I was taught on the CELTA that self-reflection is a great way to get better at teaching. It's particularly important if you teach somewhere like in a Chinese university. Generally speaking you rarely (if ever) get peer observed. So the only person who can really gauge your teaching effectiveness is you and maybe your students.
I wrote this log after one of the classes I took in the third week of teaching English in China. I taught 20 freshmen IT majors. I would say that the majority of students in this class are at Lower Intermediate level. There are a lot more boys than girls in this class. This is the reverse of the usual situation if you're teaching English at a Chinese university.
What We Did
We listened to a few homework presentations about a healthcare facility in the city in which they're studying. Then we did some of their course book about hotel bookings.
What Worked
I tried a game from a different book: 700 Classroom Activities - Instant Lessons for Busy Teachers by David Seymour and Maria Popova.
There was a bit more engagement than with my previous attempt at doing a writing + speaking game with this class.
What Didn't Work
The presentations were pretty bad so I called a halt to them after the 3rd group. I was also reluctant to let them plug USB memory sticks into my own PC as this is very risky.
The game was a little difficult. I should have graded the examples to make them a bit easier.
Not all of the students were on task. I don’t know if this was because they didn't understand the instructions, or they were thinking about something else.
This group of students don't seem to be as imaginative as the accountancy or business English students.
What to Work On
So from the game and the book's grading system I am pretty sure they are at a pre-intermediate level, which gives me a better idea of what future activities will be suitable for them.
In future I'll need to avoid scheduling presentations in rooms without their own IT equipment. Or maybe they could have plugged in the USB devices elsewhere.
This cohort of students need a lot of work to get them making good presentations. I should consider running a class about presentation skills as these are so vital in the IT industry (e.g. Agile development daily standups). The accountancy sophomore students were much better.
Doing more games is a good idea. I should pay more attention to instruction setting and maybe also write the examples on the board or put on a PowerPoint.
Postscript
Well in this lesson IT equipment issues reared their ugly head. In this particular classroom there is projector but no computer. So you have to bring your own. I realised I didn't like the idea of students putting their own USB sticks into my brand new and very expensive laptop.
But a bigger issue was that the presentations were on the whole pretty dire. I don't know what students do in High School in China but I'm pretty sure they never get much practice at giving presentations.
So from this class onwards I abandoned homework setting and presentations. It was back to basics. One of my colleagues teaches another cohort of this group and I agree with him that they need to go back to the very basics, like how to meet and greet people.
I might have ditched the coursebook for a lot of the classes for this stream of students, but I did use one book extensively throughout their semester: 700 Classroom Activities by Seymour and Popova. This is a really excellent book, particularly if you're going to be teaching ESL conversation classes in a country like China. I like that the lessons are themed by topic, so if you're teaching a lesson on a particular theme then you can often drop an activity or two from this book into your lessons.
If you bring one book with you to China, then make sure it's this one:
This particular cohort of students have been a lot tougher to teach than the other classes. Their English is far worse. They don't put much effort into class. Absence from class was four times the average of my sophomore Business English classes. They did actually do very well in the final exam. But throughout the semester it was clear they were just coasting.
In fact this class are such a challenge that another teacher colleague of mine, let's call him Chad, refuses to teach this class altogether. He has been here longer than I have and he now cherry picks the students he wants to teach. Ultimately this means smaller class sizes of students who speak better English.
All well and good but you're not going to develop as a teacher if you don't challenge yourself.
I have developed a pretty good rapport with this group of students. As I used to work in IT, I feel their pain at learning programming languages. Now we joke about it in practically every class. If you've studied or worked in a particular field then this can be very useful when it comes to teaching students who are studying a particular discipline.
I guess one problem with this class is that most of the students seem really lacking in motivation. I don't know too much about the way kids in China choose their university or course. But my understanding is that they choose the school and what they want to study. But then it's down to the school to assign the students to individual courses. Sometimes they'll end up studying something completely different. Can you imagine a Western teenager applying to study for a BA in Acting and end up having to do a four year BSc Computer Science course?
The thing with IT is that there is just so much demand for graduates and so few kids want to study it that in this field there are going to be a larger than average of number of students who were pushed onto the course because all the other courses were full.
I have asked my students why they chose to study IT and in many cases they said their parents told them to study it. They do also know it's a good thing to go into from the money perspective.
Most of them have really struggled with the maths and programming courses this year, so maybe realisation is setting in that IT is not the land of milk and honey that they thought it might be.
Well I hope they stick with it because I had a pretty good 20 years working in IT. I made enough cash to quit the 9-5 at the age of 45 and make a long term thing of teaching English overseas. I bought an apartment and it's now mortgage free. I have enough investments that I can save my entire teaching salary. I started my own software business. I worked for some household names. I met some household names. I travelled all over Europe on business. And I had some memorable life experiences along the way.
