According to the list of class data of the JHS/HS, there were 7 haunted houses, 3 casinos, 2 shooting games, 2 maid cafes, and a human zoo with the students wearing animal headbands lying on the ground being fed through cage bars choko boru for their food and protein shakes for drinks.

During the week of school festival preparations, I finally had some downtime between grading and making tests to walk around and help the students and teachers. Below is a list of festival related vents that I personally partiicipated or witnessed where students were practicing English conversation:

• masks being spray painted inside a classroom not well ventilated for a haunted house

• told said high school students to put on masks because of the dangerous fumes

• told high school students to turn on the classroom light because they were sawing wood in the dark using their phones as lights

• wrote cursive for the JHS 1st graders classroom board

• edited an English paper about Japanese culture that was to be displayed in the classroom

• students told me about the new Monster Hunter game coming out

• punctured a hole in the opening of a balloon for students to pump air into

• got a free t-shirt for a Biohazard/Resident Evil themed classroom

• made 30 paper flowers out of confetti paper and 30 paper trains

• decorated a hallway with a smiley face design with above said decorations

• made 20 origami cranes and 10 origami shurikens

• shot a nerf gun for a student to practice running from

• students went shopping at Daiso and Costco to buy materials and supplies

• spun a casino custom slot machine with a students face on it making different poses

• ate 3 cotton candies for the students to practice using the cotton candy machine

• students explained to me the new popcorn game that was on the homepage of Google

• brushed 2 wigs for the performances with many students complimenting them

In the past, the benefits of being an assistant teacher included team teaching and less lesson planning time to connect with students. With the increased time to connect with students, I walked around the school and interacted with students, asking about their lives. I actually knew most of their names and a lot about their family, love rumors, friends, interests, and other kinds of trouble they had going on in their life that I felt so much closer with them.

Now as a main teacher, while I don’t have as much time to connect due to increased role responsibilities as when I was in an assistant role, I still do my best to talk with my students. I really love when the festival season comes around the corner because this is one of the best times I can connect more with my students. Being able to have fun moments inside and outside the classroom is a joy to me and I love seeing my students thrive and improve in their studies. The educational and emotional responsibility we as teachers share for our students is a great task that I take pride in, as showcased during the festival season.

During the festival, the time with my students brings more natural conversations that are so unprompted and organic. While making origami, my students volunteered to become teachers and taught me how to make a crane using easy English and learned new words.

The time together with no lesson plan, but rather just sitting with students creating was the time where I not only learned new names but also their interests and daily life worries. Instead of repeating the textbooks, while making origami students asked the usual questions like what Japanese food do I like and why did I come to Japan but also unusual questions that they never would’ve had the chance to ask me otherwise about mental illness and sexual orientation.

These rare moments outside the classrooms are one of the things I have looked forward to as a teacher as I try to get those interactions every day. One of my favorite things to do when I’m not teaching is to go visit the club rooms and talk with the students. For example, the best place for me is visiting the cooking club. Learning and teaching real world skills is the best motivation for anyone to learn a language and food culture connects us universally.

When I left school during the school festival preparations week to go home, I felt a different kind of accomplishment with my students due to the connections made and look forward to making more.

Image by lifeforstock on Freepik

One of our client schools has a class that our teachers really enjoy planning and teaching, but I have never been a fan of, either as an observer or as a substitute teacher. It is a current affairs class for third year high school students. Our teachers choose a topic and prepare texts and vocabulary lists related to the topic. The instructor stands in front of the class lecturing to students who are asked to answer questions or give their opinion from time to time.

In my experience teaching and observing this class I have not seen much engagement beyond a handful of high-level students. I wondered why there wasn’t more engagement.  Was it because the language or topics were too difficult, the students were not interested in the topics, or the students did not have the tools or opportunity to discuss?

Thinking that deeper student engagement with the material was the key to increasing student participation, I suggested in one observation report that our instructor consider  doing a jigsaw activity– breaking up the reading into sections, giving a group one section, then reforming groups so that each student in a group had read a different section and could explain to each other their assigned reading  -- to encourage discussion and increase comprehension. However, I received feedback that the teacher I had observed felt that all I was doing was telling him to have the kids play more games, to be more fun.

Looking back at my report, I probably was too blunt in my general criticism of the class – though over the years I have not  been shy in repeating my thoughts about the class to our teachers at the school -- but I am still at a bit of a loss as to why this activity perceived to be a game.

Games are a touchy subject for some EFL teachers in Japan. There are those, and  I would say I am one of them, who are wary about being associated with the stereotype of the genki English teacher, who doesn’t really teach – or know how to teach -- but just plays games and has fun with the kids while the serious learning occurs elsewhere. Whether a legitimate criticism or not, having that self-image as a teacher can be demotivating for ambitious and motivated professionals.

