Talking about disruptive
entrepreneurship has become commonplace. We all know about the Amazon, Twitter,
Uber, Airbnb, and what not, revolutions. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark
Cuban and myriads of others have become modern-day saints, to be emulated by
younger generations.
We have come to associate
market disruptions with big business. With the hotel, retail, music, publishing
or media business. However, many entrepreneurs in smaller niches – consciously
or subconsciously – consider that all those changes will not affect them. They
may think that their market segment is or too niche and small to be attractive
for disruptors, or that they are simply irreplaceable. Where we come to the
language learning business.
How are language schools in
today’s world? Extremely vulnerable, I would say.
Let us look at seven “sins”
(=vulnerabilities) committed by many schools. It may not be yours, for sure,
but it is, nonetheless an observable phenomenon (join the discussion if you
disagree and send me an e-mail at gerhard.j.ohrband@gmail.com).
1. Arrogance. There
is no way people can “seriously” and “thoroughly” learn a foreign language,
other than through our “accredited” school with our “certified” teachers. - Do
you know what, your customers care about their results. As soon as they get
them somewhere else, independently of how “unserious” and “un-certified” that
service provider may be, they leave. Results speak for themselves. As in other
crafts or skills, one can immediately see or hear whether someone has mastered
it, or not. One either speaks fluently, or not.
2. Relying
solely on status. In the language learning world, there are quite a
lot of “renowned” institutions: the Alliance Francaise, the Confucius
Institute, Berlitz, the British Council, the Goethe Institute, the Instituto
Cervantes, and others. If you happen to be one of them, beware that customers,
in the end, will value outcomes. For the first courses, the image of a
prestigious institution alone may attract them, but at higher levels, it really
depends on the quality of the services. Now, the more prestigious the
institution, the less flexibility in experimenting with new techniques and
formats, and the greater the vulnerability compared to startup competitors who
do not care for how language teaching should be done “correctly”.
3. Focusing
too much on standardized testing. At the moment, preparing for the
TOEFLs or Goethe Certificates of this world may seem a profitable long-term
business – for some schools even a local monopoly. However, these certificates
may lose their standing quickly, as soon as technology advances. Their current
function is just as intermediate proof to employers (and educational
institutions) that a person possesses certain linguistic competencies. With the
possibility of speech recognition and text analysis, and the respective tools
becoming cheaper and cheaper, why should a company rely on those certificates
and not just let candidates pass through fresh exams, tailored specifically to
the company’s needs?! Administered and analyzed automatically by online tools.
How would your school fare in a world in which there are no more monopolistic
language certificates around, and customers value most highly speech
production, in the areas of their individual interest?!
4. Disregard
for actual science. What has always baffled me is to what degree
education, in general, relies mostly on traditions that are not tested in
experimental settings. You may say that we cannot afford to run controlled
experiments at our school and to check what teaching style, materials and
learning techniques yield the best results. Nonetheless, there is so much
actual science done in educational psychology that offers easily applicable
hints on how to improve goal-setting, giving feedback to students, managing the
classroom, helping students set up home routines, memorizing words for the long
term, dealing with difficult students, or overcoming obstacles and
frustrations. I just remember one school that had students fill-in
questionnaires with more than 60 strangely worded and often outright biased
questions on how they liked the course. I suggested adapting the questionnaire
according to some basic standards for surveys, shortening it and making the
analysis more transparent for their feedback-ed teachers. To which the reply
was: “We do not want to get to scientific with that. We will just leave it as it
is.”
Disregarding real science on
motivation, memory and learning does not only mean ending up with something
more complicated, unreliable, invalid and inefficient, it may also translate
into leaving profits on the table, preventing you from making your processes
more productive.
5. Losing
sight of the essential added value to customers. Faced with the advent
of new technology, many schools try to incorporate tech by giving their website
a new make-up, including interactive functions, buying touch-screens for the
classroom, eliminating paper in favor of apps and shared Google Drive
documents. This bears the risk of investing a lot of time and effort in areas
less relevant to the outcome (speech production), which should be scrutinizing
the actual teaching process and its underlying assumptions.
Other schools try to make
themselves more attractive by offering all kinds of events in and outside the
classroom: movie showings, games, competitions, excursions, discussion clubs,
etc. This may pay out (or not, by blurring your key value proposition to
customers) in attracting new students. However, they will stay (!) for more
courses, only if lessons are more productive than anything else on the market.
6. Lack
of quality management. At this topic, school administrators often
become angry. “What do you insinuate here? That we do not know how to run our
school?! Look, our school exists for more than 20 years. That means, we know
how to do things.” But, how much of that is written down somewhere on paper (or
computer files)? What would happen if you had to leave your school for half a
year upon short notice? What do you have to hand over to your replacement? Will
that suffice so that he or she can run the organization competently and
smoothly? You may say we are no franchise; we are not McDonalds or Starbucks,
nor BMW or General Motors. Why should we care? Well, how do you expect to scale
your business, open new schools in other locations, double or triple your
teachers, languages and services in general, without having systems in place?
7. Unproductive
lessons. In the previous materials, we have repeatedly pointed out
that often extremely unproductive (=time-wasting) lessons are THE Achilles’
heel of language schools. I have yet to come across a school that explicitly
doubles down on maximizing productivity as their core value-added proposition.
And I have been on hundreds of language school websites.
If you want to be prepared for
the tide, this is the key element to fix to stay alive and thrive. And, then engage
in all the fancy stuff.
If you want
be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the
psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.
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 applies research
in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language
teaching process. 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.
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 as a university
lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes,
IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with
representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
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