My adorable monsters. About the long-term work with a group

This post, like many others, starts in the classroom…

The thought falls on my head out of nowhere.

We are playing the game with the first conditional. There are only four of them, on the day, in-between the holidays, so we don’t even bother to go into the breakout rooms, we are playing together. It is not even a real game, either. Someone starts a sentence, someone else, called out, thinks of an ending, action – reaction, a situation – consequences. And they are just producing. Coming up with great ideas, some of the sentences just down to earth and realistic, some of them, as we call them, ‘creative’, just for laughs. And so we laugh out loud. A trainer in me suddenly realises that the lesson plan (if there had been a formal lesson plan) should include not only the traditional elements, like the staging and ‘the teacher will’ and ‘the students will’. The trainer in me realised that it might be worth considering to include a laughing fit and the necessary calming down part in the timing, in the assumptions and the potential problems and solutions…We laugh a lot with my kids.

Unavoidably, I realise, I get those constant flashbacks, those mini-trips into the past and I am looking at my students, today already 10 and 9 (or 8 and 7, still, some of them) and I remember how we walked into the classroom together, for the first time, me on my toes, all eyes, all ears, and them cautiously taking every step and every action. I do remember how we learned to say ‘Hello’ for the first time with some of them and how we first said that we don’t like broccoli ice-cream (except for Nadia, my little rebel). How I used to need lots of miming and scaffolding and modelling, with every single activity and how they’d start with single words, then move to phrases and to sentences.

And I, who was present, 99% of the time, over those seven years, I cannot believe my own eyes and my own ears now, how they throw the language at me, storytelling, or using the Present Perfect in free speech. Or the first conditional.

What does it mean for a teacher to continue for an extended period of time? What does it mean for the business? How does the methodology change? Does it change at all? What do the parents think? And, last but not least, perhaps it would be better to change the teacher once in a while?

This post will be very personal. This post will be very emotional. But I would like to look at it from the other points of view, too, thinking like a trainer, thinking like a methodology expert and, also, inevitably, thinking like a teacher and like a human, too.

In order to make it a bit more objective and more like a research, I asked my teacher friends for help. This post was written with the help, support and contributions from my amazing colleagues: Ekaterina Balaganskaya, Nadezhda Bukina, Marina Borisova and Tatiana Kistanova. Thank you!!!

Are you still up for such an adventure? Follow me.

Over to…a teacher trainer

• You know your students very well, in every aspect, including the interests, their motivation, the family situation, the strengths, the areas that need improvement, the interaction patterns that they favour, their best friends in and outside of the group, their favourite activities and games, their role in the group. This helps a lot with lesson planning, shaping up and choosing the activities and, later on, in class, with managing the activities, the lesson time and the interaction patterns.
• Giving instructions is much easier, after a while. The students know you very well, too, that they are almost able to read your mind and to react to any, even those less formal hints and clues. Quite likely before you give them.
• You need to be creative because after a while, your students might get bored with the activities you usually use. This might not sound like something positive because it means that you are at risk of running out of anything that you normally keep up your sleeve in terms of games, classroom management techniques or ways of checking homework, for example, but I would like to see it a more positive light. Working with a long-term group can be a wonderful catalyst for your creativity and, as a result, there are more new games, classroom management techniques and ways of checking homework!!!
• It is perfectly natural that with any new group, a teacher strives to build up the comfort zone in order to ensure the conditions for the effective teaching and learning. However, once that comfort zone is created (and after a few years with a group it is likely to be a very stable comfort zone, a very cozy and safe ZPD, hello Leo Vygotsky), the teacher can start dreaming of venturing out and trying out new things on a much more advanced level. Not only a new game to practise vocabulary but a new approach that you may have heard about such as introducing a new approach to storytelling after you have found out about PEPELT, setting up journals with your students, just because you read that one research article or just taking your lifelong passion for teaching English through another level. Or, actually, you might even want to start a blog at one point. An experimenter is, I believe, one of the most important teacher roles!
• Teaching long-term, you are moving on, together with your students and that means changing and adapting the approaches and techqniues to match them to needs of the kids who are growing up. With time, kids are becoming more mature and more capable of producing the language and dealing with more and more complex tasks. They say that a rolling stone gathers no moss and the same can be said about teachers who are growing and developing with their students. Sure, some of that can be achieved within one year, but there is definitely a lot more potential for the changes and the evolutions if the learning process takes a bit longer than just one season.
• My colleagues also mentioned the impact on the learning process and the very shaping of the curriculum as it was adapted to the particular needs of the students. Instead of just following the book (or the curriculum whichever form it came in), as might be the case with a less involved teacher (although, of course, I am not implying that working with a group for a season only equals lower quality service), with a longer term group a teacher is able to introduce a circular / spiral curriculum, introduced to the world by Bruner and to me be Ekaterina, with the teacher returning and revising the crucial elements of the language, regardless of what the coursebook or the pacing schedule says. For example, working on the past simple (served in manageable chunks) from the beginning of the year instead of waiting until April when that topic appears in the book. This was Ekaterina’s example and I realised that we have been doing the same with my kids, simply because I wanted us to have the language (or some bites of it) for us to be able to talk about the weekend and the holidays and the day at school. Tatiana also mentioned it as one of the key benefits as knowing the group helps the teacher set the pace that will be most appropriate for this particular bunch of children.

