Putting one of these together for yourself
is loads of work so if you’re not really into this English teaching
thing for the long term, disregard this article, but if you’re
going to stick around for longer than just a few years, then
read on.
There are a few very good business and education-related reasons
why you need some good programs of your own: one per level that
you will teach:
Education-related reasons:
1) They’ll help you organize your materials better.
2) They’ll help you improve your teaching.
3) They’ll help you understand levels and what goes into getting
a student to learn English. You have to be able to put together
groups according to their correct levels.
4) They’ll help you speed up your class preparation every week.
5) They’ll free you from the whims of agencies and publishers.
Business-related reasons:
1) They’ll help you sell English classes and make more money.
2) They’ll help you keep your clients in the long-term.
Education-related reasons:
1) Having your own programs will help you organize your
materials better.
One of the biggest problems you’ll be facing as an English
teacher is the quality and quantity of materials that you have
and how well you have them organized. You might resolve this
issue in any number of ways: by winging every class, by simply
following whatever textbook you have at hand at the moment,
by coming up with your own material on the weekends, by collecting
materials everywhere you work, etc.
The way I chose to resolve the issue at first was to collect
materials from all over the place, but the problem I soon had
to deal with was how to organize it all. I found that the best
solution was to fit the materials into a program. I have now
organized most of my materials in individual plastic “baggies”
in large two-ring binders starting with point number 1 in my
absolute beginner’s program in binder number 1 and going up
from there. My absolute beginner’s program, for example, takes
up seven binders, which comprises about a year of classroom
work.
2) Your own programs will help you speed up your class
preparation every week.
Preparing classes is very fast and easy now as most of my materials
are stored in the order that I will present them. I just have
a look at where I am on the program or in the corresponding
binders (as they are in the same order) and take out what’s
next. This wasn’t as easy before even when I knew I had the
materials somewhere because my materials were disorganized.
Because of this, it basically rendered much of my materials
useless.
3) Your own programs will help you improve your teaching.
Now that I get a lot of the grunt-work out of the way a lot
faster, I can safely say that I have a lot more time to think
about how to improve on how I present my materials and orchestrate
my class work.
Also, whenever I get or need new materials to add to my program,
I know just where to put whatever I’ve come up with. And because
I now have a lot more time to be creative, I can afford to spend
more time coming up with better activities and/or materials.
4) Your own programs will help you understand levels
and what goes into getting a student to learn English.
Remember, if you ever want to sell your own group or individual
classes in companies, you will have to put groups together according
to their correct levels. You won’t have very long to “diagnose”
your students and once you put them in a group, you’ll have
to either teach them at that level or change their groups. In
my years of experience, one of the biggest problems working
in some academies or for some agencies was their inability or
unwillingness to put students in their correct levels.
(As examples of "unwillingness": some
small academies can't afford to have too many levels and sometimes
in companies you won't be able to create a whole new group just
for the odd-man-out.)
This lack of ability or willingness can create an enormous
problem later in classrooms when teachers have to adapt to the
mixed-up levels. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, put
some absolute beginners in a group that’s even just two weeks
old and watch them freak.
Also, to really be able to teach students English, it helps
a lot if you know what you need to teach in order to be able
to build them up. (i.e. If you try to teach them how to run
before they walk, you might get into a bit of trouble later.)
(By the way, Oxford Publishing has a great product for
level exams. I recommend it. But, you’ll still need to do
a bit of talking to the students yourself to double-check
their levels. I think I saw it at Booksellers
in Madrid the last time I was there.)
5) Programs will free you from the whims of agencies
and publishers.
Neither of them put enough content into their books or programs
anyway. They tend to behave as if something like 80 hours of
class work should be enough to get students to go up a level
when it’s probably more like 200 hours. (Especially with Spanish
students, 95% of which will never ever do any studying outside
of class.) Also, you’ll find that at least some of the materials
in any textbook provided by either will be unusable by you.
