Show Me the Money! Performance Related Pay in ELT?

As I was chatting to colleague recently he made the comment, ‘It seems like good teachers are punished in Korea by getting a heavier workload and bad teachers are rewarded with less hours for the same pay.  Surely good teachers should be rewarded’.  Putting aside the idea of what a ‘good’ teacher is, the idea of Performance Related Pay(PRP) in ELT is not a new idea.  However, I haven’t personally come across any schools that implement it.

I think most of us did not enter the world of teaching to earn our fortunes.  Should teachers be rewarded for their efforts ?  I’m not convinced.  Now you may be thinking who would be against teachers getting paid more.  Me?  Not at all, but I worry about how PRP would be implemented and if it would actually benefit teachers.  First of all, what criteria would be used to measure it.  Let’s look at some (but not all) of the possible options.

1. Student Test Scores

Exams in private schools are often made and marked by the teachers themselves so they do not go to any external body.  This creates obvious problems with consistency, and who exactly marks the test papers.  Do you mark you own? Do you mark your colleagues?  Do you mark all of the tests for consistency?  Honesty and transparency may be a problem here.

2. Student Feedback

We are entering a murky area.  Although it is important to have a rapport with students, it is quite possible (particularly with young learners) that the joke telling, fun teacher will be extremely popular with the students.  This doesn’t mean they are doing a good job.  They may spend most of the class playing pointless games or endlessly entertaining the kids.  Does this mean the students are learning? On the other hand, there may well be a dour, serious teacher who is less popular with students, but certainly no less effective as a teacher.

3.  Observation

First, who will do the observation?  Second, will their own personal preference for teaching style impact on the score?  How is the observation broken down?  What weight is given to the different components that make up your observation sheet?  Is any sort of objective consistency possible through observation?

4. Professional Development

Should teachers who attend seminars and conferences (whether in person or online)  receive some credit?  They are working hard to improve themselves (often at the cost of their own time and money) which hopefully benefits the students.  Could teachers who keep a record of their own reflective practice show that they are always doing their best for the students?

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This is just a quick list of possible criteria.  The problem is that much of it is rather subjective and probably impossibe to measure in an objective way.  Who would draw up the criteria?  Would it be each individual school or is it possible to adopt an industry standard?  Could this standard be adopted worldwide or adapted country  by country?  What weight will be given to each criterion?

The idea of PRP is also often put out there by people on the assumption that it will benefit teachers.  The opposite could happen.  It could be used by private school owners to set a lower basic wage with the promise that your effort will be rewarded with untold riches.  You could be in for a nasty surprise at evaluation time as you stroll in ready to count your money, only to realise you have not reached any of the targets set by the school.

As is obvious from my post, I have many questions and no answers.  I am hoping someone reads this post and could share their own ideas or experiences regarding PRP.  Do you work in a school that adopts it?  Do you think it’s a good idea?

Opta Stats for ELT?

I’m a big football (soccer) fan.  I also have an occasional fondness for reading the latest statistics.  How many miles did this player run?  How many crosses did that player make?  It has become more and more important as coaches analyse every aspect of their players performances in the hope of gaining that extra edge that brings home the cup.  Diet, specialised training schedules, resting players have all been influenced, sometimes very strongly by statistical analysis.  Fans spend their time reading the latest stats from the latest match (If you are a sports stat nerd you can visit @OptaJoe on twitter)

I thought of this as I attended a recent seminar about blended learning.  The focus of the seminar was how online learning was integrated into the latest editions of a certain publishers books.  It seems a number of publishers are realising the growing importance of blended learning and trying to incorporate it further into their books.

The seminar did get me thinking about blended learning in a broader sense.  I’ll be honest, I have no experience in this field.  I work in a strictly offline environment.  About the most high-tech I get is putting a CD in the player or turning on the air con.  However, as a bit of a nerd I was attracted to the idea of statistical analysis in the ELT field.  It did intrigue me.  My students could do work at home and I could see all the data set out for me in shiny barcharts and graphs.  How many times they had to do a particular task,  how long it took them etc.

My initial reaction was fascination, filled with grand schemes of all the work I could get them to do, of how I could follow their every move from my own PC at home.  The possibilities seemed endless.  Phonics work, gap filling exercises, mini tests etc  Oh, how my heart was all a flutter.

After I calmed down I looked at the positives and negatives.

Positives

The first positive that sprung into my mind, was rather selfish.  If they do all this work at home, and the results are collated and presented to me by the publisher, I won’t have to check homework in class.  I can devote those vital 10 minutes or so to a task or discussion.  Yippee!  Of course, I would still have to check work, but the potential to reduce homework checking made me feel a little giddy.

