It is not uncommon for any staff to be a “mixed ability” group. Teachers come at different ages, with different levels of experience and sadly tend to specialize in different CEFR levels. The fact that the flora and fauna of a foreign language school exhibits such wide biodiversity can only benefit the learners, who are exposed to different teaching styles. The problem is that a conductor is needed to offer guidance and align or harmonize the different voices, so that they can create a pleasing whole, instead of dissonance and cacophony. In this article I am planning to discuss how school owners (DoS) can use the beginning of the school year to unify the attitude of their teachers, without eliminating those individual touches that make each teacher a valuable asset of the team.
What’s there to unify? Teachers, teach!
This is tantamount to saying that good students learn under any circumstances, with any teacher. Clearly, this is not true. A school comes organised with its mission statement and its unique selling points both of which constitute its strengths and individuality. The teachers who are hired to work for that school are chosen (hopefully based on a structured interview) that checks (apart from the academic worth of the candidate), their compatibility with the school’s mentality and the staff. Twice a year, preferably at the beginning of the year and in the middle of the school year (near February when the school year seems long, boring and endless) the school needs to intervene with formal activities to ensure that the public (the community of students, parents and even stakeholders) do not see individuals who represent themselves through the school, but a well-balanced whole.
There is no doubt that teachers are the cornerstone of any school and its strongest asset. I have been stressing for years that commissioning expensive advertising space and creating striking digital ads is not worth half as much as investing in the training of the teaching staff. Training, of course, does not necessarily mean that we hire a trainer to lecture the staff. In fact, the older I grow and the more we proceed in this highly digitalized era of autonomous, asynchronous learning, I feel that such training should be the smallest part of our yearly training. The main focal point of this article, the induction week, is just one such step. More steps will follow hopefully in the next few issues dealing with self-directed training (reading groups) and the key role that mentoring and appraisals play.
What is an induction week?
Each school needs to identify its own induction week based on when the staff need to be up to speed to deal with the influx of registrations. This may differ from place to place. To be on the safe sided, I will suggest a week at the end of August. The induction week is an idea that can take different forms and shapes. In my scenario, I am imagining a staff consisting of 8 teachers. Five teachers are rehired, three are new. There is one secretary and the owner (who also teaches some hours) is the DoS.
The aims of the induction week are manifold: firstly, it will allow the new staff to blend in with the old guard. The last thing a school needs is the two groups to remain separate, suspicious of each other and almost competitive. The second aim is to allow the teachers to exchange ideas and share best practices. Finally, this is the best time for the school to iron out any misunderstandings and ensure that all teachers are on the same wavelength, ensuring alignment on matters of policy and methodology.
Why is alignment so important?
Teaching is highly personal and personalised. No matter how hard I try, I cannot teach in the way another colleague does. I may be inspired. I may also try (hopefully frequently) to exit my comfort zone and experiment with new techniques, but I will always remain me in some core characteristics of my teaching. This is different from not understanding how the school has constructed its identity in terms of methodology. Such issues include the language spoken in class, the way we work with the coursebook and whether our courses are coursebook-based (the coursebook is a springboard of inspiration) or coursebook-led (the coursebook is the lord and the teacher the slave that serves it) (McGrath, 2016). These issues may also include how we assign homework and what kind of homework we assign, how we deal with rudeness and bullying, how we deal with parents. The list is endless, which is why I am suggesting an induction week and not one meeting lasting about one hour.
Really? A whole week? What will we be doing during that time?
The week may start with a social meeting preferably held informally during which people can mingle and get to know each other. Bonding games and time for each person to present who they are professionally and personally are really important at this point. During the week, a programme of sessions can be created which allows all members of staff to become prosumers, to quote the term by Dudeney et al. (2013). The term means that all members of staff are not simply “consumers” of content, but also “producers”. Each member of staff will need to contribute something that fits into the bigger scheme of getting to know our school and our team.
