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Shouldn't We Evaluate Our Bosses?

5/29/2014

In my university professors give students grades at the end of the semester. No surprise there, right? Students also give mid-semester feedback and end-of-the-semester feedback scores and comments to their professors. These scores impact our career as they can be used to justify whether we are offered a new contract or not. Department heads use student feedback scores and other quantitative measurements such as how many students register for our classes and average class GPA to determine whether or not we should keep our jobs.

Let's add this up. Teachers evaluate students (grades), students evaluate teachers (student feedback surveys), management evaluates teachers (stats), but when do teachers evaluate their bosses? I'm still waiting for someone to ask what I think about the job my bosses are doing. I'm not sure if no one simply cares or they are afraid of the answers and what they might mean.

Currently, there is no survey to ascertain how my bosses are doing. If there was such a survey, what should be asked? Here are some sample question ideas:

1. What has your boss/director/department head done in the past year to help you do your job better/more effectively including training, access to resources, or professional development opportunities?

2. How has your boss/director/department head motivated you to do more than the minimum requirements in your department?

3. How does your boss/director/department head congratulate you or show appreciation when you do a good job?

4. How does your boss/director/department head handle disagreements with faculty members?

5. How well does your boss/director/department head communicate with faculty members regarding departmental issues? Is your input asked for? If so, do you feel is it valued?

6. How satisfied are you with the level of communication with your boss/director/department head?

What do you think? Should questions only be asked that can be answered with Likert scale responses? Do you trust the policy makers in your school to read your written-out responses? Do you think a boss/director/department head would actually lose their position if they received poor feedback? Is it all just a waste of time?

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Professional Networks Are Essential

5/26/2014

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This semester more than others, I have been stressing to my students the importance of building professional networks in addition to social networks while in university. Websites like Facebook allow us to expand our social networks and stay in contact with people we might not otherwise communicate with due to distance or we simply lack a connection that limits us to being just "Facebook friends" and not close friends. Professional networks can be similar to "Facebook friends" in this sense but the key is that if you contact them out of the blue, they know who you are and are willing to help you out.

This week we discussed the CO2 Management Center at KAIST on the Around the Carillon podcast and, honestly, I had nothing to contribute due to my lack of knowledge in that field. I do, however, know a foreign professor at KAIST who works in the EEWS (Energy, Environment, Water, and Sustainability) Department. He and I aren't close. We don't meet for lunch or connect on any of the social networks but we always say hello when we bump into each other on campus and sometimes stop for a minute to chat. I called him first to ask for advice on who to talk to. He seemed to know who I was when I identified myself on the phone and gave some good suggestions including speaking to another professor who I had met one or twice. I then called the second professor and he took fifteen minutes out of his busy schedule to give me a short introduction to his research at the center. It was very educational and much appreciated. I have to assume he was so open and helpful because we had met before and he remembered me, but maybe he's just a super-friendly guy. I hope I can be this useful to others in the future.

This is yet another example of advice that I give my students that rings true in my own life. I'm grateful to have a network of English teaching professionals that I can go to for advice but also a network inside my school of people who I can call and ask a favor of. It's never too late to expand our own professional networks but as teachers I believe it is essential to start our students down the path to good habits as early as possible. It's not always what you know but who you know that can help you become successful. Great advice to share as well as heed.

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We Impact Our Students in the Craziest Ways

5/23/2014

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The other day I sent a message to a former student who I had heard had recently gotten married. We ended up chatting online for a few minutes and he mentioned that he uses something I said (four years ago) when he conducts training sessions. I asked what it was and when he told me I had no memory of every saying it. It wasn't one of my main teaching points that gets repeated every semester but an offhand comment that stuck in his head and became something he used in his own professional life. I wonder how often this happens.

In the last several years I have started asking students what they learned in my class and how they might use the skills we practice in the future as a final exam question. Sometimes students repeat verbatim things that I said during classes. While it is flattering to hear that entire phrases were stored away in my students' heads it is the random nuggets that I didn't really assign much value to that reappear and startle me, like running in an old acquaintance out of the blue.

Whether I'm teaching a presentation skills course, a business course, or a writing course, I hope that my students take away the skills associated with that class's topic. I also hope that they learn how to manage their time, take responsibility for their projects and assignments, and learn to behave like professionals. If they learn how to be more successful and nothing else in my course I still consider it a success. There are courses I took in university that I gleaned life lessons from but remember zero content from. That still qualifies as time well spent in my book.

I want to be an educator that helps my students learn, whether they have any interest in my course or not. I often use this line when conducting teacher training workshops: "Our job title might be 'English teacher' but we are teachers first and foremost." What will students remember about you and your course years later?

