Feeling sad? Teach something!

Not long go I was watching a great video on how your body can shape your mind. It sounds rather obvious, but the conclusion is hard to believe: standing for two minutes in what is called a ‘high power pose’ can actually trigger the production of testosterone and therefore make you more confident to deal with stressful situations. (Link here: Your body language shapes who you are)

Of course I immediately started to think how this could be applied to the classroom.

Then I started thinking about those days that you don’t really feel like teaching. Every teacher has been there, secretly wishing that his/her one-to-one student doesn’t show up, or even worse when you actually feel like calling all your students to cancel a lesson.

I figured this wasn’t a feeling that belonged only to myself. I actually heard from a teacher trainer I had, in a moment when she was getting off her chest, who told me she wished the administrative staff understood that teachers need to be 100% to deliver a good lesson. That, unlike other professions, we’re just not good enough when we’re on a 70% level, for example. This conversation is of course used here without context, I’m not actually trying to crucify her or anything. I actually agreed to the statement at the time.

But what I realized with time is quite the opposite. Every time I had to teach a lesson when all I felt like was going home, the lesson proved to be a great mood twister. Invariably I left the classroom feeling great, many times wondering how much my mood had changed so much in so little time.

I think I may have found a reason for that. As a teacher, our goal is to deliver great lessons, making sure students engage, participate and learn something from the time we spend together. Our students don’t have anything to do with our mind set. They don’t have anything to do with our problems. They’re paying to get great service, so I guess the old ‘leave your problems at home’ do apply for us.

But after I watched this video, I wondered if by forcing myself to smile and be ready for my students actually had the power to make me feel better. After observing this phenomenon for a while, I am quite sure it does. I do believe that when you make an effort to keep you troubles aside in order to provide a great lesson for your students, you are actively working on your troubles. I would even say you might find some good answers after making teaching a good lesson.

I’ll go a bit further and reveal something about myself. When I first started teaching, I was actually recovering from a quite long and severe depression. At the beginning, many were the times when I felt like quitting because I felt I wouldn’t be able to deliver a decent lesson. Many were the times when I stood facing the director’s office, almost knocking on the door to reveal my weakness. But something always convinced me that I should go on and teach the lesson, and in case I felt like that at the end of it, then I would quit. Glad I did it, as never did I feel like quitting the job after a lesson. Quite the contrary, I actually thought to myself how I could possibly have thought about it some hours earlier.

Teaching can be a really challenging experience at times. It makes you turn all the engines on and makes sure your students are getting what they paid for. And I think this drive to excel and do a good job is a powerful tool for those days when you’re too comfortable feeling idle and miserable.

So my suggestion is simple: feeling a little bit under the weather? Teach someone.

When Profiling Works

Profiling people is certainly not a new concept for many – something we each do almost subconsciously. It comes in the form of social orienting, and of course environment. It rose to prominence after 911 and the rise of terrorism, and while homeland security was and still is a primary mandate for most responsible states, should it supersede individual rights when based on profiling? The safe answer is depends.

In Brasil, the issue of profiling has come under the spotlight with the manifestations which occurred recently in shopping malls in Sao Paulo, commonly known as ``rolezinhos`` - and most recently the incident in Rio involving the alleged 15 year old thief from the favelas – who was beaten, stripped and finally locked to a post by white vigilantes. And even here at CEO, through the profiling of our own students.

Now, relax - there is no diabolical plan in effect to take over your minds with English and thereby mount an attack on other language schools in the city and then the country and then… Sorry got carried away there, but rest assured; no calculated plan other than that to provide the best quality teaching is being formulated at HQ. Having said that profiling our students is something that we do every day, especially when it comes to lesson planning.

The practice or should I say science is fascinating. There are so many variables, socio economic, cultural, gender - that come to bear when projecting the personalities of students. Profiling as teachers allows us to cultivate lesson plans that address specific areas of interest in students, but more importantly, it gives us insight in how to best impart the knowledge. Working exclusively with Executives, accurate profiling based on carefully accumulated data is essential to the education process, especially with respect to language teaching.

