Teacher Training

When I was deciding where to teach and which company to work for, I looked at the perks of the job. Not just how much they pay me for teaching how many hours. But what else I get for working at the company. I was promised Chinese lessons (which haven’t happened), teacher training, and fun activities with the other teachers that work for the company (haven’t had any yet, but I know they do them occasionally).

As I am a new teacher (new to in-person classrooms and teaching groups of students), I was looking forward to whatever training I could get. Getting a TEFL certificate can help you learn a lot about teaching in general, but mine didn’t really prepare me for the reality of teaching 8 children and maintaining control, it just helped with what to teach them.

Because I work for a training center and not a public school, most of my teacher training will be conducted by the training center. So far I have gotten a lot less than I had hoped for.

As far as formal training goes, I’ve just gotten overviews of the different levels taught at the center and what the expectations for those levels are. Just broad overviews of how things work and what is expected of me and the students. And I got to observe a couple of the foreign teachers for my first day of work. But, I had to teach my own classes the second day.

Most things I’ve learned about actually teaching a class, I’ve learned in the middle of class or from discussing issues with the other foreign teachers or my Chinese teacher.

As my training center is trying to update their curriculum, they are also updating some of their training for new teachers. Just after my first month there, they decided to use me as a guinea pig and have me be their test subject and provide feedback on their presentations.

So far, I’ve only gotten their “training” for the first 2 levels, the beginner classes. 2 of my 3 classes this semester are level 1 classes. So, I’m already familiar with how those classes work, what to teach, and what to expect from the students.

But, I sat through their short overview of the classes and gave them a bit of feedback on their presentation’s slides as I had a few questions and a couple things sounded weird to me as a native English speaker.

Then, it was on to having about half an hour to create a “demo class” that I would give to some of the Chinese teachers, who were playing the role of students.

As I had to prepare for my class tomorrow, I was told to prepare a lesson plan (they had a couple sample lesson plans for the first couple classes, but as all the classes follow the same pattern, they didn’t make lesson plans for all the lessons, just an overview of what is taught in each lesson) and all materials I would need for the class.

I would be teaching “What can you hear? I can hear a ___.” with the vocabulary words horn, piano, violin, cry, and noisy. Mostly easy.

I was fighting with the Chinese internet where a lot of results are something I can’t read and all the good sites are blocked (searching bing is no fun!) to find some sound files to play in the class of the instruments when I was told my time was up.

I did the demo to the best of my abilities and skipped a lot of the repetitive parts. My whole demo lasted about 15 minutes, with a bit of chatting. However, I got scolded for not having the sound clips I wanted to play. They wanted the demo to be as close to the real class as possible so they could give me the best feedback they could.

They understood that it was just a demo and that I was having some issues with the internet. If they hadn’t come in when they did, I would have just asked my Chinese teacher to find them for me.

I spent 5 min on my phone, with my usually wonderful VPN, after class on my way home and got the songs from a banned (in China) website that does free sound clips. China’s internet makes everything harder than it has to be, especially if you don’t read Chinese.

A couple days later, when I had some more free time, I had another training. This time on level 2, which I don’t teach and had not even taught a make-up for at the time (I have since taught a couple classes when they forgot to tell the regular teacher about the schedule change due to public schools making up some classes the week before the Labour Day holiday).

This time, they didn’t have a pre-recorded video. They just had a PowerPoint presentation and a speech. They had changed this presentation a bit based on some of my feedback from our first training. Most of my feedback for this training was over some word choices that seemed a bit odd. One was about the students enjoying English conversation, which I thought was something that the teacher can’t really control. They can make the class fun, but they can’t make everyone like something.

Then it was on to me creating a demo from materials I had never seen. Again the planning was rushed and I had no idea what I was doing for the most part. I asked my Chinese teacher a lot of questions about what this thing or that thing in the lesson plan was, as we didn’t use them in my level 1 classes.

My demo was equally a mess, but I did all the things I was planning on, even if I did have to keep looking at my notes and wandering around the class to show PowerPoints, go back to printed papers, then on to some flashcards.

I’m not sure if their goal is to get me used to teaching these classes before I have to do it for real or to see how I/a new teacher would be able to handle getting the materials and being thrown into a classroom and told to teach. Or some weird combination of both. And I guess that some training is better than none, but I’m still not really ready to just jump into any level 2 class and easily teach it. I relied heavily on the Chinese teachers when I was covering other classes during the Labour Day holiday.

These trainings are interesting and the trainers are interested in my options, but it is still a little odd being told all about a level and then teaching a ‘class’ in 30 min or less.

Classes shouldn’t be planned in the time it takes to get a pizza!

If you have any questions about any of the terms I’ve used, look in the glossary.