• Over to… a manager

• Students staying for a few years are basically your returning customers, your loyal customers and your dream come true. As they would be in any other area. They come back, month after month and year after year and they make the world go round, basically.
• What’s more, these students are also likely to bring in other students, their friends, brothers, sisters, cousins or even parents, to join your groups or the other groups at the school. Since there has been a positive experience in the family, so to speak, these are also likely to stay.
• The fact that you have worked out the patterns and the procedures of managing the finances, the group, the assessment or the festivities, will mean that these will be easier to implement.
• This will be a huge advantage, should there be any changes to adapt to, even those unexpected and unplanned, as in case of the pandemic. Perhaps that was not the case in all the countries and with all the groups and students but, in my experience, many of those that went online, smoothly, were the long-term students and groups and they basically trusted their teacher to transfer online or, later on, to study in the hybrid classroom.
• That also means that a strong bond and trust will be built and the parents will be more likely to accept any changes or even any complications such as the need to move online, the need to change the timetable, the need to make up for the class or to run the lesson online, or even, to have a cover class.
• Staying with ‘the old’ teacher might also be easier for the parents which was a very important point made by Ekaterina. Parents are busy, they might not be able to devote a huge amount of time to looking for a new teacher, a new school or a new group and they might also worry that their child would not fit in the new set-up. Some parents fear that due to the previous negative experience, either with the school, the group or even the teacher’s professional competence. Staying is easier.

Over to… a teacher

• The first one to mention here will be the enormous sense of achievement that a teacher can get from working with a group for an extended period of time and the opportunity to observe and to assess the same students, not only from September to May, from the beginning to the end of the level but over the years, from pre-A to A2 or even further.
• Teaching a group over any longer period of time provides the teacher with plenty of opporunities and a lot of data for formative assessment, as pointed out by Ekaterina. It will apply to all the language skills as well as vocabulary and grammar, accuracy and fluency. Let’s take the past simple as an example. There will be the series of lessons devoted to the topic, a series of lessons per level or coursebook even, and the students might do well in these lessons. However, it will be up to the teacher to track whether and how accurately the students use it to describe the past events in free speech, recalling the events of the day at school or retelling a story. The aims of these two activities are not the freer grammar practice per se but, for example, settling in and checking understanding after a reading skills development stage. It might (and it will!) take a considerable period of time for the students to finally assimilate the structure and to start using it freely and correctly. I have also noticed in my teaching that with time I tend to prioritise formative assessment over summative assessment but this is a new discovery and I need some time to think about it before I write about. A new post? Who knows)
• Creating a positive atmosphe in the classroom, creating the environment that will be beneficial for learning, learning about your students and their needs is something that we, as teachers, do regardless, but there is something special in the connection that you build with a group over the years. You accompany them in their lives outside of the classroom, all the good marks and bad marks, all the competitions, holidays and birthdays. You get to meet their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and all the pets. You take part in the important family events, such as the births of baby brothers and sisters or even those more traumatic events like an illness or a death of a family member and, whether you want it or not, you bond. To an outsider it might sound strange but there must be a reason why so many teachers refer to their students as ‘my children‘ or, sometimes, when in a non-teaching environment, ‘my educational children’.
• Then, there is the pride in all their achievements and progress that they are making. Going back and reminiscing about all the milestones, all the firsts is a truly wonderful journey for a teacher to take: the first lesson ever, the first time we made full sentences, the first time we started to create in English, the first letters scribbled, the first story we did and the first time they asked to be allowed to take over the story reading, the first test, the first real grammar lesson, the first ‘OMG, I cannot stop them from chattering away‘ day or every time they took an exam, Starters, Movers, Flyers, KET, PET, FCE or, finally, also, CAE.