So how does one accurately profile the adult Brasilian learner? Last year, The Guardian ran an article which helps to explain the recent interest in Brasil`s burgeoning middle class, and sheds light on the unique issues faced by Adult ESL students in the country. Here is part of that article:

“…the rise of a formerly poor social group that is now in the most powerful consumer stratum in the country. Brazil’s “C-class” – as they are categorized – have grown rapidly in size and influence over the past decade thanks to the growth of the Brazilian economy, widening credit lines and the government’s efforts to address income inequality. Since 2004, the government says, 32 million Brazilians have been lifted out of poverty. Last year, this helped the C-class – defined as those earning between 1,000 and 4,500 reals (£300-£1,400) a month – to constitute for the first time a majority of Brazil’s population of 196 million.”

The fact that in a global economy more and more people need to speak English is nothing new, of course. What is new, I believe, is the kind of student that has emerged because of the economic boom The Guardian described. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, I would describe these new middle class adult students as people who:

1. Are in their early-20s to mid-30s.

2. Need English to become or remain employable. Travel, culture and fun are secondary interests.

3. Need to learn English more than they might want to learn it. And they need to learn it fast.

4. May have never been to an English-speaking country.

5. May be relatively impervious to American / British culture.

6. Are mostly A1 / A2 when they start a new course, since they didn’t learn enough English as kids / teens and grew up with limited exposure to English – partly because of item 5 above.

7. May have limited literacy in L1 and a very feeble grasp of learning strategies and study skills.

8. Tend to be very career-oriented. They have no time to – in their words – “waste” on topics, situations, words, functions and grammar that they don’t perceive as directly relevant to their career goals.

9. Tend to gauge their progress by the degree to which they are able to “get stuff done” at work.
 Fast.

10. Are not willing, for the most part, to spend more than 2 years in a language school. *

Add to all this the amount of pressure these students live under, makes you wonder why they even bother trying. But then, that’s where we come in as teachers of adults – dealing with and understanding these issues through profiling better enables us to address these specific needs and provides us an insight into their obstacles and motivations behind learning the language.



*Taken from an excerpt from Luiz Otávio`s blog: http://www.luizotaviobarros.com/2013/12/learn-english-fast.html

Purpose

Most teachers know this term rather well: purpose. When it comes to classroom practice, think everyone who has been observed by a peer, coordinator or teacher trainer has heard something like this: “tell me more about that activity you did. What was the purpose behind it?”

We learn quickly that “to have some fun”, “to enjoy ourselves a little” or “to practice” are not usually enough. There is a deeper connotation to it. You are led to ask yourself why your students should perform the activities you ask them to. In the beginning of our careers, we wish to know a lot of ‘whats’ and ‘hows’, but at same stage, the question that matters the most is ‘why’.

Thinking C.E.O. as a huge lesson plan, we started asking ourselves why we exist. What is our purpose? To teach English in business contexts? To provide a solution for adults who want to share a classroom with people who share similar interests? To offer convenience and value for money? If you analyse these questions closely, you will notice they are all related to what we do, and not why.

Therefore, we dug deeper, and it did not take too long to realize why we exist. We want our students to succeed, simple. We thrive through our students accomplishments. It’s not a great lesson that matters. It is when we realize that our students use what they learned in their real lives for their own benefit. Suddenly, we saw that all our ‘whys’ are linked to our ‘whats’.

We succeed when our students are able to hold a telephone conversation in English with their bosses. To help, our students have their teacher’s and my cell phones to call us up any time for a quick chat in English.

We win when our students succeed in presenting something in English at their jobs. To be there for them, we provide special lessons for this kind of circumstance.

We succeed when our students do well in interviews, and of course we schedule some rehearsal Skype interviews with them beforehand.

We hate when students miss classes that they have already paid for, and so we offer them make-up ones, or have them on Skype for the lesson when they are travelling, for example.

We are happy when students are able to socialize with someone with work colleagues from other countries, and that is why we have happy hours in local bars and here at the office.

I could continue, but there is no purpose (got the catch?). We do everything we do because we want our students to get there, wherever ‘there’ is for them. There is no successful lesson if students do not succeed outside the classroom.

Having come to this realization, we have decided to do more, much more. I think our students could already notice some changes. And there is much more to come.

In addition, we have decided to change the way in which we communicate with students and the market. That is why today we are releasing our new campaign “you do good, we feel good”. We want to show why we are here, we want people to know that our success comes through theirs. Based on what our students have accomplished up until now, we feel GREAT.