How to help your language students in goal-setting

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Why should students set their own goals in language teaching? Is this not my job as a teacher, to tell them what they have to learn? Are we not using standard textbooks, and do students’ goals not have to coincide with the next exam’s content?

If you view yourself as just being part of the “machine”, faithfully applying one textbook level after another, yes. But, many of us have ambitions that go beyond that. We realize very well that excellent performance in working with the textbook and passing standardized tests does not guarantee a satisfactory real-life experience with the respective foreign language.

If you see yourself, however, more like a coach that helps each and every student acquire a new language for his or her individual needs, than individualized goal-setting becomes mandatory.

Many students themselves, at first, do not understand the usefulness of this exercise. So, I start by asking questions like this.

·        In your native language, do you feel competent to lead a prolonged and specific discussion with members of every age-, sociocultural and professional group: with accountants, car mechanics, tax attorneys, engineers, jazz musicians, reality TV “stars”, etc. etc.? Will they see you as a competent interlocutor? Probably not.

·        In your native city, imagine you had a free afternoon to spend in a café. With what percentage of the overall population would you be interested to converse two hours? With 100%, 80%, 50%, or less? Most people answer: with less than 1%.

·        What would you be talking about?

Well, in the foreign language you are learning, these proportions will be similar. So, wouldn’t it make sense, while learning the new language, to focus on becoming competent, first and foremost, in talking to that 1% about what interests you most? And if not, why should you try to achieve and force yourself doing something you cannot or do not want to do in your native language?!

Every student comes with different goals and expectations, hidden under the expressed goal of “I just want to learn English”. They learn it for travel, migration, hobbies, online chatting. If you do not uncover these underlying goals, you will set yourself up for trouble. Students may show signs of disappointment or disengagement, and you do not know why. Or, they may become seriously frustrated later on when in real-life situations.

Just asking everybody in a welcome round during the first lesson won’t do it. Better than not asking, of course, you will get mostly generic, short answers, that adapt to what the previous students have said.

What I practice and suggest is to let students write down their goals on a template sheet you have prepared for them in advance. You ask them to complete it until the next lesson and to carry it always with them. Over time, as a coach, you help them to adjust some aspects of it, how to achieve their goals at home - if you cannot incorporate much of every student’s goal list into your classroom teaching.

Here is what you could include in the questionnaire-style goal sheet:

·        What accent do you want to acquire? Be as specific as possible! (Instead of US, say Kansas or New Orleans; or Jamaica, or BBC)

·        What is your motivation for learning this language?

·        Where would you like to live in that country? What places would you like to visit?

·        What concrete person would you like to model your speech after?

·        Name x topics you would like to be able to converse about.

·        To what categories of people would you like to speak (e.g. carpenters, fellow cardiologists, cat-lovers, jazz fans)?

·        What number of specific words would you need to converse about the above-named topics?

Than you could preformat a table where students plan, approximately, how much they will learn each month. Number of verbs, prepositions, specific vocabulary, etc.. How many e-mails, small texts they intend to write, how many conversations and phone calls to have, how many pages in books, articles to read? Etc. etc.

Writing down goals is just the first step. What could follow?

·        Asking students to update them in set intervals;

·        Making conscious efforts to include their goals in your teaching;

·        Developing tracking mechanisms so that students can follow-up on their goal attainment.

Tell me what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions. If you want me to hold a live seminar for your school on the, just send me an e-mail.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

How to not make questionnaires to collect feedback from language students

How do your customers like your courses? Most language schools administer some sort of a feedback questionnaire after each course. Students are asked to complete it anonymously. The school administration is convinced that this will yield them objective information on what teacher performs well and who not.

Very rarely does a school consult with a specialist in constructing questionnaires and doing surveys: like a sociologist or psychologist. Why? Because it seems so simple. Anyone can come up with a list of questions and construct some kind of rating scale.

Distributing badly constructed questionnaires can have unpleasant consequences:

1.     You may end up with a lot of data but do not know how to interpret it.

2.     You may elicit resentment among your teachers who feel they are not treated justly.

3.     You might lower the image of your school because the way the questionnaire is constructed “primes” the respondents to think that something seriously must be wrong.

(Extreme, hypothetical example. What would happen if parents of kindergarten children would be asked questions like this: Have you observed any signs of infectious illnesses in your child’s educator? How sure are you that he behaves properly with your child as soon as you leave?)

When I audit language schools and their quality management system, here are typical questions I ask when talking about questionnaires:

1.     Who had the authorization to develop the questionnaire? Where is this written down on paper (for example, in the school’s quality handbook)?

2.     To what degree have the employees (=teachers) participated in the development?

3.     Have experts been consulted with, and on what basis have they been selected?

4.     How is the questionnaire’s content linked to other QM documents, like the school’s strategy or standard operating procedures for teachers?

5.     Have teachers been briefed before distributing the questionnaire, and how?

6.     Is there a written procedure on how to apply the questionnaire (what do you say when handing it out)?

7.     How are results analyzed and archived?

8.     How often is the questionnaire applied?

9.     Have you piloted the questionnaire with a select group of students? Have you checked how respondents understand your questions? Do all customer groups understand them (also children or minority groups)?

