5 easy ways to systematize your language teaching

Success in most areas of life depends on having suitable systems in place that support our development process. While we may have excelled at school or in corporations following “the system”, we may not be equally well prepared to set up our own systems. In a typical language school situation, all three stakeholders involved – administration, teachers and students – expect from each other to be given “structure”. At the end, we end up with relying solely on the “structure” offered by the respective textbook. This is far from enough, since successful learning depends on so much more, and mainly, the student having a training routine at home and learning how to self-correct.

Here are some premises to reflect on. What is your stance on them? On what grounds do you accept or dismiss them? What evidence do you have from your or fellow teachers’ experience? How do holding them affects your own teaching?

The most important predictor for success is not what happens in the classroom but what practical (!) training takes place at home. Just imagine someone taking guitar lessons and only playing the guitar when sitting with the teacher…
Apart from material for homework, standard textbooks rarely offer consistent coaching advice: how to train at home: how to set up learning routines, how to overcome obstacles (time-management, self-handicapping, frustrations), how to set goals, how to monitor your success.
Students typically do not have significant others around them, able to help them out with all the above. 
Therefore, the teacher is the only person a student can expect help. 
However, teaching time is very limited, and explaining the above to students takes away from the precious lesson time.
Thus, teachers need to find ways to automatize as much as possible their coaching role, so that they have maximum impact with the least time investment.

Here are five ways to do that:

1.      A welcome document outlining most of your coaching part. Address what to expect of your course, classroom rules how to train at home, what obstacles students may encounter and how to deal with them, recommended resources, etc. In the past, I spent most of the first lesson in a group “explaining” the course. Now I just give them a pdf and check at the beginning of the second lesson, whether everybody has read it and has questions.

2.      A classroom notes template. Instead of hoping students take notes whenever you are explaining, already have a customized template for them, where they write down new words (used by the teacher and classmates), rules and most importantly, document mistakes.

3.      A home routine template. If your students do not only complete homework out of the book, but have certain routine activities (x new words per day, reading, writing, etc.), have them fill out a special form for that.

4.      Accountability partners. Let students form pairs that hold themselves accountable in between lessons. They can also (pre)check each other’s homework, train together or help each other out when one is frustrated.

5.      Error management. Have a special template for error management. After each test, or, ideally, each lesson, students complete a table with all their errors, and probable cause, correction as well as preventive measures. Typically, students want their teacher to correct them. They don’t want to do too much thinking in analyzing what they have written. On the other, they will become proficient speakers only if they succeed in learning how to self-correct.

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. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

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.
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