How to make sure teachers can really teach
Just like any other business or any other part of your life, telling teachers what they should do is about as much use as telling a teenager to stop mooching about. Here’s how to make sure the teachers in your school are really teaching:
- Make sure that during the interview the questions you ask find out how they teach, not just what kind of qualifications and experience they have. Ditto with the application form.
- Ask teachers to teach a demo lesson before employing them. If you can’t get a classroom of students together so they can teach a real class, ask a non-native member of staff to take the place of the student(s) or just ask the teacher to stand up at the front of the class and talk you through what they might do
- Have a written teachers’ manual with any points you think are vital for teachers to remember while teaching written down. Alternatively, have matters of teaching methodolgy written into the teachers’ contracts.
- Don’t just tell your teachers how classes should be taught, make sure they see classes being taught that way. This could be showing them a video (with a worksheet to make sure they are looking for the right things), peer observations (ditto) or you teaching one of their classes and them watching you do it (ditto). Many teacher training books now have DVDs at the back you can use, e.g. the new edition of the Practice of Language Teaching, Harmer.
- Have regular teacher training, observations and one to one progress meetings with teachers
- Offer information and/ or funding for outside teaching
- Have a library of books and magazines about teaching
- Have the pay, conditions and chances for career progress that attract good teachers, for example offering teachers the chance to get involved in teacher training or to take on more responsibilities as a way into a management job
- Give them the resources they need in order to teach good lessons- good textbooks, classes with students in the right level, lots of supplementary materials that are easy to find
- Make the students happy in other ways so they are easier to teach
- Give the students support in learning outside the classroom so the the teacher is just one element in an all round learning environment.
- Take away the things that use up teachers’ time and stress them out and so stop them teaching good lessons. Cut down on paperwork, sort out scheduling etc.
- Have a fixed system of warnings, extra observations, extra meetings etc. that teachers know is used when they don’t match the standards of the school, so that people know they aren’t being picked on. Again, this should be written into the teachers’ manual or job contracts.
- Pass on all student feedback to the teachers, good and bad, and have many informal and formal methods of getting that feedback.
- Have the senior staff do their lesson preparation in the teachers’ room, so that they get a feeling of what teachers are doing to prepare for their classes. However, you’ll also want times when the teachers’ room is free of senior staff so the teachers can relax and have a moan.
- Get feedback from cover teachers on how well the class seem to be progressing.
- Have a system of class record keeping that encourages teachers to look at lessons the right way, e.g. marking each student for performance and effort as well as attendance or having an “aims” box in the place where teachers write what they have done. Difficult to combine this one with cutting down on paperwork though…
- Have the teachers’ room etc. set up to encourage the exchange of ideas between teachers, e.g. a noticeboard where teachers can pin up good materials they have used recently
This is an answer of mine to a question on the TEFL.net forums. If you have any extra ideas or other comments, you can write them here below or on the forum
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:50 am
Overall, I’d agree with a lot of that. A couple of points might be a little contradictory, though:
- Keeping closer records on student progress and having teacher progress meetings are excellent ideas, and something I like doing. However, they do mean more office time and paperwork.
- If you spend money on good resources, a nice learning environment, running smaller classes and providing regular in-service training… then you have less money left to pay higher salaries, sadly.
This second one can work in your benefit – a lot of our local competition pays a higher base rate than we can afford to (but with much less in the way of support and resources), so we get fewer applications from the mercenary type, and more from people who’re likely to care about their students and their learning.
Overall, though, a very comprehensive and well thought-out post of advice; if only more employers and/or academic managers would listen to them…
November 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 am
Quite clearly, though, the best school would provide the best resources and pay the best salaries, thus keeping the more motivated teachers and enabling them to deliver good lessons all the time. The notion of teachers being ‘mercenaries’ is a joke, usually indulged in by self-deluding school owners and teachers, as everybody wants to earn the best salary for themselves.
It doesn’t matter how intrinsically motivated you are to teach well – sooner or later, you are going to demand the financial lollipop that you feel you are worth.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:29 am
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