Aihua

See also: Dealing with young students; Locations of teaching; Teaching resources and training; Teaching responsibilities and Being a Teacher.

General Responsibilities

Punctuality
Teachers must be in the school 15 minutes before the start of a class or the departure time for the school bus.

Classroom language
The most common mistake of new teachers is failing to speak slowly and clearly.  Before taking a class, you should look through what the previous books in the series the students are learning from, to get an idea of what language the students are already familiar with, and use this as a foundation for your classroom language.

Classroom behavior
Teachers need to be mobile in class, particularly when teaching young learners.  Retaining the attention of the students is the main factor in a successful class, and if teachers are static, and do not utilize gesture, they will not succeed in retaining the attention of the students.  Teachers should move around the classroom, and use exaggerated gestures when speaking.  They should as well associate standard gestures with most utterances, in order to help the students to remember the language being taught.

Discipline

At Aihua we are intent on developing culture of courtesy and good manners.  The attitudes of our teachers toward classroom discipline is an important influence on our ability to succeed in this endeavour.

You are not doing your students any favors by allowing them or their classmates to behave disruptively in class.

It is not a question of being either a friend or a teacher.  If you class environment is unsuitable for learning you are being a lazy teacher, and not a friend of your students. It is your responsibility to ensure that there is a good learning environment in your classroom, and at times you need to be strict to do so.  By being strict, you are being good to your students.  Don’t feel bad about being a responsible teacher.  Again, you are not dancing monkeys.  We will not abide any members of that species here.

If you cannot solve a discipline problem, do not catch a member of our management team in the hallway and complain about this.  Instead write a written report and submit it to the director of the service department and the teacher trainer.  This will give you a chance to analyze the problem more carefully.

Dress code
When teaching, teachers must dress in a smart casual fashion.  Jeans, T-shirts, sandals, sports clothes and shorts are not acceptable.  If teachers wish to wear T shirts to class, they may wear the Aihua T shirt.  Teachers are expected to dress professionally, with ties, shirts and dress trousers, for open classes, demo classes, and when judging at the annual Aihua English competition.

Lesson plans

Thorough lesson plans should be produced for each lesson taught at Aihua.  These should include a description, lesson objectives, teaching material, board work planning and a step by step, timed plan of classroom activities.  Lesson plans should be stored in the appropriate folder of the school network, and they may be checked at any time.  Teachers are encouraged to consult past lesson plans in the appropriate folder.  Lesson plans should be prepared well in advance, and they should be discussed with the co teacher.  If the Service Department management feels that lesson plans are not being adequately prepared, they will ask to have lesson plans regularly presented to a member of the management team for a fixed period of time, or until the perceived problem has been resolved.  If the Service Department management feels that the foreign teacher and Chinese teacher are not coordinating their efforts, they will ask them to prepare lessons together for a time, and submit countersigned copies of these to the teaching department management team.

We have considered providing standardized lesson plans, but have decided against this for two reasons.  First, an important part of the planning of a lesson is in creating a lesson plan.  Simply consulting a ready-made plan is no substitute for this, even if the teacher has the best of intentions.  If you want to deliver a good lesson, you need to build it up from the ground by yourself.  Secondly, providing ready-made lesson plans would take away from the teacher’s creativity, and neglect the teacher’s knowledge of the receptivity of the students with which he is dealing to various teaching strategies.

It is important, however, that we should monitor and regulate lesson plans, as lesson plans are the key to success in the classroom.

We will ask each teacher to keep a folder for each class that he teaches, and compile lesson plans in these.  We will supply these folders.  If lessons plans are hand written, they will need to be written legibly.  We may ask to view lesson plan folders at any time, and the lesson plans in these folders should be up to date.  Lesson plan folders need to be submitted to the service department at the end of the term.

Lesson plans should adhere to the following standard, and contain the following information. Date, location, (onsite, offsite, etc) course book, week number, objectives, time to be spent on each step of the lesson plan.  Lesson plans should describe the lesson’s progression through: warmer, introduction, vocabulary, listening and practice, toward a production activity, such as a roleplay, a dialogue or a skit.

Homework

Learning results are maximized by daily exposure to the target language.  10 minutes per day is better than 70 minutes once per week.

In order to maximize our students learning results, we need to ensure that our students have daily exposure to English.
We need to ensure that the students do some homework every day.

Foreign and Chinese teachers need to be aware of the homework requirements that we have set for our students, and assure that students fulfill these requirements.
Foreign teachers need to weekly demonstrate how to do upcoming homework, and review completed homework.
Chinese teachers need to check homework weekly.

We use an internal website to deliver homework to students.  Foreign teachers need to have an awareness of, and a presence on this internal website.  We need a photo of the Chinese and foreign teacher posted for each class.  The foreign teacher should write an introduction and welcome to the students at beginning of term that will be posted on the website.  Foreign teachers should occasionally write something about class to be posted on the class page.