Games and gamification of learning can, however, be an important part of an English class, whether it is an old school board game like sugoroku  or having all the kids pull out their smart phones or tablets to play Kahoot. Some students are motivated by winning a game, it can encourage language use, and it just adds some variety to the classroom environment.

Teachers, though, should be judicious in their use of competitive games during lessons. Not all kids are motivated by competition, losing can be highly demotivating and in the worst case, though in my experience not a rare case, competition can create unnecessary and unconstructive conflict in the class. The English used in a game can also be completely disassociated from its actual context or meaning, making its usage transactional and ephemeral.

Our client schools are private schools with many of them wanting to have as many of their students as possible accepted into top level universities, which means their students are successfully passing college entrance exams. The incentive for these schools and the instructors they hire is to teach English as a Test Subject, emphasizing teacher fronted lecture courses, devaluing activities that provide opportunities to acquire language within a communicative context. We want our students to succeed in life, of course, and in Japan that means passing exams to get into universities. So, it is important for our teachers to support our clients and students in these goals. But, just like overemphasizing competitive games, teachers who attempt to motivate students solely on the basis of passing exams can also demotivate some students and lessen engagement in the classroom by promoting a way of thinking  that any activity  that is not directly related to explicitly passing exams is a waste of time within a competitive educational and career environment. 

Both competitive games and teaching to the test are similar in that they have easily identifiable outcomes. However, does that mean activities in which students are given the opportunity to engage with each other in an unstructured or lightly structured environment will ultimately have negative outcomes for student learning or development? Professor Laitha Vasudevan of Teachers College Columbia argues instead that it is essential. In an article entitled "Adolescents, Embodiment, and Play" she writes “adolescents need time and space for unfettered opportunities for experimentation and exploration of the changing world in which they live. Free play, or the full freedom to make all the decisions about play from materials to activity to location, is vital for young people’s development and sense-making about the world.” This is “because it is often in play that intertextual connections, imaginations, and other raw materials for literate engagements are sourced and nurtured.” 

How can we as teachers motivate students to use English in a more integrated way beyond just receiving a reward, whether that means becoming the daily champion or getting into their university of choice? Activities like jigsaw discussions are one way to bridge the gap between the two. A jigsaw activity puts the responsibility on students to speak and use English in their own time and their own way. In the context of the current affairs class, students can independently discuss and talk about the topic and come to their own understanding with several different classmates. The act of breaking up the essay into a number of parts and then asking students to summarize their section to other students who haven’t read it ensures that everyone will be required to engage with their classmates and the material in different ways. Understanding is then confirmed by the teacher through a whole class discussion. A jigsaw activity does introduce constraints that unfettered play would not, but, as the famous mid-20^th century designer Charles Eames discussed, how one decides how to  work within constraints is an important aspect of creativity.  This activity provides both students and teachers the space to use English and interact with each other in ways that can not only help them acquire English but also, though a less constrained environment, allow them to more fully identify themselves  as English speakers.

I strongly believe that we can add plus alpha to our client schools by providing opportunities to our students to express themselves and make interpersonal connections through English. Of course it takes time to build such a culture and it is much easier for everyone to fall back on either top down, highly structured lectures or competitive games where there are clear outcomes with winners and losers, correct and incorrect answers, and everyone can rate their success by the amount (rather than quality) of  English spoken in one finite class period and have  our classroom management skills judged by how students quietly stayed in their seats and talked only when spoken to, allowing everyone to quickly and quietly get through our days as teachers and students without much trouble or stress.

By challenging ourselves and our students to do more and be better, we do risk the possibility of failure, and that some chaos and messiness will ensue. But by giving our students more autonomy in lessons in the short term we can challenge them to be better learners and help cultivate more positive attitudes and outcomes in their English-speaking journey outside of class in the long term.

The article I referenced by Prof. Vasudevan was published in the  April/May/June 2023 of LITERACY TODAY, a publication of the International Literacy Association

I took the title from a video by Project Genius’ first Chief of English Services, Peter Ackerly.

Header image "RDECOM presents STEM opportunties at Edgewood High School" by U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It is the end of the term, exams are finished, kids are restless, teachers are restless, yet you still have one more lesson to do. What do you do?

 I like lessons to connect to something in the kids’ lives as much as possible and one thing kids are often interested in are global sporting events like the Olympics. Though Olympic Fever in Japan is not as strong this year with the Olympics being in Paris rather than Tokyo, people are still excited for it.  So when we asked our students what big sports event is happening this summer, they all said “The Olympics”

I have found that a simple way to get younger students using English related to the Olympics is through the use of pictograms. While the Tokyo pictograms were universally loved, I also really like the look of the Paris games pictograms.  They remind me of the design of the French card game Mille Bornes I used to play as a kid, though sometimes it takes a second or two to recognize what sports they represent.   This video shows how the pictograms reflects the sports they represent:

Our lesson utilizing pictograms for our first year junior high school students was quite simple. First, we created four matching worksheets with about 10 Olympic sports in English in the right column and in Japanese in the left column. We made four different sheets. We used the time that our students were working on the worksheets to check on their English notebooks. Students only needed to complete one worksheet but if they finished early, we gave them a different worksheet.  This was unintentional, as we didn’t explicitly tell students they could complete more than one worksheet, but it did give students differentiated levels of success while also giving everyone something to do while we completed the notebook check.

