Business by Janice

It’s quite a struggle to keep up with everything that comes at us in this technological age, we have to develop prioritising skils  more than ever before and it’s tempting to focus on our own world of immediate concerns and pressing problems.

Email, and more to the point, managing email has become a skill in itself. Those people who manage it successfully combine prioritising their time to “get things done”  with maintaining an effective email relationship with their network.

Have you ever felt perplexed (and probably slightly miffed ) that people who you have a professional relationship with just don’t answer your mails?  What happened to good old fashioned manners?  Ok, perhaps the term “manners” is no longer appealing, let’s replace it in this context with the term “netiquette”. Because at the end of the day we are dealing with PEOPLE. We might have a computer screen seperating us but we  have one person sending the mail and another person receiving it.

How people behave around email says a lot to me. Those people  I have a relationship with and who respond to my mail, even if it’s just an acknowledgement and especially if it’s to say thank you, go up a few points on my integrity scale. As with anything in life, it’s how we behave that paves the way for a positive personal and/or business relationship between two people. Those who don’t observe simple codes of conduct when it comes to responding to email could just be losing out on opportunities.

And what about those people who are too lazy to change the “subject” of the mail. They want to talk about a completely different topic to the previous one so they find the last mail that was exchanged with you and just start writing. You get confused before opening the mail to then find that the mail is endless with all the exchanges that went before. How lazy can you get?

Continuing on a practical note however (enough of the moans and groans), how can we effectively manage our email whilst at the same time reserving time to do the  important, “moving forward” aspects of our jobs?

Here are some tips to manage email:

1. Allocate specific times of the day to check email and different times to DEAL WITH email
2. Work on the concept of zero inbox. How do we achieve that?
3. When you check your emails you need to scan them quickly and immediately put into one of 5 files, do, delete, delegate, archive and defer.
4. At the time you’ve allocated for actioning mails, go through the files to do, defer and delegate to take the appropriate action.

We waste so much time opening emails, reading them, thinking we’ll see to it later only to come back to it amongst a yet fuller inbox, read it again before deciding what to do with it.

Even the sight of a huge inbox before you even start to tackle anything just drains your energy, so there’s a lot to be said for the zero inbox concept.

If you are looking for more details on how to manage email and in fact, time management itself, I highly recommend the book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. I’m a bit of time management freak myself and in my opinion Allen’s book is the most practical work I’ve read on the subject.

Check out his web site: http://www.davidco.com

I think a lot of academy directors would agree with me when I say that it’s very hard to find teachers who do a great job teaching children.

There’s so much more to the story than being native and holding a TEFL and I wanted to highlight this subject this week to alert naïve teachers of the sort of situation  they might be getting into. I use the words “native” and “TEFL” as first off, most parents are obessed that the teacher be native and secondly, TEFL is the most common training medium available to teachers looking for work abroad.

One thing is to like children, the other is to be able to teach them. And as the majority of TEFL courses provide minimal training if any at all in this very important area, the suitability of a teacher is something that both the academy and potential teacher should consider carefully before making a mutual committment.

I have to say at this point that this area isn’t my speciality, I deal more with corporate language training but as we’ve had some teachers bail out on us this year in our school saying that teaching kids isn’t for them, I wanted to raise some awareness around the issue.

The pedagogic considerations are perhaps the least important when it comes to teaching successful childrens’ classes as we’re all trained in the basic techniques on our TEFL courses. The issues which beg to be looked at though are:

• Discipline problems
• Gaining respect from the childrem
• Dealing with different learning styles
• Motivation of individuals

to name but a few.

To what extent are new teachers really prepared to deal with such issues?

It’s amazing how many teachers casually accept childrens’ classes saying they “like children”, want to widen their teaching experience etc. etc. but are then powerless in front of a group of 6 year olds!

What can we do to prevent this situation from happening?

In the first place it’s imperative that the selection and interviewing process is rigourous. Teachers need to be sourced who have proven experience in the field and who ideally possess a qualification such as the British PGCE or similar. Recruiters need to be tuned in to energy, a teacher with an insipid personality is going to be eaten alive (possibly by the same group of 6 year olds who made an appearence above). Assertiveness and clarity here is the key.

Initial orientation training by the school is essential and particular attention should be paid to classroom management, daily routines, reward systems and disciplinary measures available to the teacher. And of course ongoing support is a must. Teachers need to know that there is someone on the management team who will back them up and be there for them.

Which leads me on to another point - we’ve seen over the years that many teaches feel embarrassed to ask for help, many think they have to solve any classroom management problems on their own, and often wait until a situation gets out of hand before speaking about it. This is completely the wrong approach.

