KICK-STARTING YOUR FIRST TEFL CLASSROOM
Serving in the Peace Corps means that you're thrust into a new environment where you have to learn a completely new skill set to survive. When I joined up, I became an English teacher at the Guiyang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Teaching TEFL in a foreign country had many hurdles: huge class sizes, wide gaps between student skill levels, and student shyness all made it difficult to grab students' attention and get them speaking English. My students were used to a teaching style that emphasized teacher presentation: they expected to be entertained and educated by silently observing me.
I knew that trying to engage 100 students at once, one at a time, was suicide. I also knew that I didn't want to spend 2 years on stage with everyone staring at me with their huge, innocent, owl-eyes. My first hurdle was to establish new classroom norms that encouraged students to become the main speakers.
After being eaten alive the first semester, I turned to the advice of a more experienced TEFL teacher, my friend Patrick Sansbury. He told me that the way to handle a classroom was through activities: "Model activities yourself, and then hand the mantle back to the students. Rather than presenting a lesson, present an activity to the students and engage them in that activity. Then have the students present the activity back to each other. As long as you, the teacher, are talking, you're losing."
I started the new semester with a redesigned curriculum. I opened the new class by walking in and shouting "I am BEAUTIFUL!" I got the whole class to say it with me. Then I addressed them to fill in the blank of this simple sentence with a positive adjective: "I am (adj) ." Each student's job was to stand up and shout their statement as loud as they could. As each student stood to shout their slogan, I looked them in the eyes and smiled. This simple activity was quick and set a great tone for our first class: positive, self-affirming, interactive.
My next task was to establish the TEFL classroom as an interactive forum rather than a presentation. For our first group activity, I pulled out a fistful of photocopied hundred-dollar bills. Adopting a debonair demeanor, I fanned myself and asked my students, "Why should I give you this money?" I was immediately met with a torrent of replies. After modeling the activity, I handed out a stack of bills to each group. It was a simple game: whoever had the money in hand by the end of the activity was the de facto winner. If you ever wanted to see a hundred students cajoling, begging, and lying to each other in a foreign language, that was the day. This type of competitive activity got students talking to each other and kept them talking: whoever lacked the money would continue trying to get it. By designing discussion activities with conflicting objectives, I was able to raise the interest level and pull myself out of the picture. Then, as the teacher, I was free to spend quality time engaging the individual groups in conversation.
Obviously, there were many future hurdles in that semester and the semesters to come. But with this strong, interactive start, I won the class over and created the good environment for a TEFL class. Each first class is the beginning of a long relationship, and first impressions count big.
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