HOW TO IMPROVE A LANGUAGE SCHOOL: #2 FOCUS ON COLLECTIVE TEACHER EFFICACY

Collective teacher efficacy is not something most people in EFL have heard of for the simple reason that it comes from outside the world of EFL. Collective teacher efficacy is the extent to which your teachers believe that the results of their cooperative efforts will always be greater than their individual efforts. It means teachers working together.

However, EFL teachers tend not to talk to each other a great deal for a variety of reasons. One reason, and this is based on personal observation over 30 years is that teachers don’t really want to talk to each other that much. When a lesson is over, it’s over so why spend time talking about it? In 30 years, I’ve met one colleague that really wanted to talk about teaching and we had a very productive professional relationship. I always feel that most teachers tend to tense up when engaged in conversation about teaching – it’s as if EFL teachers don’t want to expose their practice to external scrutiny.

Another possible reason is that teachers just might not be that interested in professional development. Once teachers hit a certain amount of experience they often get set in their ways and become less interested in other perspectives. And so you end up with a school where there is little to no communication about teaching going on beyond the usual bland staffroom chitchat along the lines of “Does anyone know a warmer for the first conditional?”. That isn’t collective teacher efficacy – it’s just being lazy.

One of the worst things you can do when you have this situation in a language school is to do enforced training. Doing monthly inset training sessions that are based around top-down randomly selected topics isn’t going to fix this problem for you. And getting your own staff to do the training sessions won’t help either. I’ve attended scores of training sessions over the years and learned nothing at all from a single one of them beyond understanding how not to conduct training sessions.

The best way to solve the collective teacher efficacy problem is very simple: employ people who actually care about teaching and learning. An interview is a great way to figure out if someone really cares about their profession. Why not use the interview as a way to figure out whether or not the candidate is committed to their work? Then you’ll have better quality teachers who will be more likely to work together. The solution is simple – just hire better. Imagine you are Finland.