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Creating Demand Among Students Is Elementary

5/9/2014

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I watched Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows last night. Holmes deduced that Professor Moriarty was creating demand for the supply of war-related products that he had amassed and I was struck with the idea that language teachers need ways to create the same urgency for what we have to offer our students. Three ways to do this are to create a secondary demand for academic reference letters, remind students that university is a competition, and demonstrate practical uses for the language we are teaching.

It is important to remind our students that they may need us to write reference letters in the future. After all, who better to write an eloquent reference letter in English to an American graduate school or business on Baker Street than their university English professor? What do they think that letter will say? "Jeong Bum did the bare minimum to pass my course." "Mycroft tried hard when he could be bothered to attend class." If students want me to write that they exceeded my expectations and were a pleasure to know and to teach, they had bloody well better earn it.

Teaching job interview skills is a great way to show the competitive aspect of our students' time in university. Have several students answer the same question one after another and ask the other students to choose who gave the best answer and why. Skill-based questions such as "How any languages can you speak?" and "What can you offer that other candidates cannot?" highlight one student's strength against their rivals' weaknesses. If you can highlight where a student needs to improve before he or she is a senior, that student has a chance to increase his/her skill set. If you wait until their last semester, it may be too late and they will have to work with what they have. Hopefully your students won't have to disguise the fact that they aren't as prepared to enter the workforce as they should be.

Consider teaching some of the skills that can benefit students in a job interview and during their career in your English classes. Teamwork, leadership, working with technology, time management, creativity, and presentation skills can all be taught in English-based courses through project work. This will be a greater challenge with lower-level students but not impossible if you keep things elementary. Your students may not understand why making a boring podcast episode is helping their English ability and in the long run it may not. However, many of the skills listed above do go into creating a podcast episode and students then have something tangible to show for it at the end.

In order to sell a product at a high price a salesperson must first build the product's value. Explain to your students why you drive them so hard and remind them of what's at stake. They may not be able to deduce it on their own. When they see that they are not only working for you and a grade but also for their personal development and their future career they should clamor to buy what we are selling. It's not a mystery, after all, that we are here to help our students succeed and proceed. Perhaps they will even become doctors one day.

Note: You can use this with your students as a sample five-paragraph essay.

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New EFL Teachers Should Find a Niche

5/1/2014

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A Dilbert classic on presentations

If you are a newer teacher in the ELT industry and are looking for career advancement advice, look no further. Find a niche and specialize in it. It's great that you can come into a new job and handle classes teaching the four skills. That makes you employable. But what helps you become "in demand" or, at the very least, harder to let go? I believe it is specializing inside our industry and working to create a positive reputation for yourself in that area.

Some teachers get into technology and become Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) specialists. Other take it a step further and learn how to program and become e-learning content developers. This niche is always developing and there is a lot of potential here for people just starting their careers.

Writing (especially technical writing) is another popular niche. Professors at my university who teach scientific writing to graduate students are always in demand and can parlay that experience into a qualification for technical editing. Teachers with these skills can advance in their field or shift to another one (teaching to editing).

Presentation and interview skills are what I have chosen to focus on. I have a BBA in Marketing and Management and my first experience with content courses was a business projects course that I taught eight years ago. I brought that course to KAIST and proposed that I teach it here as well. I taught in intersession camps and asked for presentation classes. I included presentation elements in many of my courses and taught undergraduate presentation courses for several years. In 2012, I cited demand from graduate students to join the undergraduate presentation courses and proposed a graduate-level presentation skills course. The experiences I had proposing the new business course, teaching successful camp and regular-semester courses in the subject, and citing student demand helped the administration make a positive decision to open the new graduate course.

Credibility is important in the ELT industry. Too many newspaper articles focus on "backpacker teachers" or foreign teachers who get in trouble with the law. We need to show our students and administrators that we are serious about our field and very good at what we do. One way to accomplish this is to highlight the practical experiences that we have in our specific niches. If you work in CALL, create a new website or e-learning program. If you are a writing instructor, join the editing team of a journal and point to that experience when a student challenges the grade they received on an essay. If you teach presentation skills, go speak at conferences and observe other sessions' speaker so you can give an up-to-date assessment on what speakers are doing well and doing poorly. The best educators teach their students using real-world experiences, not merely textbooks.

I guess dinosaurs could be a niche too...

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Shouldn't We Evaluate Our Bosses?

Professional Networks Are Essential

We Impact Our Students in the Craziest Ways

Creating Demand Among Students Is Elementary

New EFL Teachers Should Find a Niche

Tim's Thoughts

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