tutors. It’s frustrating to prepare for classes and not see results in students, a good teacher doesn’t enjoy that. And since we are all learning together, we know very well that it is one thing to want to do it and another thing to do it. Working with motivation, discipline and habits is an important part of our tutors’ job. It also led us to coaching. To make our tutors more effective and to be able to help our students with proper goal setting and maintaining motivation, we regularly train them in basic coaching techniques.
The biggest challenge has been and continues to be creating and maintaining a healthy ecosystem of learning within our school. Learning new things means constantly stepping out of your comfort zone, and it’s important to have an environment that pushes people forward while supporting and motivating them.
I consider our success to be building a system of in-house training and working with tutors. We are already seeing the results of this in practice today in student attendance and results. We even won the prestigious Learning and Development Awards for this in the Best Soft Skills Corporate Learning/Development Programme category for 2023. I am extremely humbled that our programme was recognised by a panel of 17 expert jurors, experts in HR, L&D and coaching.
We cannot afford to let our trainers rest on their laurels and positive feedback. Motivating them was a challenge at the beginning, our summer school helped us break through that. We were helped by the psychology of adjustment and role models. Spending a week secluded in Zajezova with the top people in our field had a significant impact not only on the development of the individuals, but also on the development of the whole team. In discussions with Philip Kerr, Mike Shreeve, Rakesh Bhanot, Peter Medgyes and others, we all suddenly somehow understood more that “aha, so this is how I can be better, this is what it means to be truly professional”.
Role models are very important for team building and motivation. Being together all week is also great for getting to know each other better, forging deeper relationships and gaining more respect for each other. It fostered trust within the team and consequently came with better quality sharing and learning from each other.
I also find it interesting and very motivating to prepare international conferences for English speakers. For almost ten years before the pandemic, we organised one of the biggest English conferences in the CEE region, ELTforum. In addition to the summer school for English teachers, we regularly organize courses with different focuses, workshops and webinars. Teachers need to learn and develop, because only what we have can we take forward.
