Is a good teacher worth good money? Part Two

I seem to be preaching to the converted here (unless the people who disagree with me are so infuriated that their fingers have tensed up and they temporarily can’t use a keyboard), but I’d already started writing part two before I got the comments below, so here goes anyway…

As the comments I’ve heard from unappreciated and underpaid teaching pros over the years seem to suggest that their schools are idiots for not paying a premium to get decent teachers, let’s see if that’s true shall we?

To take just one of the decisions schools used to take to employ good teachers back before commercial reality struck, let’s look at the pros and cons of deciding only to employ Diploma (e.g. Cambridge DELTA) qualified teachers. As the money to do so will have to come from putting up prices for students or cutting the budget for marketing, school furnishings, teachers’ room resources or admin staff, there will certainly have to be a good reason for doing so. Good reasons that could make it worthwhile include:

-The school will be able to use the fact of having well qualified teachers in their marketing (assuming that they will be able to explain what a Diploma means to the students)

- The school has lots of very high level or other demanding classes

- The school is in a competitive and shrinking market where student retention is more important than finding new students

- The school is in a country where consumers are dynamic and demanding and will quickly switch schools if they are not satisfied and will carefully check out other schools before they move to one

-The job doesn’t demand anything Dip-qualified teachers might find below them, e.g. kindergarten classes or involvement in sales and promotion

-The job involves teaching students whose culture or personal preferences mean the knowledge of a professional is as much as or more important than being personable eg. Swiss, Austrians, Germans

- The teachers will be working with non-native speaker staff who have an issue with native speakers without theoretical knowledge

- Teacher training is included in the work

Especially if one of the above are true, the advantages of employing experienced and qualified teachers such as these include:

-Less supervision will be needed, possibly meaning you need less senoir members of staff and can save some of the extra money you have spent on wages back that way

-You will have plenty of good candidates for senior jobs when they come up

- You will have less complaints from students, cutting down on admin work

- Student retention rate is likely to improve

Believe it or not, I have managed to think of just as many disadvantages though:

- The teachers might be fussier about what kind of classes they take, what materials and technology they demand access to, the number of hours they work, their living and working conditions etc.

- If you can’t offer many places higher up the career ladder, they might move onto those jobs elsewhere and so stay no longer than a backpacking teacher

- The other demands they take on to aid their teacher development (become an IELTS examiner, giving workshops at teaching conferences, trying out new materials in the classroom, doing research on their classes etc.) might actually interfere with their work more than it helps it- and even more so if they are taking the Dip rather than already have it

So, you can see why some schools wouldn’t bother…

Employing managers or teacher trainers is of course a seperate question, but experienced teachers being forced into management positions is another common complaint- one I will be dealing with next…

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 1:11 amand is filed under Diploma/ DELTA, EFL management, Job security, TEFL, TESOL, Teacher training, Teaching, Teaching qualifications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.