From an academy’s point of view it’s relatively easy to find your team of full time Young Learner teachers at the beginning of the academic year and follow the comprehensive selection procedure mentioned above. But if you need to replace a teacher mid academic year, that is really when the pressure is on as the groups in the academy simply have to go on the road. A well thought out substitution system is what is called for here but for economic reasons this is not always implemented in smaller schools.

I’m sure there are quite a few of you out there who can add some depth to this post, both from an academy and a teacher’s point of view. The main point I wanted to make here is that inexperienced teachers shouldn’t jump headlong into teaching a block of Young Learner classes in a school, even though the block hours are attractive, without really finding out what extra demands the profile of these classes entails. And conversely, schools should really examine exactly how well suited a particular teacher is before assigning the classes. In this way, parents and children will have more chance of getting the service they deserve and headaches will be reduced all round, well, except for the headacher the mere noise of a group of 6 years old naturally make anyway!

What have your experiences been regarding the teaching and/or coordination of kids classes? How could negative situations have been avoided?

I’d be very interested to hear your comments.

Something weird happened this weekend which I’d like to share with you. It’s related to this blog although it may lead me to go off at a tangent… (or on a tangent?  mmm, I’m not sure, no wonder our students have so many problems!) Shawn or Troy, as seasoned teachers, if you’re reading this, I’m sure you can help me out on that one.

Anyway, I usually post on a Sunday afternoon and so begin to ruminate on possibie topics from Friday onwards. However, it got to late Saturday night and I still hadn’t had any inspiration. No worries though, I thought, I’ll think of something.

Would you believe it, I woke up this morning and I had been given the answer. I DREAMT what my topic would be. I had decided last week that a good source for my posts would be debates from experiences during my working week, and that is exactly what my subconscious gave me. What a gift!

Most of you who regularly read this blog know that I’m into Law of Attraction, (google it if need be), which I see as a natural extension of coaching. Law of Attraction then leads you into spirituality and the whole energy, intuition thing. And the more I read and study this area, the more I see it working in my life.  In fact I now use my feelings as much as my reason to guide me in my decisions .

How can our subconscious and feelings guide us to make the right decisions?

In essence, there are only two types of feeling, one makes you feel good and the other makes you feel bad. When we think about something and it gives us a rush, makes the hair on our arms stand on end, and even brings tears of joy to our eyes, that is the strongest indication  that  we are thinking about  something that is exactly right for us. It is our inner being, a being who is infinitely wiser than our physical brain can ever be, telling us that this is where our path lies. I have experienced this quite often lately, and I can vouch for its effectiveness when having to make important decisions.

Conversely, what about when our intution tells us “hey! don’t do that!”? How often do we take notice? I learned  a big lesson on this one  a short while ago. In September we signed a contract on an office in the centre of Madrid. The office seemed ideal, it was modern, in a great location etc but on going to sign, I had a feeling of foreboding. Guess what? Four months later we are still struggling with the most horrendous technological problems which have seriously affected our productivity and the morale of the team.

Just last Monday, 10 minutes before leaving for work, I suddenly had a wave of nervousness and dread. How weird I thought, what’s all that about? I drove a couple of miles and then my car broke down!

There really is a power within us that if we only learnt to be more sensitive to, and to develop, could help us so much in every aspect of our lives. We live in such a fast paced world that our intuition has been buried, and we rarely take the time to just stop and examine what our feelings are telling us.

Capitalism is fully lodged in our society for good or for bad, but there is gradual movement towards a  different consciousness, and a different way of doing business and treating each other. I think I referred to this in another post as “authentic” business, and yes, despite what some cynics may believe, I think we CAN combine spirituality and business. At the end of the day, businesses are run by people and if people are true to themselves and to what REALLY deep down makes them feel good and worthy, surely they will be led to take the sort of action which is beneficial for all concerned.

You see, I have gone off on a tangent. Ok, it may not be strictly EFL stuff  this week or business but what the hell, I felt INSPIRED! And I’m going to save my dreamt of topic (yes, related to a teacher EFL issue) for next week. Wow, my dream helped me with TWO topics in the end.

If you are interested in finding out more about Law of Attraction, coaching, personal development or spirituality I can recommend the following reading:

Mind Magic:- Marta Hiatt

Harmonic Wealth:- James Arthur Ray

The Science of Success:- James Arthur Ray

A New Earth: Eckhart:-Tolle

The Celestine Prophecy:- James Redfield

I’ll See it When I Believe it:- Wayne Dyer

The Secret:- Rhonda Byrne

Think and Grow Rich:- Napoleon Hill

The Law of Attraction:- Esther and Jerry Hicks

Coach yourself to Success:- Talene Miedaner

Take Yourself to the Top:- Laura Berman Fortgang

Conversations with God:- Neale Donald Walsh  (NOT religous, purely spriritual)