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.
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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.
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