These are guidelines for having a successful lesson. There are a lot of things to keep in mind, and some of them are obvious. We have included them for the sake of completeness.

Location/setup:

• Have a tidy background to your video.
• Display The English Farm logo in a professional manner. 
• Have some front lighting, ideally diffused, to illuminate your face.
• Have an audio setup that allows the student to hear your voice clearly. Avoid your computer’s internal mic if it picks up the sound of typing too loudly. Avoid your computer’s internal speakers as it can create an echo for the student. Use a headset or at least headphones for best audio quality.

Fundamentals: 

• Always be on time. Message the student one minute before the lesson time starts.

• Be able to focus on the lesson at hand. Keep your attention on the student.

• Dress professionally—as you would for a job interview. 
• Encourage the use of video.

• Finish the lesson record as soon as possible after the lesson is done.

• Write a good lesson record: remind the student of the key teaching points, give them lots of new words and phrases. Address it to the student (not in the third person). You can add Youtube video or pictures if you think they will be useful.
• Make use of the recording feature in the lesson record.
• Enter at least the next lesson information and lesson title. If you need to come back and finish the record later, then click “save draft” so the next teach can see next lesson information.
• Have a professional Skype display name(e.g. Jeremy | The English Farm) & photo (which matches your profile pic).

Teaching

• Write lots of notes in the chat.
  • Did I say write A LOT of notes? Write A LOT of notes.
  • Write them into the chat and save them in the lesson record.
• Correct most mistakes. 
  • Do not let bad habits fester. Correct even minor persistent problems.
  • Explain the details of the mistakes and the logic behind them.
  • Give lots of feedback in a timely fashion—interrupting sometimes is okay. Manage this carefully.
• Challenge listening the right amount. 
  • Speak slowly and clearly to begin with, but ramp it up as you get to know the student—challenge them always!
• Teach to your strengths. 
  • Don't try to be something you are not. You can always let your student teach you about their specialty as you correct their grammar and word usage.  
  • Ask open questions, and get the student to teach you as much as they can about what they know. You'll learn a lot too.
  • Make sure your grammar and knowledge is tight, but if you don’t know, admit it and research the answer (Google it or ask on the all-staff chat.) Report back to the student next class or send them a chat message with the answer.  It'll impress them.
• Be high impact.
  • Do not spend too much time making the student read—a couple of minutes is the absolute maximum. They should have read ahead before the class. If they haven't, skip and adapt. If they do have to read, then use the exercise to work on pronunciation or fluency.
  • At every point in the course, ask yourself from the student’s point of view, “Is this new?” and “Is this important?”
  • Don't grind through the course for the sake of it; if you do skip things, make sure you explain clearly why and ask the student if they are OK with it.
  • Don't while away the lesson in free conversation (it is easy to get to the end of 25 minutes and find that you haven't touched the course). This only OK if the student specifically asks for it at the beginning of the class.
• Be flexible.
  • Always ask, “What would you like to do today?” at the start of the class. Have a plan A (the course) and a plan B (a discussion or similar), and be open to sudden needs. 
• Keep the lessons focused.
  • Try to use the books as much as you can. Use discussion lessons provided when they say that they don’t want to do the text. The student is the boss ultimately, but we want to discourage students from only doing discussion or test practice. They must learn functional English too (for business and corporate clients in particular). It might not be as appealing, but it's a disservice to the student if we don't teach them what they need.
• Review and link lessons together.
  • Make sure you know what they did last time and where to kick off your lesson.
  • Pick a few key language points from the last lesson to review.
• Be a quality guide.
  • Talk the student through the exercises in the book and make sure that they understand what is going on.
  • Check to see if they have prepared for the class, and go through their answers.
• Be strict and focussed on getting through the book, but friendly.
  • Understand your student’s business—see the company summary for corporate clients from the link on their profiles. There's plenty of information there.
  • Knowledge is important (make sure you know the topic and read the teacher notes/answers). You can ninja Google in the lesson and appear like the font of all things.
• Be student-focused.
  • Allow your student to provide examples, contexts and partly take the lead on exercises.
  • Put things in terms of the student’s life, work and interests.
  • Check frequently for questions and feedback.
• Be nice.
  • Praise your student.
  • Be super polite. Lots of pleases and thank yous.
  • Smile when you talk. Even if they cannot see you, it'll come through in your voice.
• Help your student be polite. 
  • Teach people to speak professionally and politely, and to do that, lead by example
  • Make them treat you with respect and good manners. Explain that you don’t care, but it is a good habit for dealing with colleagues and customers. (Don't let them say, "What?”, “Yea, yea, yea.” etc...)
• Be interesting. 
  • Explain and give lots of examples.
  • Make conversation & add interesting insight and examples.
  • Imagine business contexts and use business English.
  • Add to the text. Teach professional & natural expressions. Bring up different ways of saying things as much as you can.
  • Introduce new words and different ways to say things, especially if they are simple but non-obvious to the non-native speaker.
• In the case of no-shows, be available.
  • Wait for the WHOLE class, except if you hear from the student. Do not bail after 5 minutes. They are paying for the whole session, so you must make yourself available.
• Life happens, and that’s okay.
  • So long as it doesn’t happen often: interruptions are okay (some of us have little kids and it happens); being a little bit late is okay; tech trouble is okay. Apologise and make up the time that class if you can or in the next session. If you cannot do the class at all, apologise profusely and we'll give them back their point. You can do this yourself. Make sure you write up a lesson record and indicate that a refund should be given. Explain in detail what happened (both in the comment to the student and the refund field. Their point will be automatically refunded. Don't delete lessons from the schedule after the lesson time has passed.
• Be neutral, but not too much.
  • Try to speak as ‘internationally’ as possible, but also play up your own brand of English. Try to convey how diverse "English" is.
  • Give your opinion sparingly. Ask for your student's opinion as much as possible.