Once we completed the notebook check, we then started showing the pictograms from the Paris Olympics. We just needed to say “What’s this?” and encourage kids to yell out the answers. Since the students had the answers on their worksheets. they could go through what was on the worksheets to find the answer if they didn’t already know the English or couldn’t guess from the pictogram. Then using choral repetition, we had the students practice complete sentences using the sports.

Our students were quite into it. High level/highly motivated/more outgoing  students would yell out guesses and compete against each other without us having to create a formal competition.  Lower level/less motivated/less outgoing students had the opportunity to listen and hopefully guess on their own while getting to practice speaking and pronunciation through choral repetition.  

I felt it was a really nice way to end the semester with an activity that is not too difficult but connects English and our lessons to the larger world outside of the classroom. 

Header image -- Scholz qualifies in 200 meter run. Then wins!

I spent 3.5 years in the Jet Programme in Akita, northern Japan. When I first arrived, I was escaping a corporate job in Australia that I had no desire to return to but no real plan after that. Within my first year as an English teacher, I realised I genuinely enjoyed my work for the first time in my life and since then I’ve continued down that path. That has included working on getting further teaching credentials and moving to Tokyo for better career opportunities, which brought me here.

I work 5 days a week at an elementary school in Tokyo that prioritises English education. This year, we have changed how the curriculum is taught, which has been a collective effort by the English department. Taking part in the process has been eye-opening and a great experience for all involved. The goal is to accelerate learning by having native and non-native teachers teach from the chosen textbooks. This was not the case last year and the change has been positive.

At the elementary school level, we mainly focus on student's communication abilities in grades 1 and 2. However, many students at this school can read English well by grade 2 or 3, with some being native or near-native in their general English ability. As the current 1-4 grade students move up into the higher grades, they shall be moving up a textbook each time, which is in contrast to the previous system, which used 1 textbook for two grades. Hopefully, these new changes will allow our students to pursue more English-focused junior high schools in the future.

I look forward to the year ahead on this adventure and with Project Genius as well. 

Header image by Douglas P. Perkins, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

In the Japanese workplace, conflicts are bound to arise due to differences in culture or language. Efficient conflict resolution is key to maintaining a healthy and productive work environment. Here are some tips:

Open Communication

Establish transparent communication for team members to express thoughts and feelings openly. This is incredibly important in Japan as many people are not too comfortable with expressing their own thoughts and feelings. 

Define the Issue

Clearly articulate the problem to ensure all parties understand the conflict's root cause. Using language that all parties can understand can help bypass the potential language barrier issue. In high schools the JTEs often have a higher level of English compared to those at elementary or junior high schools. So it is important when teaching in elementary or junior high school to use easy English or Japanese when presenting a problem or conflict.

Collaborate

Promote a collaborative approach to conflict resolution, involving team members in brainstorming and solution-building. Clearly state your goal in the lesson and the JTE goals for the lesson and work together to come to a solution that satisfies both parties.

Follow-Up

Make sure to follow up after the fact to make sure that all parties are ok with the new changes to the lesson. If there are still some points of contention, make sure to ask the JTE for their end goal for the lesson once more and work towards making the needed changes.

By embracing these strategies, workplaces can turn conflicts into opportunities for growth and foster stronger team dynamics.

 Image by jannoon028 on Freepik

Many of us came to Japan alone and this can be especially hard during the holidays. While being away from family during the holidays can be challenging, celebrating the upcoming winter break in Japan alone doesn’t have to be daunting.

Some activities you can partake in are exploring local festivals, illuminations, and traditional events like Hatsumode. Try a festive KFC meal or join a Nabe party for a warm and communal dining experience.

If festivals and KFC aren’t your cup of tea, you can try connecting within the community:

This means building connections within the local community by attending events, language exchange meetups, or participating in holiday charity drives.

Searching with your local city hall, you can find several winter holiday events that would be the best fit for you. 

Celebrating the holidays in Japan without family may have its challenges, but it also opens the door to cultural exploration and personal growth. Embrace local traditions, savor unique flavors, connect with the community, and use technology to stay close to loved ones. The result can be truly enriching and memorable.

One of the most difficult parts of debating for both native speakers and ESL students is rebuttal. From my experience the rebuttal part for Japanese ESL learners is especially hard since debating is not something that they commonly do even in Japanese. The most important aspect is providing them with a structure to follow. 

