Job Discussion Forums

[Golightly]

This thread does what it says on the tin.
It is for positive ideas only.
Any posts slagging off any language school, ESPECIALLY ones that have a shared acronym with a certain Steven Spielberg character, and I'll get this thread locked
How can EFL teaching in Turkey be made better?
Ideas?
Or will this end up as one of the shortest threads ever?

[31]

Only employ qualified teachers and check all references with the referee and qualifications with the awarding bodies.

Only employ teachers legally, with work permits and with SSK.

Have a decent mix of new teachers, teachers with the dip/MA.

Pay a good salary and have a pay scale that reflects experience, qualifications and time with the school.

Offer decent financial incentives in order to encourage the teachers to do the dip, MAs by distance learning etc.

Encourage the students to study for exams like KET, PET etc.

Good facilities and access to journals and magazines like MET.

Pay has to be enough to keep experienced teachers who may like to marry and have kids and to stop people leaving.

DOSes who have some kind of management qualification.

Regular observations and decent feedback.

Good quality accomodation that is not shared and not in Buyuksehir when you are working in Taksim. Or a housing allowance that actually covers the cost of renting your own flat.

Subsidised private medical insurance and pension.

A bonus scheme.

Free water, tea and coffee.

No split shifts.

A teachers` association that acts a bit like a union that you can go to with problems and will negotiate with management.

ET offers none of the above.

[Baba Alex]

Hire a donkey

[justme]

[31]

The British Council in Cairo which is a big employer of teachers has a Teachers` Association.

The problem with a blacklist of schools is that if it was done properly most of the schools would be on it.

A blacklist of businessmen would have the same problem.

I am less sympathetic to the Turkish teachers because where I have worked with lots of Turkish teachers such as a private uni or high school I have mostly found that they are only interested in going through a grammar book, giving out gap fills and doing private lessons in the evenings and weekends for which they double their salary.
I have never seen one do the DELTA, make their own teaching materials other than gapfills or do anything other than go through the textbook or grammar book. Why should they be paid more?

[justme]

I agree, there definitely are some dreadful Turkish teachers out there. And there are plenty whose English is crap. What fun it is trying to convince a class that something their Turkish teacher told them is 100% wrong. They never believe you, and you run the risk of slagging off your co-workers to the students...

But there are also some really good ones. Dedicated, well-trained, constantly striving to improve their work, beautiful English, and above all, a good non-native speaker teacher is more sympathetic to the problems of learning English, at least I think so. And those people are doing this with very little incentive and crappy pay. If the conditions were better for the Turkish teachers, the bad ones might have some incentive to do better at their jobs, or they might just give up and go away if something more were expected of them. The good ones would at least be getting proper compensation for what they do.

I brought up better conditions for the Turks because of the tacit, seething resentment in the workplace between the foreigners and the Turks. Usually, there's a big gap between the two, and neither supports the other. It just makes the job even more uncomfortable all around, I think...

[31]

Out of curiousity were the Turks paying for the course themselves or were they being sponsored?

[31]

I have so much to say about ITI and loads of gossip from years ago.

Would you like it by PM or shall I dignify the whole forum with my comments and gossip? If so, would you like me to start a new thread?

I am right about ET and you know it.

[justme]

[31]

Do you mean a blacklist purely based on whether the organisation rips off teachers financially rather than on non monetary conditions?

When I worked for English Fast I got the little money I was entitled to but at the time what made me angry was that I was cheated on conditions and treated like crap.

You are right about Sinan but newbies get conned by him for a number of reasons. How would you get the blacklist to newbies before they got to Ist? Here on the forum but what about those who don`t read it?

[ghost]

[31]

The topic of the thread was how can it be made better. We all know the realities.

[saloma]

At my current school here in Taiwan, Chinese teachers (CT's) are paid the same as foreign teachers(FT's). (There is a bit of a difference because a lot of the CT's are undergrads, so they get slightly lower pay, but it's not much). From there the pay advances according to your performance and number of hours worked.

CT's are usually stronger teachers than FT's because they stay on year after year. They also have opportunity to observe a lot of classes. Because of this set up, CT's and FT's have a good working relationship.

Just out of curiosity, what is the longest a native-speaking teacher has worked at your school? At ours, we have two guys who have been there forever, one 12 and one 15 years! (and other's who flee after 3 classes!)

[molly farquharson]

I would love to see an association of language schools, both a business one and a professional one. I used to be very active in associations, gave papers, etc,, but then I came here, where it is a totally different ballgame. I think if the school managements got together they could exert some pressure on the government to make it easier to jump through the legal hoops. That may also result in the government having more oversight on the language schools, which may or may not be a good thing.

As for the teacher side, I looked into joing INGED some years ago but was rather put off by it. It seemed rather academic and not much related to the realities of what I am doing. A TEFL teachers' association would have to have some legal status here in order to exist, as I understand it. Which means that some people would have to get together and make it happen. And I am not volunteering, as I am way too busy. What would the mission of such a group be? making blacklists? that's ok but it's not constructive. Working to improve teachers' conditions? That's good. How, exactly? Which ones? What's the priority? What would be the strategies? How would people learn about it? Not everyone read Dave's...

Thanks for starting this thread. It is something I have been thinking about off and on, but too busy to do more than that.

[31]

There is an association of language schools as you well know. It has been around for ages and meets to try and set rates.