Abstract:

The idea came to mind while thinking of Márquez's novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. The idea it is based on is the enduring power of love. In my case, it is about the love of teaching. These unprecedented times have faced us with a totally new scenario where we had to improvise overnight, we needed to reinvent ourselves and to think of new ways of motivating our students and keeping their interest alive. All this online, behind the screens, from a distance.
This novel situation has stimulated me to find new ways of giving my students a sense of identity in remote and engage them in the learning process. All this has made it clear once again that teachers are co-learners before anything else. Physical proximity is not always a prerequisite of good education and at the end of semester 2, based on my students' feedback, this has been more true than before.

Our case is a particular one as the students leave their country in order to study Romanian in the Preparatory Year. So this year they only had the opportunity to study in class for 1 semester and afterwards they found themselves stuck in a country they had barely got to know, they had almost no friend to rely on and with the new Covid they were loaded with assignments they had very little time for, they were facing fear and anxiety and they were confined in the campus. As their teacher, I had to think of ways of dealing with all these issues and to also focus on their learning progress. This situation I have found most stimulating for me as a teacher since I was facing something utterly strange and new, being myself anxious due to the whole context.

In the paper I intend to present the strategies I have devised in order to maximise student engagement and learning achievement in online classes and to also offer my students constant support.

Keywords:

Teaching, identity, engage, feedback, strategies.