Growing the UK TCC Community

There are just seven accredited teachers in the United Kingdom, and five of us were teaching live classes before the COVID-19 lockdown.

Laurin McDonald and I were taught by Tina Wells, who had set the intention of increasing the number of accredited teachers in the U.K. In March 2018, she achieved her goal, when Laurin and I were accredited in Aston, Pennsylvania. Tina has continued to inspire other students to prepare for accreditation; a few more candidates are working hard in the wings.

Lauren and I set about with beginning classes; Laurin has been teaching diverse groups in addition to the classes in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and nearby villages. Due to other commitments, I taught just three classes in villages outside Banbury. However, we were both determined to follow Tina’s example to grow the U.K. community (and in Europe generally), so plans were incubating in late 2019, culminating in our Discovery Workshop. We held this in mid-March, just before our COVID-19 lockdown.

Laurin and I carefully considered our “ideal student,” someone willing to stay the course and teach at the end of their journey. We concluded that a wellbeing coach or complementary therapist was most likely to recognise the value of T’ai Chi Chih and be interested in adding classes to their core business. We marketed our workshop to a health-based networking group of which we are members. Seven people attended our first workshop – two acupuncturists, a yoga teacher, a Pilates teacher, a reflexologist, a clinical psychologist in the National Health Service and a secondary school teacher. We intended to add more dates after Easter for the people who couldn’t make the mid-March date, but … COVID-19.

We worked on a take-away booklet for workshop attendees. It included information about the history of TCC, mission statements, benefits to health, how to add it to their core business and how to establish a daily home practice. We also included testimonials from accredited teachers – grateful thanks to April Leffler, Jessica Lewis, Tracy Gibbons and Tina Wells. At the end of the course attendees completed a feedback form, as this was a pilot course, and offered an opportunity for us to improve future workshops. The feedback was very positive and constructive, and we now have two interested in becoming teachers and three maybes.

Although we intended to continue with live, post-pandemic workshops, we have become so proficient at teaching on Zoom that maybe we just need to adapt the workshop for Zoom and continue our quest.