Helping Teachers Help their Students

I'm here to assist with any teaching dilemmas you may have encountered: course-planning woes, classes that drive you mad, unfair school policies, the students who complain and resist—whatever it is that makes you want to flare up, storm out, cancel the course, request reassignment, ‘fire’ the student or leave your language school.

After more than a decade of teaching English as a second language, it occurred to me that what students tend to complain about was basically the same regardless of country, cultural background, age, education or language level...

"My pronunciation is laughable. No one can understand what I’m trying to say. I’m missing proper words and expressions. I can’t use grammar correctly. I’m worse at English than I used to be. After all these years, I’m still a beginner. I shouldn’t be making so many mistakes. I feel stupid when I speak English. I’m too old to learn anything new. I’m not talented, when it comes to languages. I’m too tired, at the end of the day, to make myself study. I’m much slower than others. I’ll never progress past where I am now."

Faced with such attitudes week after week, it was clear that instructors were being infected by this as well. I certainly knew I was. So I sent a questionnaire to a school founder, the director of languages at a local university and several senior teachers—and even a recent TEFL graduate or two. What were my colleagues saying about their students?

"They sit there and do nothing. They don’t activate the language. They have negative opinions of themselves. They don’t do participate or do homework. They underestimate the time and effort needed to learn. They don’t find it important. They take English as a ‘duty.’ They allow only minutes per week for study. They lack the motivation to work outside the classroom. They don’t retain much, due to poor attendance. They can’t prioritize between personal time and coming to class."

What teachers heard, day after day, began to affect their ability to deal with so-called ‘problem’ students, demotivation and lack of progress. Why? Because they’d begun to mirror their attitudes, which had a negative impact on the time they spent with one another. What students encountered during the learning process gradually lead to a negative judgment of their own developing skills and abilities, which influenced their teachers as well.

Confronted with such limiting self-talk and behavior, day after day, instructors were often at a loss as to what to do—especially when changing tactics or methodologies didn’t work. Basically, the question was this: how to identify and dissolve what’s stopping teachers from doing their best in response to their students’ behavior, study habits and attitudes?

Close to the point of burning out like so many others, I used what I’d discovered and started to connect with my students in a deeper way—by engaging more fully with the places where they felt stuck, limited or obstructed. Instead of focusing on students’ performance, we focused on what was blocking their performance—the hidden habits and negative thinking patterns that continually got in the way.

Here's the point: if you have to teach week after week, why suffer? Suffering is optional—a choice you make each morning when you shuffle off to classes. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Together, we’ll go to the core of the situation and uncover the causes behind what’s limiting you and your students, so that things begin to flow again.

Helping your students help themselves is a far more rewarding experience than trying to change them. In truth, your so-called ‘hardened cases’ (those who’ve studied for decades without any progress, for example) are your greatest opportunity, and the best instructors you’ll ever encounter.

I’m a CELTA certified English language instructor with 12 years teaching experience in countries ranging from Japan, Hungary, Turkey and the Czech Republic.