Secondly,similar to homework checks, I could get them to do exercises in their own time that they were perfectly capable of doing alone.  I always try to do something in class that they can’t do at home so they get the full benefit of  class time with a teacher.  I don’t really see the benefit of me being there if I spend 50 minutes standing beside the CD player hitting the pause/play button.

The third positive which occurred to me, in a Machiavellian moment, was how I could control my classes.  Design specialised exercises based on the statistics.  I could see myself pouring over all the information, and decide…. that Jimmy has to do extra listening homework.

This is all rather tongue in cheek, but I am excited by the potential to see some of the students stronger and weaker points and create exercises, lessons plans and homework that will zero in on their specific needs.

Negatives

To use the footballing analogy again, famous coaches have won trophies using statistical analysis as a cornerstone of their approach.  League titles, European cups have been won, with great credit given to Opta stat type approaches. However, it is also an approach which has been accused of being impersonal and treating players more as statistics rather than humans beings.  Is this a danger in ELT?  Could we start looking at the stats and forgetting the humans?  Will we approach each lesson  thinking only of our students’ statistical weaknesses?  Probably not, but as the importance and use of online content within traditional courses increases, it will be important not to get caught up solely in the figures.

The danger is that schools will just buy new editions of books and clumsily add-on the online learning to the existing traditional coursebook with no thought about how to truly integrate it so the students get a true blended learning experience.

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As I said,  I have no practical experience of blended learning so I’m an outsider looking in and trying to grasp what it all means.  Do you think blended learning will continue to become more and more important in the future?  Is it the real deal?

Behind Enemy Lines – integrating personal teaching beliefs!

This is my third year teaching.  It is fair to say, it is the year I have grown AND stagnated the most as a teacher.  It is the year I realised that teaching was no longer something I was doing just to allow me the means to travel and see the world.  I fell in love with the job and want it to be a lifelong career.  I joined twitter and discovered many great ELT teachers with many great ELT blogs (a small sample of which are on the blogroll to the right).  I have started to really find out what kind of teacher I am, and more importantly, what kind of teacher I want to become.  I seem to have followed a typical teacher development cycle.  First year, just figure out what I’m doing.  I had no experience, no qualifications.  Second year, enjoy the fact that I have, at least, some experience, have some idea what I’m doing and love going into class.  Third year,  no longer happy just to ‘teach by numbers’ but ready to put my own stamp and my own ideas into classes.  I want to develop my teaching.

This really is a big issue for me.  I started to write this post about how I could bring my own style and beliefs into a class in a company that may not share them.  How can I teach the way I want to teach, yet still teach in the way that my employers want me to teach?  After all, they do pay my salary.  This is not a vanity project for me.  They pay me, I’ll teach how they want me to.  However, I also owe loyalty to my students, and to teach them in the way that I believe will benefit them.  Is there a way to teach according to your own beliefs and ideals and also satisfy the academy.  My school owners have been in the ELT business much longer than I have.  Who am I to put aside their methods and replace them with my own?  After all, I often remind myself, if the academy goes out of business, I can get a new job, but it is the owners who lose their livelihood.

As I was writing this post I saw a post on twitter that the next #KELTchat would be about this very subject.  ’What a coincidence’, I thought.  As I reflected on it, I realised that it was not, in fact, a coincidence at all.  Surely, many teachers feel this way, particularly in Korea.  For me, the answer has not been easy to reach.  I am not there yet.  I have developed ways that I can try to find a happy medium between the heavy coursebook use demanded of me and my own beliefs of a more humanist approach that involves using the students as resources, working on emerging language, pair work etc  (Dare I use the ‘d’ word…?)

I have tried to introduce ‘dogme moments’ into my classroom.  Those few minutes of each class where I can take a detour behind enemy lines and forget about the coursebook.  They are brief, but often lead to the richest conversations, where students are suddenly talking about topics of interest to them.  Students previously slumped in their chairs with glazed over eyes, become alert and eager to use English.  Why are they eager to speak?  I believe it is because they get a chance to talk about something meaningful to them.  I see students who rarely speak or give one word answers change, and start to search their brains for the right words to express what they want to say.  We are no longer discussing coursebook topics such as ‘processed corn products’.  They care about the topic and want to reach out.

Is it possible to teach your way within tight institutional frameworks?  Like  most things in life, the answer probably lies in reaching a compromise.  You need to know what is expected from your bosses, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bring something of yourself to the classroom.  We are not robots whose function is to hand out gap filling exercises or press play on the CD player.  We have a chance to show our enthusiasm, to attempt to transmit it to the students, to engage them (or bore them less).  As it is, I will continue in my attempt to become an above average teacher by bringing my teaching beliefs into the classroom.

Are you not entertained?

