The EBU Education Working Group formed early in 2022 with the aim
- to promote and facilitate teaching and learning options for those wishing to learn the game of bridge.
The primary membership is four board members plus Giorgio Provenza, the CEO of EBED. The group meets by Zoom on a regular basis and has offered, and had approved by the EBU Board, the following objectives for 2022
- To ensure that learners can easily find all the learning options (f2f and online) which are currently available.
- To identify and promote options that facilitate quicker access to the game through combinations of online capabilities and local F2F support.
- To put in place a community of teachers to enable them to benefit from each other, and the roots of a programme to increase the number of teachers.
- To promote cooperation among us all, clubs, County Associations and the EBU in order to improve the available teaching options.
These were approved by the Board at its Jun22 meeting, and work is underway on all of these. The position of the EWG at this time is
Surveys have indicated that many clubs are short of teachers to whom to direct newcomers to the game. One approach to this is to increase the number and availability of teachers but this will take time; another is to maximise the use of the online teaching capability which is available today. Online teaching only works for a bridge club if the learners then join the club; a way to make this happen is for the teaching to be delivered online, and the learning to be delivered through Assisted Play sessions organised by the club and staffed by club volunteers. The EBU is aiming to facilitate this approach for clubs which can use it, by identifying and advertising suitable online teaching (in particular, that which links into prepared hands for Assisted Play), and providing support to clubs in the running of Assisted Play sessions. The short-list of suitable online teaching is being finalised at the moment.
These options can be used in concert with the Marketing Materials being developed by the EBU to spread knowledge of the game and to increase club membership.
A fifth objective, as a development of #2 above, is therefore proposed
- To provide sufficient support to enable clubs to build online teaching by others into a programme of learning for newcomers to their club.
As of the end of September 2022, the progress against the objectives is
- A survey of members to identify teachers has taken place; that information has been built into a database, and a search capability has been layered on this to allow a newcomer to easily find teaching local to them, and this has been made operational. COMPLETE.
- We have gathered information on existing online teaching offerings and have been assessing how easy or difficult it is to integrate these into an Assisted Play scenario. We have found online services to help learners (eg No Fear Bridge) and online services to help teachers, but nothing to help or guide clubs which lack a teacher to take advantage of online learning. Our conclusion is that this approach is a non-trivial task, and it does not make sense to continue with this objective independently of objective #5. CLOSED
- We have engaged with a focus group of teachers to understand better how working together can enable more teaching to happen, and they confirmed the value in holding informal gatherings at which teachers can share. EBED has run such ventures face-to-face in the past, and we need to engage now with EBED on the way forward. Adding a section for teachers to the EBU Forum structure is under consideration. ONGOING.
- We are working to establish a more productive relationship with EBED with the aim that our respective strategies do more to complement each other and leave fewer gaps. We have facilitated County Chairs (representative) conferences which have discussed these issues. We are working with teachers to put together a package of support for clubs undertaking teaching for the first time. We will work with this focus group (and other teachers) to identify resources that could encourage more players to participate in bridge teaching. ONGOING.
- We are organising a meeting for successful clubs to discuss and share their experience of setting up and using online teaching, so that we and other clubs can learn from this.