We experience a lot of late students, no-shows, and late cancelations, so we should all be in the habit of using that paid time productively.
Doing the following activities are all ways to sharpen your skills, get more lessons, and show that The English Farm is a place where teachers genuinely care about our students.
Here are things you can do followed by detailed information about how to do them:
- contact sleepers,
- follow-up with regulars,
- update/clean up student profiles,
- complete lesson records for your other lessons,
- prepare for upcoming lessons,
- contribute to the all-staff chat,
- flag lesson records, and/or
- plan and write content.
Here's the detailed information:
1. Contact sleepers—look back at your schedule and find students who haven’t taken a lesson in a while. Send them a friendly message. There are some ideas of messages in the next section.
If you are new or you’ve exhausted the students you know, then contact support for a list of sleeping clients and how to get in touch with them support@theenglishfarm.com.
2. Follow up with regulars—the same as with sleeping clients above. Think of it as keeping in touch, like you would with anyone, regardless of when you last saw them. The key is to not make it a sales thing or to do it too much. There are basically three ways this could go:
1) A catch-up/hello message like what you might send to a friend to follow up on their news or ask after their well-being.
Hey -------, it was good to see you on Monday! You mentioned a big client meeting. I hope it went well. Is everything on track?
2) A follow up from a recent class with a nugget, trying to entice the student to remember/use something you have taught them recently.
------, how are you? We were talking about prepositions/articles and pushing them into the next word, so "nice to meet you" becomes "ni-stewMIIT-chu". I thought of another word, "morrow". Have you heard of it? Probably not. Because we always say "tomorrow", this is a case of the preposition "to" getting pushed into the next word. I thought it's interesting. Anyway, I hope you are practicing a little everyday. See you later.
3) Recommending content or media you think that they might be interested in (with a link).
Hello ------, I was thinking about our class the other day. We talked about using GET versus BECOME, as in "the weather is getting colder." We actually have a blog post about this! Check it out: https://theenglishfarm.com/blog/how-properly-describe-your-spring-aller…
Hi ------- , we talked about word stress and emphasis. The comedian is learning English and he has the same trouble! Take a look when you have time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1syXYTG4qVY
3. Update student profiles—just go through the students you have taught and carefully read their profiles. Make sure they have ample information in their profile and also make sure to move old information to the student history box (like requests leading up to tests that have come and gone).
4. Complete lesson records—make sure your lesson records are up to date, and add a voice memo if you worked on anything related to fluency or pronunciation.
5. Prepare for upcoming classes—take a look ahead, prepare warmup questions or exercises and take a look at G.B.C. scores.
6. Contribute to the all-staff chat—if you have any topics or questions you’d like to discuss, there is a good chance other teachers have insight. Use the all-staff chat or reply to a forum topic.
7. Check out other teachers' lesson records—this is very useful. Just click through other teachers' lesson records to gather tips and tricks. Also check out variations of style. Be sure to flag both positive and negative records so that managers can look too. It's an anonymous system and it helps us maintain and support quality work. Use the buttons at the top of the page: "Great record" or "Needs review".
8. Plan and write content—it’s a great way to add to the site and increase your number of bookings. Take a look at the content creation page for more info.
If you have any questions, comments or if there are any activities you want to add to this list, please contact a manager.
Note that the number of no-shows varies seasonally. You can expect a higher number of no-shows during the end of corporate contracts. If you are unsure when that is, you can check when user points are expiring on any corporate student profile, it's under Student Points below the Next Lesson box.
As stated in training, make sure you are available for the full 25-minutes of your no-show. If you need to step away from your computer for a moment then turn up the volume so that you can hear any calls or messages that come through.