To rebut effectively in English debates, here are some essential tips:

Active Listening: Understand your opponent's arguments by actively listening and taking notes.

Preparation: Anticipate your opponent's points and prepare your arguments in advance.

Signposting: Structure your rebuttal by starting with an acknowledgment of the opponent's point.

Address Key Points: Focus on the most crucial aspects of your opponent's argument in your rebuttal.

Provide Evidence: Support your counterarguments with facts, statistics, or examples.

Expand Vocabulary: Enhance your English vocabulary to express your ideas more effectively.

A while back, while randomly watching YouTube one night, I was recommended a video entitled Big Bird in Japan. Intrigued, I watched it.

This PBS-NHK co-production ended up being quite interesting. It was produced in the late 1980s at the height of US-Japan tensions; not coincidentally, about the time the JET programme began. Big Bird and Barkley somehow join a tour of Japan and immediately get lost in Shinjuku. A friendly stranger of mysterious origins helps them to rejoin their tour in Kyoto while introducing them to Japanese life and culture. In addition to the time capsule aspect of watching something from the late 1980s, I was reminded of my own first day in Japan in 1995.

I was on my way to my study abroad university dorm room outside of Kyoto with my brand new, never-before-used passport and one full year of Japanese language studies at university under my belt. I got on the wrong train line in Osaka at first, but somehow, I made it to my station. I took a bus when I got there, but only way I knew I was at my stop was when the bus driver called "Gaijin-san!" in a friendly voice -- though I felt a bit self-conscious when everyone on the bus looked at me at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, I went in the opposite direction from the dorm I was staying at for the next month. At a loss of what to do, I just walked into one of those local electronics shops that are in neighborhoods around Japan and thrust the paper I had explaining where I was supposed to go towards them. Luckily, the family that owned that shop was just as friendly as the person Big Bird met. They calmed me down and bought me McDonalds for lunch, my first real meal in Japan, which I happily ate while chatting away. So I ended up feeling a strong affinity towards Big Bird and Barkley, watching them become lost and then found while wandering around Shinjuku and the rest of Japan.

When I showed it to my junior high school students, however, I found the visuals interesting enough—Big Bird and Barkley driving through Japan in a car is easy enough to understand while I noticed some students trying to figure out what Shinkansen station Big Bird and Barkley were at— for them to follow along while the language being at a level that can be understood by my mid-to-high level students.

My students English isn't at a level to have the sociological discussions about the video on Japan-US relations in the 1980s or representations of culture that you could have with older, more advanced students. However, I did want them to actively engage with the video. With my colleagues at my junior high school, we decided to make a listening, fill-in-the-blank worksheet based on the pre-school performance of the Japanese folk tale "The Bamboo Princess" that Big Bird and Barkley somehow stumble into watching. It starts at around the 39 minute mark and, spoiler alert, this story is related to the origins of our heroes' magical friend.

I will share two different worksheets here. First is the one we did in class, where we added a few vocabulary words at the beginning and a few review questions at the end. Looking at it again, I decided another way to do it would be to have students only listen for nouns. I hope you can either use these or that they give you some ideas to make materials better suited for your students.

Incorporating cultural materials such as this video is an effective way to help our students with their English. Though often we want to introduce things from our own country that does provide another layer of complexity to their language learning, as they need to learn not only the language but the cultural context, as well. It is always easier to understand something in a foreign language if you know the material well in your own language, so I believe using materials such as Japanese folk tales is one way to help students' confidence in learning languages.

1. Start with Basic Topics

Begin with simple, relatable topics that ESL students can easily understand and express opinions about. Gradually progress to more complex subjects as their language skills improve.

2. Emphasize Vocabulary

Introduce debate-specific vocabulary and phrases, such as "opening statement," "rebuttal," and "counterargument." Encourage students to incorporate these terms into their speeches to enhance their language proficiency.

3. Provide Structured Practice

Break the debate process into manageable steps. Teach students how to outline their arguments, provide evidence, and refute opposing viewpoints. Practice each step separately before combining them into full debates.

4. Foster a Supportive Environment

Create a safe and inclusive classroom environment where ESL students feel comfortable expressing their opinions and making mistakes. Encourage peer feedback and constructive criticism.

5. Incorporate Technology

Use online resources, debate platforms, and multimedia materials to make learning engaging and interactive. ESL students can watch and analyze debates in English, helping them grasp the art of persuasion.

6. Encourage Research

Encourage ESL students to research thoroughly before debates. This not only improves their argumentation skills but also enhances their knowledge of the topic.

7. Practice, Practice, Practice

Regular practice is key to mastering debate skills. Host mock debates, organize debates within the class, or even encourage ESL students to join debate clubs or competitions outside of school.