Rather than beginning with the tools, rules, or foundations of teaching; I’m going to jump ahead to the first class you get at your new job. Often parents will be watching you, either in the class or watching via a camera. They will be nervous about you and unsure of your capabilities.
On top of that, managers will be assessing you. The key is to try your best to forget them and instead remember that your only job is to focus on the students. If you manage to create a good rapport with your students, the parents and managers will follow suite.
One reason I prefer teaching children as opposed to adult students is because adults will always enter the classroom with a closed mind. That is to say, they have certain expectation that they will require you to meet. Children, however will always enter the classroom with a clear mind, ready to participate and open to learn whatever you decide is necessary for them to learn. It’s in the first five minutes that they then begin to shape an opinion. So, you have the first five minutes of the class to shape their opinion in favour of you! Ready? Let’s get started.
We will go into further detail later about classroom goals, but for your first class, I believe there are four goals one must achieve by the end of the class. Follow these three goals and I guarantee your first class will be a success. If you set a good first impression, it’s easier to then get the parents and managers on your side and maintain a good opinion of you.
The goals are:
- Make the students participate and have fun.
- Get familiar with the student’s names and interests.
- Insure they can tell you if they understand you or not.
- Insure the students are comfortable answering questions around you.
Remember, the first five minutes are when you either make it or break it.
Firstly, start with the childhood game ‘duck duck goose’. Kids of all ages love to play games, so never be afraid to play games, they’ll love you for it. Get the children to make a small circle, with enough space between each child so they can quickly stand up and move out of the circle, having one less chair than there are students.
A quick note: in my experience students are terrible at making circles, so a fun way of ensuring they can make a circle and reduce your stress at their lack of competence, is by getting students to draw on the whiteboard shapes they know such as a rectangle, triangle etc. Then tell the students you want them to make a circle, NOT a triangle, NOT a rectangle, but a circle. Offer them a challenge: if they can make a perfect circle in 30 seconds they will all get a point. I guarantee they will make a perfect circle from the first class to your last class with them.
Start the game by making a child will go around the circle, touching each student on the head whilst saying ‘I like (the kid’s name)’ until he or she chooses the goose and says ‘but I don’t like (kid’s name)’. The goose stands up and chases the other child who must run around the circle and sit down in the goose’s chair. If the student who tagged the goose makes it to the chair without getting touched by the goose, they get a point and vice versa. This way you learn the children’s names and within the first five minutes they’re moving, having fun and speaking English. It’s that simple.
An alternative game you could play is called ´feel faces´. The students once again sit in a very large circle, however one student is in the middle and is blindfolded. While you spin the blindfolded student around, get the others to quickly and quietly change seats. You then help the blindfolded student to a random student, they feel the student’s face and try to guess who that student is. If they are correct, they get a point and keep going until they guess incorrectly and another student gets to be in the middle. This is another fun way to learn names and get students moving.
Once you have established names through one of these games, get each child to write down three things they like and don’t like on a piece of paper – make sure they don’t write their names on the paper. Give examples first on the whiteboard such as ‘I like to play piano, I don’t like to eat apples’. Take the slips of paper and put them into a bag, shuffle the bag and then get a student to choose a piece of paper. That student reads the likes and dislikes, the other students then try to guess who these likes and dislikes were written by. If a student guesses correctly, give them a point (we will discuss points in the discipline chapter).
1. Avoid asking students to do things, instead simply command them to. The reason for this is because when teachers politely ask students to do things they complicate the instruction resulting in the students not understanding i.e. ‘open your books to page 5’ is straightforward and simple to understand instead of ‘would you mind opening your books to page 5 please, thanks a lot’.
You have now accomplished the first two of your four goals, the next goal to focus on is insuring the students can tell you whether they understand you or not. You can do this by writing on the whiteboard and going over the following dialogue:
Question: Do you understand?
Answer: Yes I understand/ No I don’t understand.
Every native speaker speaks with a different accent, and at first you may talk too fast and use vocab that is too rich for their understanding. But by teaching the students this simple dialogue; that will never be a problem. They will then go home and tell their parents, “Sometimes I don’t understand the teacher, but he taught me how to say I don’t understand.”
When you go over this dialogue with the class, say a simple sentence to one students and ask them if they understand. They should reply that they do. Then speak very quickly in gibberish to the next student and then ask them whether they understand you or not. They should laugh and reply that they don´t understand. Follow this pattern with the entire class and then they will be comfortable with telling you whether they understand you or not. Third goal ticked.
Your final goal is to insure the students are comfortable answering questions around you, but how do we accomplish this? Often you will ask a student a question and instead of a reply they will give you a blank face and simply not say a word. This can be because they either don´t understand your question or they are too shy to answer. This is frustrating for both you and the student and immediately creates a barrier between yourself and that student. So how do we avoid this barrier? Simple, write the following dialogue on the whiteboard:
Question: Do you know?
Answer: Yes I know/ No I don’t know.
After going over this dialogue with the entire class, write a simple math equation on the whiteboard such as 1 + 1 =? Then ask a student “do you know?” They will always laugh and reply “Yes I know, it’s 2.”
Then ask a few others the same question, change the equation but keep it simple such as 2 + 2 =? After you’ve asked a quarter of the class this question, erase the equation and write the most complicated math equation you can think of. It doesn’t have to make sense, for example:
10000 x 20587 + (36789 – 4567) x 56 =?
Then ask the next student “Do you know?”
All the children will laugh, including the child you are asking who will then reply, “No I don’t know!”
Continue doing this with a few more students then revert back to a simple equation.
Now you have the children on your side and they’re enjoying the class. They’re learning key English phrases but most importantly, you have conditioned them for the future to be able to comfortably say they don’t know the answer to a question. Let them understand that if they don´t know the answers, it´s OK; if they know all the answers then there´s nothing left for you to teach them. There’s no shame in not knowing an answer, that’s when you can step in and do your job – teach.