(For example, I’ve never used the pronunciation stuff in any
text books as I’ve been doing this long enough that I can do
it on the fly. Also, I still do have to use text books, as a
matter of fact, because I have to teach English in an “editorial-publisher,”
for example.)
What’s worse, is that publishers probably will not support
their materials for very long and if you totally rely on textbooks,
you may find yourself having to change texts more frequently
than you’d like. Forget whatever you’ve heard about “new and
improved”: there are some really good text books from 20 or
30 years ago that still work just as well as ever, though they
couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be the only materials used on an English
course. (i.e.: Off Stage, Streamline Departures. Though, you
can’t find the first one any longer, but you can find the second
one at Booksellers, for example.)
Business-related reasons:
1) Having your own programs will help you sell English
classes and make more money.
Well, that IS the whole point of it all for you, isn’t it?
And to begin with, your program can do that for you because
many companies recover via government funding much of the money
that they spend on these courses. If you’ve heard of “Fundación
Tripartíta” and/or “FORCEM,” then perhaps you’re already
familiar with this. From what I understand, part of every employee’s
taxes goes into an “education” fund from which companies can
then put in for by correctly filling out the proper paperwork.
This paperwork will include your programs. (At the end of the
“official courses,” by the way, one of my companies presents
the company with an official looking certificate with a copy
of the course program on the back side of it. I'd hate to hear
the chittering if it didn't happen to match up with what I'd
actually taught them.)
The information on how this funding works can all be found
on Fundación
Tripartíta. This year, for example, this fund will be paying
for around 3,500 - 4,000 euros of my English classes. (Other
companies are already using this fund for other purposes.) This,
apart from companies deducting your classes’ expense from their
taxes, is another big reason why you absolutely must be “autónomo”
(or an “official” freelance) in order to work in companies.
2) Developing your own programs will help you keep
your clients in the long-term.
There are some text books that are really good, but none of
them are long enough as I pointed out above. Perhaps, this would
be different in an ideal world where every student did all of
their homework from their workbooks and memorized everything
that you gave them, but the facts of life are usually the exact
opposite and have more to do with Murphy’s law than with Murphy’s
grammar books.
Basically, you’ll have to make the program a lot longer for
some people and shorter for others depending on each individual’s
personality and student history. For example, if a group of
students are beginners, but you think they’ll pick it up faster
because they’ve studied English before and they seem to be highly
motivated, cut out some materials from the course.
However, if a particular group of students seems to be really
slow for whatever reason, you’ll have to add lots of new materials.
Now, if you use a beginners’ text book the first year and come
back with another text book for “beginners” the second year,
expect big trouble. Then, if you actually survive that trick
and come back with another one the third year, you’ll be sure
to be up to your eyebrows in it by then. In fact, if things
are that bad, I don’t think you’d even have been able to get
through the first book as I’m almost certain your students would
have become totally de-motivated a long time before that. Basically,
I can’t see you getting too deep into the past simple, for example,
if they haven’t even got a grip on the present simple or verb
“to be” yet.
Claiming that you have to individualize programs
after you've been with a group for a while is one good way to
give yourself time at the beginning of a course to make extra
sure that you've zeroed in on their level right. Don't actually
give your clients a program in the first place if you can help
it (as it'll be as binding and burdensome as a contract), but
if you have to give them one, stall the company until you've
actually tested some of your materials on the students.
In any case, don’t doubt it for a second, developing your own
programs and getting and keeping your clients go hand-in-hand
with becoming a better teacher. Now, we all know that just about
anybody can get into a class, but only the best of us will keep
them for much longer than a school year. Whether you keep your
classes or not in the long-term will depend on your becoming
a “real teacher” and on your students actually learning something.
Developing your own programs is one big step on the way to
becoming a “real teacher” and it doesn’t matter much how you
come up with them as long as they work. The usual way is to
“borrow” a syllabus as your basis, eliminate the parts that
don’t work, and build it up from there by plugging in more topics
where they seem most relevant. Of course, you should constantly
test your programs in "real world" classrooms to see
if they actually work.
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