For newly-hired members of staff getting to know who is who, how the school works and practical details such as how we record absences or how we inform the secretary if a student is absent, are key stressors. Therefore, the induction week could start with the school secretary presenting the Teachers’ Handbook along with the annual programme with a detailed list of dates for tests, delivery of tests, dates for meetings and dates for parent days. At this point, let me pre-empt you by replying to what is on your mind: yes, it is doable and yes, these dates can be settled at the beginning of the year. Unless we fix those date, we cannot produce syllabi, nor structure our academic year.
Each of the following days of the induction week will consist of about 2-4 hours of work during which formal training by external trainers might be included but it is mainly the staff who will be training each other. For example, an experienced member of staff might be delivering a session on how we teach writing with lower CEFR levels while a new member of staff who has knowledge in technology may present new digital tools. It is up to the DoS to identify the strengths of each staff member and play to those strengths. At the end of the week, we could have focused round-table discussion, devoted on specific levels (e.g. teachers teaching junior classes or teachers working with B1 level). These shorter meetings will allow the staff to get to know their immediate team, exchange ideas regarding the coursebook and shape the syllabus. Most importantly, these breakout room meetings will be the breeding ground though which we will create our buddy system.
What is a buddy system and why do we need it?
Giving newly-hired teachers a set of books and a PDF with the school rules is a good start, but it is hardly enough scaffolding to support them. First and foremost, giving PDFs does not guarantee that people actually read them and when they do, it does not guarantee that we have common understanding of the what the rules mean. Therefore, during the whole first year, we need a secure system of support and solidarity that does not overload the DoS’s own schedule. This is the place of the Buddy System. Teachers form pairs with a colleague they feel comfortable with, usually with someone they have a lot to give to one another. For example, a senior teacher with years of experience who has been teaching a diet of exam classes has a lot to gain from being paired up with a younger colleague who teaches early CEFR levels. During the school year, the two buddies become each other’s confidant and they can ask each other for advice, exchange peer observation visits, and support each other in an active way.
Will my staff go along with such a plan?
Staff, much like children, do not ‘’occur’’ to us. We breed them. We shape them. If a school proclaims that it can teach students, I find it hard to believe that it cannot inspire its own teachers to keep learning and ignite their curiosity for more learning that keeps them in the loop professionally. Personally, I have worked for a number of schools and in some of them the induction week was a staple that was expected. If there is forethought to engage all teachers and help all of them to be heard and seen, if we give the school secretary time to explain what s/he expects from the teachers when, if we take the time to organise a Kahoot based on our Teacher Handbook and if we create extreme scenarios to discuss how teachers deal with parents or demanding learners, we take steps to protect our teachers from the unknown, we shield them against harassment. What the induction week translates into is pure empowerment, which comes with knowledge. I can foresee a practical question here: do I pay my staff to attend the induction week? Personally, I would offer a compensation, but if this week is seen as investment on the part of the teachers on their future and their work, it may form part of a mutual agreement.
I would like to end with a warning. People do not change. If during an interview a DoS feels impressed by the academic qualifications of a candidate but cannot ‘’see’’ this person working at his/her school, this is probably true. We cannot force people to see ELT and teaching as a forever job; we cannot force them to become ambitious. We cannot inspire the ‘’un-inspirable’’. The good thing is that there are plenty of colleagues who want to see themselves as ELT leaders in the coming years. Let’s structure hiring systems that allow us to pinpoint those teachers and given them a chance by scaffolding them for their first year as best we can.
A Happy School Year to all!
REFERENCES
Dudeney, G., Hockly, N. and Pegrum, M. (2013). Digital literacies. Harlow: Pearson.
McGrath, I. (2016). Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
White, R., Hockley, A., Jansen Van Der Horst, J. and Laughner M.S. (2008). From Teacher to Manager: Managing Language Teaching Organisations. Cambridge: CUP.
