In observing foreign teachers in Japanese schools, one of the things that I harp on is be jealous of the students' attention. Especially if you are alone in a class of 40 native-Japanese-speaking kids, you will lose from time to time, but being conscious of that fact is not the same as letting it slide. Don't allow the sleeping kid to continue to sleep. Don't allow clusters of Japanese chit-chat to fester in the corners of your room. Be in constant pursuit of the optimal English-learning environment. At LEAD, they were much more dogged in defining the ideal: 100%. No exceptions, no excuses. This comes right out of Doug Lemov's book.

There’s one suitable percentage of students following a direction given in your classroom: 100 Percent…. Many teachers that fail to approach the 100 percent standard stop noticing whether they are achieving full compliance.

So ... first ... I would like EFL teachers in Japan to watch this video by Doug Lemov. And think about those ways in which it does and does not connect with their experience. In addition to the points Lemov is trying to make, there are some other things to focus on in the footage of actual teaching....

• Use of language.
• Tangible behavioral expectations.
• Also, this is footage of expert teachers at their absolute best (believe me, I have worked in this context and it is the pinnacle of tough), but even so, notice ...
  • the constant attention to classroom management.
  • the physicality of the work that they do.

To succeed in running any kind of class, you need to isolate a particular kind of misbehavior. — what I will call willful misbehavior. Willful misbehavior needs to be distinguished from confusion, overzealousness, or behaviors springing from disability. Your treatment of willful misbehavior makes or breaks a lesson. Less effective teachers tend to ignore willful misbehavior and pray that it self-corrects, which it rarely does: it instead tends to grow and infect the attitudes of other students. More experienced teachers have strategies for neutralizing misbehaviors. Experts find ways to channel the energy of misbehavers in a direction that actually improves the culture of the class. However hard our jobs may be, working as foreign teachers at Japanese private schools, the challenges that the educators at LEAD Public Schools are taking on are infinitely harder. Try just 5 minutes of running one of these lessons -- no matter how well-prepped and relevant and full of positive energy you are -- and you'll see how it is that nothing short of 100% compliance is going to work. This is because to varying degrees a good 50% of the students are willful misbehavers. — charming absolutely brilliant kinds, crying out in the only way that they can for us to impose boundaries, show them that there is justice and order in the world, that there is an inside and an outside. Most EFL teachers in Japan are not dealing with that many willful misbehavers. (And maybe this is why I see too may EFL teachers allow too much non-compliance in their classes.) But the same priciples apply. There are other factors that make it very important that you get 100%.

• First, usually this is the one hour that the students get with you per week.  Consider how many hours total they will get over the course of the year.  Is that hour indeed expendable?  In teaching, as in life, do not waste time.  Go into that classroom determined that it be maximally valualble time.  Letting a kid give you less than 100% is an insult to yourself.  It devalues the time that you spent prepping for this class and the time that you are spending running the class.  It devalues the time of the misbehaving student.
• Second, this is the students’ opportunity to hear real English from a real English speaker.  If there is a white noise of Japanese chit-chat in the background, then you are painting on a dusty canvas.
• Third, exalting the teaching profession means not just doing well in your class, but teaching in such a way that the students can appreciate the value of what teachers in general have to offer.  Insist at every turn that they get the most out of every breath that they breath in your presence, not just because it will make your class go better but because you represent EDUCATION, and the paradigm of teacher-ness.  Devalue yourself and you devalue those with whom you share the profession.