‘Are you not entertained?’.  So asks Russell Crowe in Gladiator.  It is a question I sometimes wonder whether I should ask my students.  Should teachers be entertainers, especially with young learners?  I was recently watching the ‘Three Amigos’ movie.  One scene involves the trio trying to entertain the local rough crowd in a bar while attempting to get them to sing along to ‘My Little Buttercup’.  Is this what it is like to be an entertainer in the classroom?

Now, I feel some teachers are natural entertainers, some are not.  I like to think of myself as quite entertaining in the classroom, but my students may disagree.  However, the fact that someone is more or less serious in front of their class shouldn’t really reflect badly on them… or should it?

I work in Korea which has a billion dollar industry in private academies(Hagwans) teaching English .  It is a dog eat dog world.  Hagwans open and close everyday.  Students can leave at a drop of a hat. Something that was said to me by another teacher in my first week in Korea has always stuck with me. ‘They won’t ask the kids if you are good.  They’ll ask them if they like you.’  Isn’t this a problem?  Of course, we all hope that our students like us.  We try to form a connection, make the class an interesting and safe place to encourage and promote learning.  I don’t think any of us want our students dreading the moment they enter our class.

The worry I have is that the balance has gone too far in one direction.  In a system where private academies have to balance their books, entertaining teachers can often be automatically perceived as ‘good’ teachers.  Quite simply, if the students like their teacher, regardless of the teachers ability, the students are more likely to stay in the academy, and therefore, keep the money rolling in.  The potential negative side of this is that sometimes, teachers who do very little apart from playing games with little or no educational value are popular.

Students in Korea not only have school and English academy to deal with.  Some students can attend up to four or five other academies such as Chinese, Art, Math, Music etc.  They can welcome a class with a teacher who ‘mucks about’.  Even some school owners have been known to welcome this.  What about those poor teachers that are of a more serious nature?  Are they in danger of being undervalued because they happen to be less lighthearted in class?

In saying all this, my approach is very much one of trying to engage the students, have fun, but always with the goal of learning at the end of it.

For me, teachers come in all shape and sizes.  With regard to young learners, I prefer to see high energy teachers showing enthusiasm and transmitting that enthusiasm to the students.   However, does this mean that, in a highly competitive industry, more reserved teachers may be judged harshly?

Grading

Thanks to Phil Wade for this guest post.  If you want to read more of his insights into the ELT world, please read his blog at http://eflthoughtsandreflections.wordpress.com/.  

Barry

Over to Phil…

I am not fond of grading students because everywhere I work has a different marking scheme. Some give overall marks and others mark per category. This is fine but when you have 8 of them and the participation mark only represents 40 or 30% of the total mark, things get tricky.

Here’s an example:

Course marks allocation

• 40%Final test
• 30%Participation
• 30%Mid-term test

Now hold on…

The 30% participation is then broken down into many sub-categories:

• 20%Grammatical accuracy
• 20%Vocabulary range
• 20%Topic understanding
• 20%Positive contribution to class
• 10%Homework
• 10%Tasks

Now, I hate maths, partly due to this type of admin, but this gets crazy.

Do we need to be so accurate? And if so how do we actually grade grammatical accuracy for example?

Here’s one sub-sub category from a school I know:

1. Basic grammar with many errors
2. Intermediate grammar with some errors
3. Advanced grammar with no errors.

Hmmm.So now I need to decide how I judge ‘basic/int/adv’ grammar and then convert a score out of 3 into 20.

In the end I may end up with a seemingly correct mark but I always have to tweak them so why bother? Why not just give an overall mark? Possibly just so when questioned you can explain why X student got Y mark but is it all worth the amount of headache and grey hairs?

Questions

How do you grade participation?

How accurate is it?

What’s the best way?

Rethinking how we treat the quiet student?

Reading through an article this week in the Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/13/why-the-world-needs-introverts ) has made me think deeply over the past couple of days.  The article dealt with introverts and touched briefly on how our classrooms are organized.  Afterall, we are constantly told that groupwork, pairwork, and student interaction all lead to improvements in language learning.  I’m not for one minute suggesting that we should discard any of these.  I know their value.  The article did, however, make me rethink my own approach to ‘quiet’ students.

In my academy, I have to write report cards every three months.  A recurring comment is that certain students needs to participate more.  Students who participate are better…right?  Well, not necessarily.  It does appear (though not always) that students who talk more, have a higher skill at speaking. However, I have students who never participate who are excellent at listening, reading, writing etc.  Are we in danger of treating quiet students as second class citizens?

In reflecting on the introverts in my classes, I think I may have been a bit harsh on them.  I admit that I am also an introvert.  It is the reason I was drawn to the article.  Maybe as a teacher, in my desire to get students interacting, I forgot that many kids are introverts too.

I guess the question is, do we all need to rethink how we approach the introverts?