The more expertise you have in a subject, the more likely you are to try and ride out a drastic change caused by new contrary / negative information.
It's a good thing to trust your experience and wisdom. It makes you more confident and can greatly improve your competence.
The trouble is, it can also make you very attached to the way you've been doing things.
And when the world changes as fast as it does today, this can lead to problems.
I'm certainly guilty of relying more on my experience than listening to the "signs" around me.
When the pandemic hit, I was reluctant to transit my teaching online because:
a) I had spent months prior to the pandemic, producing my programmes.
These were science-based and centered around a lot of guided experiments and activities.
Not that much "lecturing", as they were aimed at students who were less inclined to sit and listen. So, how was I going to let them do the activities while I'm not present to moderate the flow and give guidance?
If this was a "soft skills" programme, I can modify it easily. But a science-based one?
That would take a lot of work and be nowhere nearly as effective or engaging.
My education partners agreed with my assessment.
b) I had spent 15 years as a trainer, all of it face-to-face.
To have to start messing around with lights and cameras and being unable to read my learners' body language properly (because webcams were, and still are, terrible at their job) seemed so much trouble.
I had spent so much time honing my live presentations that I never spent any time learning to do it virtually, and the notion of doing it scared me.
If I'm honest, point (b) was more of a barrier to me than (a). I could choose to invest another few months changing the curriculum (and I kind of did eventually), but the fear of change was so strong, it paralysed my thinking and, consequently, my actions.
And, as the pandemic raged on, the income loss added to the paralysis. Not just for me, but for a lot of trainers I knew and for a lot of education companies as well.
It's a lesson well-learned.
Trying to get to a point where I'm comfortable running online programmes took me time (partly due also to the fact that I'm a bit of laggard when it comes to technology - certainly not an early adopter).
It also took some useful gadgets and apps, which I'll be glad to share information on in a future post.
I'm still nowhere as proficient in online teaching as I am face-to-face, but I'm trying to get there.