10.  Do you ask respondents how they feel after answering the questions?

11.  Does your system allow you to statistically correlate answers, and to compare repeated surveys? Can you track individual students and calculate tendencies?

12.  What program do you use for statistics (for example, SPSS)? How has the relevant personnel been trained in this area?

13.  How do you know whether obtained differences are statistically significant, or not?

14.  How do you know what questions are more important than others?

15.  Do you combine individual questions into overarching factors (productivity, likability, materials, etc.)? Do you weigh all questions equally?

16.  How many questions do you really need to measure each factor?

17.  Are there any leading questions that make respondents answer in a particular way, especially when not paying attention while completing the questionnaire?

18.  How do you improve upon the current questionnaire? Do you have regular internal QM audits?

19.  Do you publish the results, or part of it? Do participants get the results?

20.  How are the results communicated to the teachers? Individually or in a group meeting? Is there a written procedure for that?

21.  How do you follow-up whether the survey has led to improvements?

Just some questions. In most situations, I do not get a satisfactory answer to most of them. One administrator told me, he wasn’t interested in overcomplicating things and making it “scientifically” sound. Well, I your goal is just to create some trouble with teachers and students, and end up with a data mess, not knowing what to do with it, please go ahead! If not, take your time and consult a specialist.

Here are some of the most blatant mistakes, and how they can be avoided. Apart from ignoring the above questions.

1.     The questionnaire is too long. Over 20 questions is much too long. It shows that you don’t know what questions really matter.

2.     Most questions are closed questions where you can answer only with a rating, or a yes or no. Use more open-ended questions like: What made this course particularly productive/unproductive for me? What surprised me? What new techniques of language learning did I get out of it?

3.     In some countries, people like to phrase questions negatively: Do you feel ignored by your teacher? How bad is your teacher in explaining? Either keep a balance, or avoid them altogether: How does your teacher explain? How much attention do you need during the classroom? To what degree do you get it?

4.     Questionnaires may have an inherent bias to one particular way of teaching. I observed that, oftentimes, the bias is in favor of teacher-centered classes. This way student-centered teachers will obtain lower ratings. Make sure all teaching-styles (and course levels!) are measured fairly.

5.     Questions are phrased ambiguously or with multiple negations, which makes comprehension less probable.

6.     Many questionnaires can be reduced to a single question: How did you LIKE the course/teacher/school? Focusing on like/dislike distracts attention from the real question: how productive has the course been? What results have I achieved? The real test of a course is when students, often months later, are abroad and put their abilities to practice. Many students who “enjoyed” the course (because it kept them in some cozy comfort zone with a “nice” professor) experience the shock of being unable to communicate. What will they think then about your school?

Tell me what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions. If you want me to hold a live seminar for your school on the topic of feedback, and performance appraisal in general, just send me an e-mail.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please the other articles on this blog.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

Why language teachers and schools show resistance to quality management

Working for more than fifteen years in foreign language teaching, and, in parallel, in quality management and psychology, I personally observed how great of a resistance language teachers and schools show to quality management. On the surface, this seems strange. Quality management, by definition aims at offering guaranteed standard levels of goods and services, as well as creating systems for automatic continuous improvement in the organization.

Sounds good, does not it. What language school wants to have customers complaining about uneven standards of teaching among different teachers, about lack of results, teachers with dated skills and approaches? What language teacher does want to stagnate in his or her teaching?

What always stroke me, was that educators, and language professionals in particular, as a profession, showed greater resistance to change, and less curiosity and out-of-the-box thinking than other professionals did: say salespersons, engineers, designers. On average. Yes, many of us like to read about new tips and tricks on how to “spice up” our lessons, to make them more “interesting” with some new videos, quotes, songs or games, or grammar charts, or the use of “modern technology”. However, how often and regular do we examine strategic aspects of our teaching, what we want to achieve and through what underlying principles?

Until recently, the language industry could allow itself a quite elitist and oftentimes arrogant attitude towards its customers. In the pre-internet and pre-Youtube era, language schools and teachers were local monopolists of language expertise. Many teachers adopted a paternalistic teaching philosophy, interpreting the holy textbook scriptures to the masses of linguistically ignorant. Questioning one’s abilities, strategies and classroom behavior was out of question. More so that many language schools carefully selected their teachers according to the presence of competence and credibility markers (university degrees in education, linguistics, teaching certifications, etc.).

That complacent situation has since long been disrupted by online tutors, language apps, blogs, and other online resources, but also increased travelling. Today’s students can and do compare their current teacher’s pronunciation and grammar with that of countless native speakers and professional linguists online.

How do many teachers (especially non-native ones) cope with that situation? Some, actually not few, adopt an even more authoritative and teacher-centered approach: they work on their “personality” to become more agreeable and attractive, study NLP or other techniques of persuasion and manipulation, transform their lessons into entertainment arenas, playing games and singing with their students. How do many schools react? They increase the formal criteria before accepting a new teacher into the classroom. They ask for even more certificates, forcing teachers to participate in, often quite costly, qualification courses.