Lesson Observations and Feedback

Each foreign teacher will have lessons observed by a member of the Service Department management at least three times per term: once within the first three weeks, once toward the middle of term, and once within the last four weeks of term.  Teachers will be given 3 days notice before a regular observation is conducted.  The observer will make a written report and fill in a lesson observation form, which will be submitted to and filed by the Regional Service Director.  The observer will meet with the teacher to discuss the class within one week of the observations.

Classes may be observed at other times and without notice by the Chinese Headmistress, the Director of Sales and Marketing, a Site Director or any member of the Service Department management team. The purpose of these is not to catch the teacher out, but rather to keep in touch with what we are doing at Aihua, and provide support for the teachers.

The school will inform the teachers of any complaints they receive regarding their teaching.  If a class is observed because of complaints, the teacher will be notified of the reason for the observation, and the time and date at which the observation will occur.

Teachers will be asked to perform two peer observations per term.  The Regional Service Director will announce the timing of these, and provide the teachers with class observation forms.  These forms should be completed and returned to the Regional Service Director for filing.  Teachers should meet with the teacher that they have observed within one week of the observation to discuss the class and provide feedback.

For any class monitored, a film of the class should be submitted to the service department external hard drive, along with a written critique of this class, which references times in the film as support of its assertions.

Exams

During our two full terms we administer midterm and final exams for all of our Gucheng on-site classes.  At present, we do not administer exams at Changyin or Zhongguancun, but we may do so in the near future.  Whether or not exams are required for offsite classes is dependent upon the administration of the public school at which we are teaching, and this information should be conveyed to you with as much notice as possible by the teaching department management team.  During our summer and winter intensive terms, only final exams are administered.

Typically, our co teachers administer the listening and writing portion of the exam, while foreign teachers meet with students individually in the hallway to administer the oral portion of the exam.

This term we will focus on standardizing our exam system.

We need to ensure that our exams are conducted in a serious way.  We will monitor the administration of exams through the security cameras, to assure that students are behaving appropriately for an exam situation.

Exams results must be submitted to the service department external hard drive in a clear and legible format.  Completed exams should be stored until the end of the term subsequent to that in which they are written.  This should allow us to identify students who are having problems and address their problems.

With exams, teachers should submit a report on each class, describing any problems their class might have in terms of learning results or the learning situation.

English Speaking Environment

Learned material is loose, unstable and easily forgotten before it is used for the purpose of real communication in a real life situation.  Using learned material in a real life situation locks the material in place in the mid, and assures that this information will be retained.
We need to create an English speaking environment at our school, so that students have the opportunity to communicate with our teachers using the language that they have learned in classes.

Using Chinese in the classroom is useful in the short term, but harmful in the long term.  Using Chinese in the classroom will allow the children to open up to the teachers, and become comfortable with the teachers quickly, but it will become habit in the long term, so that children will lose out on the opportunity to use the English that they are learning.
Using only English in the classroom has short term disadvantages, in that the students will be more reluctant to open up to the teachers, and the teachers will have a harder time getting their students to communicate with them.  In the long term though, it will have advantages because the students will get used to speaking in English, and speaking English in the school will become a habit.  When this happens, our learning results will be much greater.

We insist that all teachers minimize their use of Chinese during times when students are in the school, with the goal of eliminating communication in Chinese.  Only use Chinese when absolutely necessary.

All teachers should communicate with one another in English when we have students in the school.

Creating an English speaking environment at the school can also help us to develop a culture of courtesy and good manners.  All teachers, Chinese and foreign, should exchange basic greetings with parents in English.  “Hello, how are you, nice to meet you, goodbye, see you next time” should be said to all parents.

Foreign teachers should be in the school 15 minutes before classes, and when passing through the halls before, between and after classes, they should greet parents and children in English when pass passing.

If Chinese teachers are talking to parents in the hallways, they should stop and say hello to passing foreign teachers.  If the foreign teacher teaches the child of this parent, they should introduce the teacher. “This is Alice’s mom, Mrs Zhang. “  “Hello Mrs Zhang, it’s nice to meet you.”

Progress reports

The Chinese co teacher and the foreign teacher should divide the responsibility for marking the exams.  The Chinese co teacher will then prepare a Progress Report Form for each student.  Each form must include the student’s exam mark, stated as A, B, or C, and comments and signatures from both the Chinese and the foreign teacher.  The Chinese teacher is responsible for delivering the completed Progress Report forms to the parents.
You will also be asked to complete a Student Learning Strengths and Weaknesses form to deliver to the parents at this time. By using of this form, we hope that you will develop ways to tailor your teaching to the receptivity of your students, and be more aware of the various teaching methods available to you.