If you have seen my About page, you know that this is not me (much too young for my experience of over three decades!). I show this picture as this is my favorite classroom setting because all students can interact easily with each other. Most of the time, I had 12 to 16 students although one time I taught a class with 10 students in the classroom and 2 students 150 km away. My colleagues said that it could not be done, which inspired me to make it a success.
Expectations
I started my first company class after having taught day classes for about six months at the International Trade Institute in Taiwan. The students resided on campus and were penalized if they were just 5 minutes late to class.
I expected my usual routine: start the class with a role call, introductions first from me and about the course (I always make a point in introducing the course carefully so that the students exactly know what to expect) and then the students (including their expectations for the course), and off we go...
I could not have been more wrong!
Challenges of Company Classes
The challenges of a company class were very different from my usual day classes.
Challenge Number One:
How to get participants of a company class to show up on time or at least not just towards the end of the class to get their attendance record?
The rule in most of Taiwan's companies is that the company reimburses the students when they attend 80% of classes and get a score of 80% or higher (Magically my lowest score was always 80% ;-). If I saw that a student was clearly below this score, I would try to tackle the problem as early as possible giving them extra help.)
Challenge Number Two:
How to help participants to adapt to a classroom setting after some had not seen one in 10 years or more?
Challenge Number Three:
How to integrate the sometimes vastly different levels of English proficiency of the participants?
Challenge Number Four:
How to encourage participants to speak up and not be afraid to make mistakes in particular when their superiors attend too?
Challenge Number Five:
How to keep the energy up in the classroom with participants who have worked long hour?
In Taiwan, customer service employees even go back to work after class because of the time difference to their customers overseas.
Challenge Number Six:
How to get participants to learn during the week and even do homework like preparing a presentation?
Challenge Number One:
Today, I want to deal with the first challenge at the beginning of the course and during the course.
My First Course: Many Participants were Late
In my first course, I was not prepared for the fact that the participants would arrive late. After 20 minutes only about half had shown up. I was wringing my hands inwardly how to deal with the situation as I didn't want to appear unprepared, but I also didn't want to introduce myself and the course five times. I survived this first lesson with talking to the students individually about anything from their work to why they came to this course.
My Second Course: I was Prepared
The next time, I had to start a course I had adapted. My solution for this situation: keep the students busy. I developed forms for their introduction and classroom rules (please see the Teacher Resource Section for samples that you find at the bottom of the website), where the rule sheet also already partly covers the second challenge.
Solution to Problem of Late Students
The students had to fill in the forms and had something to read. Furthermore, my institute is part of the Chamber of Commerce, in Taiwan called TAITRA. TAITRA publishes a shiny magazine to introduce Taiwan, so the fast students had more to consume. I chose this magazine because the participants had probably already read the information in Mandarin. An easier business article would do the same trick for example about a famous company to spark the interest of the students.
Start of First Class: My Introduction
After about 20 minutes, I start the class. First, I introduce myself with my name being a good English name, which it is not as it is actually Austrian, and let them guess the country. I also give thorough background information about my education (surprising students with the fact that I have a master's degree in mathematics and physics), my long business experience in particular in sales and customer service, and my teaching experience of more than 12 years to establish my credibility.
I try to keep the atmosphere somewhat light-hearted (careful as this can backfire in classes with high-level managers who want to be respected as such), so sometimes I start with the game: you have five questions that you can ask me. Of my answers, one will be wrong, and you have to guess, which answer.
Start of First Class: Introduction of Course
Then I explain the course very carefully including what tests they have to expect. In a 12-week with 24 hours of total class time, it is usually a midterm and a final test, although in presentations the students have to give the final presentation twice, which in my case strongly improved their performance and the stage fright was much lower the second time. I inform them beforehand that I will take the better of the two scores for the final calculation. This puts them even more at ease.
Start of First Class: Introduction of Students
Number three is the introduction of the students. They have to give a 1 or 2-minute presentation using their introduction sheet as blueprint. I also take the time to ask them about their expectation about the course and for example what difficulties they have performing that particular skill (presentations, meetings, negotiations, business correspondence, telephoning, etc.).
This introduction takes up a substantial amount of time, but gives me already and in-depth impression of the participants regarding their English level and skills or difficulties. Furthermore, the students have explained to me that they feel that I take good care of them.
Start of Classes during Course
The second part of the challenge are the hours during the course. I usually use the beginning of a lesson to let the incoming students do relatively easy exercises either from the book or on worksheets as arriving students pose an interruption. These exercises mostly focus on language acquisition like cloze and other vocabulary exercises. If possible, I provide the answer key so that latecomers can perform them after class.
I write the exercises on a whiteboard so that incoming students do not have to interrupt to ask.
This way of starting the lesson also helps students to ease into the classroom setting again.
Here is a website from the British Council with some more useful tips:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/five-tips-teaching-business-english
If you have encountered other challenges, please share them in the comment box, and I will do my best to come up with solutions.
Please also comment on whether you have other tips and like the blog post. As this is my first post, I want every help from you to improve.