Over to…a human

‘If you meet with the same people twice a week for 8 – 10 years, you can’t help loving them‘ (Marina)

‘It’s a joy to see them grow, to see the progress and the results. Develop relationships and see them enter a new age group‘ (Nadezhda)

‘The best thing about it was that I knew them and they knew me, the rapport was strong‘ (Tatiana)

‘When I was moving a country, they were devastated. Luckily, we could continue our lessons online‘ (Ekaterina)

• The group is a community. Ekaterina mentioned that the kids in the group she has been teaching for seven years became friends outside the group and that they all meet offline when that is possible, even go out for pizza or to a museum. Even when those outside events are not possible, the group can celebrate together either because they get a Christmas-themed lesson or because they all bring snack and have a little party at the end of the lesson. Even if it is an online lesson.
• It is interesting that the personal preferences work both ways and that the resistance to change the teacher might come from the students, too, as you will see in the stories for teachers that I share in the paragraph below and that, as Marina highlighted, the fact that some students stay with you (and, of course, not all of them will) is based also on their personal preferences and attachement to the teacher. Staying for longer may be seen as a result not some intertia, the inability or laziness to find a new teacher, but, simply, a conscious decision on the part of the parents and the students.
• Or on the part of the teacher, too. As pointed out by Tatiana, it might be related to the teacher’s own personality, if the long-term connections are important for them, as humans. Or, it might be the impact of the context in which they are working as the changes, imposed or not, are more likely to take place in different educational institutions whereas the teachers who work freelance would probably be in favour of keeping the students, unless, of course, it is impossible due to any external circumstances.
• As for me, personally, well, I love what I do. Yes, there are sometimes duties, tasks or even groups that I am not entirely wildly excited about but, overall, I enter the classroom, online or offline, with joy and looking forward to the lesson. And one of the reasons for that are my students and, especially, my educational children aka my adorable monsters. It is thanks to them that I have blossomed as a creator, as a teacher and as a trainer. It is thanks to them that I was able to cope with the strains of the lockdown and it is thanks to them that ‘I am still standing‘, as Elton John might put it, when the world is what it is right now.
• At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were about to transition online and change our EFL lives forever, I remember how I felt about the big unknown and how, pretty quickly, it became apparent, that no matter what (really, no matter what) we are what we are, a small (and a bit loud) community and that we had had enough experience of each other worked out and accumulated and that we can take it elsewhere. I remember one morning, just before the lessons were about to start (the first real lesson, not the free online trial and getting to know each other with zoom) how I felt the panic creep over. But I also remember the thought: ‘Hold on, they are my kids. That’s is. We will just do it, under slightly different circumstances‘. And, guess what? We did.

A change would do you good? The other side of the coin

Because, of course, there is one! Changing the teacher might be beneficial! On the one hand, as Nadezhda mentioned, the teachers themselves might feel the impact of the long-term interaction, some form of material fatigue, and in such a case a change is more than welcome. In such cases a change of a teacher might be the solution. A new teacher means new methods, new approaches, a different sense of humour…

Sometimes this ‘tiredness’ and the call for a change may come from the fact that students are growing and transitioning into another age group and the students might welcome a more official confirmation or recognition of that process. Perhaps, the change of a teacher might do the job here. If, for example, it is Mr Alexander is the teenage groups’ teacher then him taking over the group from taught so far by Miss Carolina is going to be some form of a rite of passage.

However, it needs to be mentioned, it is not as straightforward as it might seem. First and foremost, the students may not want to change the teacher at all and, in such cases, it is enough to tweak the format or the routine a bit. Then it might be that the outside circumstances change and they sort the problem out. Ekaterina shared her story of one of her groups with whom she started to consider the possible change of a teacher as the kids’ growing up and changing into teenagers resulted in some discipline issues and, as a result, the lessons not being as effective as they previously had been. However, here, the problem sorted itself out – due to the pandemic the class was transferred online and it turned out that the physical separatation (or the space and the own territory that the students gained) was the only thing that the group needed. They still continue with Ekaterina as their teacher.

This brought my own group to mind. The kids were still in pre-school, year 3, when we were asked to give our cosy kiddies classroom to a younger group. We moved and the most surprising thing was that it turned out to be an important stepping stone for the students. ‘We are real students now!’, they kept repeating and back then I was just listening to them and giggling inside that the big desks and big chairs can make anyone so excited. Today, when I look back at it, it seems to be this perfect moment in the life of a group when a change was needed. And it did take place, although, yes, without changing the teacher.

The most important thing to consider here is how the students can benefit from the new circumstances. Marina brought it up, too and, Ekaterina gave a perfect example from the British schools. In the schools her children attend, there is an obligatory change of a teacher every year, with Miss Elena only teaching the 4th-grades, Mr Peter only working with the 6th graders and so on. The system was introduced in the school to ensure fairness. This way, all the children get a change to work with all the teachers throughout their school life and the is no chance that, due to some ‘preferences’, class 4A only gets ‘the best teachers’. Not to mention that this must contribute a lot to bonding and building of the community as little Pasha will know all the teachers personally and all the teachers, after a while, will have had Pasha in their classrooms.

The end is the beginning is the end…

The most interesting thing is that, from among the teachers who waved back at me and wanted to chat about the long-term teaching of a group, there was nobody who would be a strong proponent of the Change the Teacher Every Year approach. Can it be considered a sign? I have no idea but, if, by any chance, there is anyone among my readers who has had an experience with it, please, pretty please, get in touch, I would love to talk to you!

Happy teaching!