Have you implemented these same techniques in your school as well? I hope you will learn at least one new technique today or perhaps agree or disagree with my rating system of each technique. 

 Can you get bingo from below? 

Here is the list of techniques used above for getting a classroom quiet and my efficiency rating for all::

Header image by Miroslavik from Pixabay

These concerns were less relevant when I was working with middle school students who had been exposed to a broader range of English. However, as I now teach at an elementary school, I have learned that it is even more important to provide students with a consistent model of English as the teacher. Elementary students need clarification when they encounter something new in their own language, let alone a foreign one. I must admit I struggled at first to use language that my elementary year 2 students could understand as I was unfamiliar with the textbook or their English level initially. I fell into bad habits of using half sentences or single words to convey meaning. Both my school and I are against doing this if possible, and so eventually, I realised something had to be done to resolve this issue.

I decided to record audio recordings of myself periodically during class when appropriate. The goal here wasn’t to record the students but myself and the language I was using. I could then listen back to myself and assess whether I was using the target language for each lesson sufficiently and whether I was falling into bad habits mentioned above. I was then able to work out at which points during the lesson I struggled to keep consistency and write notes for myself to take into class. This is still an ongoing work in progress to this day. However, it has allowed me to greatly enhance the understanding of my students, the flow of my lessons and ultimately ensure that a balance is struck between using target language as well as authentic and natural speech in the classroom. I would encourage anyone with similar concerns to attempt the same method or a variation to assess their language usage in class. It has been a very rewarding process, and I will continue the process moving forward.

Image Source: RDNE Stock project from Pexels

This is the 10th year for me at Project Genius and the 10th year teaching at one of our client schools. I decided that this year we should hand out a formal syllabus for the first time to our students. 

Project Genius has two teachers at this school and we teach there two days a week. We teach the first-year junior high school students on one day and the second-year junior high school students on the other. We teach the same lesson to five different homerooms each day. Each homeroom is split between me and another Project Genius teacher, so we have a little less than 20 students in each lesson.

When I have taught at the tertiary level, either as a Teaching Assistant while at graduate school in the US or as an instructor at a college in Japan, I prepared or followed a syllabus and formally evaluated my students.  However, this was not the case in my earlier experience teaching at the primary and secondary level in Japan.  When I was on JET in the late 90s, I just attended lessons to support the JTE.  When I taught at elementary schools in Tokyo in the early 2000s, I was the T1, with the students' homeroom teacher there to support me. That was also the age of Yutari Kyoiku, and the goal of the classes was to give kids a good experience with English. That meant when I planned lessons, I was free to follow my own interests and the interests of the students. I was not supposed to worry about grades or evaluations at all.

When I started at my current school 10 years ago the Project Genius team at the school – we were both new that year – didn’t know until the day before they were due that we had to turn in grades. I had assumed until then it would be like my previous experiences at primary and secondary schools in Japan.  (This is one reason, by the way, I started the school info sheets. I ask everyone in our company to update periodically.) Since then, our team at the school has built-up a curriculum, including exams, presentations, and graded conversations. And, since we don’t use textbooks, we have students keep a notebook, in which they are asked to include all the worksheets we pass out over the year, to help them visualize and remember what they are learning. 

Since we teach at a private junior/senior high school which aims to get kids into top universities in Japan., exams, grades, and other formal evaluations are an essential part of the school culture. I just need to tell my students an activity will be graded and, given the opportunity to prepare on their own, students will practice and work hard in any individual class. Even so, I still feel that many students don’t see beyond a “one point English” view of our lessons and aren’t always thinking that our lessons build upon each other.

I decided that handing out a formal syllabus would be one way to address this. Recently I have been watching my fair share of US teacher TikToks to know that it isn’t just in beginning EFL classes in Japan where adolescents are told several times what to do by teachers and then promptly forget. I don’t want to put too much pressure on myself or my students in terms of expectations, but giving students a formal, written document seems to be a good, time-tested approach to reinforce what we are telling them in class. I am also hopeful that teachers and parents are also able to gain more insight into what we are doing in the classroom, which not only shows the outside world what we are doing but also hopefully gives them the opportunity to encourage our students to participate more in our classes, as well.

Here is what we came up with for the first years and the second years.

So far this term I have been encouraged that providing and reminding students with more explicit expectations provides students with some safety, security, and courage when we ask them to take a jump into the English-speaking pond.

Header image -- Curriculum by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images