However, neither of these approaches really guarantees increased success of the teaching process, because they do not systematically address the issue of productivity in the classroom. The issue is not: how much fun do students have during lesson time, how much they “like” the textbook, teacher or school, but how the, most often, 90 minutes of lesson time is used as goal-oriented for prioritized objectives (80-20 rule) as possible, where students have the most intense opportunity to train to produce sentences in the target language.

So why not introduce quality management at your school?

Below, a list of things I have observed, heard and concluded.

·         Many think that teaching quality is limited to how well a teacher applies a certain textbook and standard tests, to recruiting formally qualified teachers (lots of certificates from prestigious institutions).

·         Many administrators fear to upset their teachers. Oftentimes, administrators are not language teachers themselves, and teachers reject advice from them as intrusion from incompetent sources.

·         Language teachers love their comfort zone of how they teach. There is the sunk-cost effect of having invested so many years in the old way. Changing it is psychologically threatening because it opens up the possibility of having wasted all that years in doing something subpar.

·         Introducing systematic change seems threatening, especially as many teachers are in a routine of teaching 8 to 10 hours a day – not only at your school, but also online or giving private lessons. They do not have the time to work on their systems.

·         Many teachers rely on a position of authority of them being the infallible expert. Starting a process of continuous improvement may undermine their position with students.

Tell me what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please the other articles on this blog.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.
Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

How to standardize your teaching

This article will show you how to write your standard operating procedure for your teaching process in the classroom. Most of you work according to a set curriculum; many of you have detailed lesson plans. So what is the difference?

Your standard operating procedure (SOP) is not so much concerned with the content of each individual lesson, but with the overall attitudes, routines and outcomes of your teaching. It allows you to think on paper, establish your own quality standard and start a process of continuous improvement. It may be further useful in case someone has to replace you during a holiday or sick leave (if you want make sure your students get a comparable level of service quality). Sharing it with your administration may make it easier for them to sell your courses to potential customers and will make the performance appraisal process more transparent, because now you are teaching following clearly outlined principles and should be judged only according to them.

Here are some chapters your SOP could contain.

1.      Goals and objectives

What is my goal as a teacher? Apart from applying a certain textbook, passing certain standardized tests: what impact do I want to make as a teacher? What is my vision for change in my students and in society at large? What cognitive and social skills should my students develop during my lessons? How do I want to leave them better off? What experience do I want to impart on them that they can get only in a classroom setting with me? How do I want to develop and change myself? What cognitive and social skills do I want to improve while teaching (e.g. posture, voice, persuasion, negotiation, explaining)?

2.      Your teaching philosophy

Not all of us do openly subscribe to a certain teaching philosophy. We just teach language X. We have studied linguistics at the university or obtained a certification as teacher. Why should we adhere to some “philosophy”? The problem is, every one of us has, at least implicitly, a clear set of rules and principles on how to teach. Putting that on paper forces us to consciously examine our belief system about teaching, and eventually adapt it over time, in the light of classroom evidence.

Questions to stimulate the writing process are:

How do I think the attainment of the above-listed goals is achieved? By what means, mechanisms do I provoke the intended changes? Where from do I have these beliefs? What evidence do I have that my teaching philosophy is right?

3.      Classroom management

Describe what you actually do in the classroom, apart from working through the textbook, by completing the following sentences:

In a typical lesson, I speak __  % of the total time.

Each of my students speaks __ % of the total time.

My students work in pairs or small groups __ % of the total time.

I ensure classroom discipline by …

In case, students do not respect the classroom rules, my strategy is the following:

When students complain about my teaching, and me, I have the following procedure:

4.      Lesson structure

How does my typical lesson look like? Make use of flow-charts in the “Insert/smartArt” function. Identify blocks of activities you regularly do: warm-up exercises, checking homework, translation, games, dialogues, grammar, etc. This does not mean every single one of your lessons needs to stick to this structure. It is just an orientation. You might also make structures for several course levels.

5.      Don’t do

List all things that, from your experience, are detrimental to your students’ success in the classroom. It can refer to a teacher’s strategies, activities or comments.

6.      List of activities

Make a list of activities, apart from those in the textbooks, that you find useful and explain why. Include also games or special dialogue exercises. Write down the short name of the activity, for what level it is most suitable, describe it and explain what you want to achieve with it as specifically as you can.

7.      Ressources

List all the ressources you need/use apart from the textbook. These may be additional grammar books, dictionnaires, websites, video courses, special objects for certain games or activities.

What next?

Feel free to add any other relevant category to your SOP. Change its structure as you see it fit. Set regular intervals at which you go through the entire SOP and check where it needs to be updated. Any time you have a new idea during lessons, make changes and corrections to your SOP. Share it with colleagues or other persons (relatives, students, professionals from unrelated fields) you trust and ask for their feedback. Establish an auditing routine with colleagues, whether you adhere to your own SOPs or not.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

Please do contact me at gerhard.j.ohrband@gmail, or visit my website http://thegomethod.mozello.com/