there's a lot to learn if you want to be an English teacher and I've got the 15 skills that all English teachers should focus on if they want to be an ace in the classroom and get the love respect and Adoration of all their students and this all begins by clicking that subscribe button just do it just do it what's up guys it's Chris westergard from the language house your ESL Guru in Prague in this video I'm covering 15 skills that you should practice if you want to be great in the classroom these are the same skills that we train our trainees at the language house on our Temple course speaking of which if you want to teach abroad if you want to move and live in a foreign country if you want to train with me and the rest of the staff at the language house check our course out we run one of the most popular and intense Temple certification courses in the world with that let's get into the 15 skills good teachers know how to make their materials pop in terms of the presentation visuals and the content they use add a little bit of color cut things out use props and adapt to make boring worksheets and speaking activities come to life teachers big tip if you struggle with material creation or with lesson planning or if you just don't even know where to begin I mean so many people contact me and they say I'm a new teacher I don't even know where to start I don't know what to teach my students and I'm freaking out if you're in that category after this video watch the video first but after the video head over to the website fluent.com and get yourself a year membership I like this company so much that I get memberships for all of the grads of the language house and I contacted them about a year ago and now all of the viewers of my channel can get 20% off their entire site if you use my code Chris 20 these guys will save you hundreds of hours of lesson planning each year and they really make teaching easy their site has hundreds of lessons ready to go all of them have all of the materials and they're all built around an engaging video so save the hassle save the stress and get a membership to fluen tize stt stands for student talking time and it should be prioritized over everything teaching English it's not like other subjects it's more like being an athletic coach where your students are the athletes we want them to be doing the majority of the work some general principles are to use a lot of pair and group work to make your classroom more student centered and interactive and to always have activities that push student talking time whenever possible good teachers prioritize student talking time in their lesson have you ever had a teacher that could make even the most mundane topics engag engaging that is the magic of Engagement we want our students engaged you can't really motivate students if they don't find your presentation or even yourself interesting couple things that you can do it's the way that you carry yourself it's your voice it's the activities and the props that you use and it's going to be like the fun games and the competitions that you incorporate it's also going to be your personal flar you should try to engage your students right when you enter into the class contrary to popular belief in a language classroom less is always more you want something to work on Master your own voice you want it to be that you don't speak that much and when you do you make every single word count you want your voice to be clear you want it to be audible you want it to be that the language that you use your students understand this is such an underrated tool that teachers often times neglect and it can really be a pivotal point in your lesson so practice your voice I've got a video on this that details everything that you need to do make your students laugh and they'll love you humor is such a powerful thing to incorporate into your lessons it's such a necessary skill and kind of a hard skill to improve but if you can do it you will see immediate results guys I've watched like I've watched thousands of teachers teach like literally thousand thousands of different teachers teach and I've seen some really really bad teachers too some of these bad teachers though they were funny and because they were funny their students love them like it's actually really sad because there were other people who were much better than them but all of the students liked the bad funny teacher and I would go up to the students and I would say you know he's really Pat like he he doesn't know what he's doing and they would say yes but he is funny we like him because he is funny saying all right so obviously be a good teacher too but if you're funny and good you're basically you can do whatever you want like you can rob banks when I think about teaching and I think about what is actually happening in the classroom it really all revolves around eliciting and this is essentially pulling information out from students when many people think about education or learning a language in their brain they think of a professor up in front of the board lecturing to students and the students are may be taking notes but in reality we don't want it to be that way we want our students to be active participants in the entire process so use elicits both verbal and non-verbal and use guided discoveries to pull that meaning and to teach that meaning in more of an interactive way good teachers elicit all of the time I've got some videos that will give you some tips on how to do that on the flip side to heising is CC Qing and ccq stand for concept check questions essentially what ccq are is there a way of checking comprehension without asking do you understand and you might ask well why not just ask students if they've understood it seems pretty basic right but the reality is is if you ask a student if they've understood something they will probably just say yes and they might say yes because they want you to leave them alone or they might say yes because they think they've OD but they're wrong so instead you ask ccq so you're going to be doing this for grammar for Lexus and even just for directions you should always be CC Qing and you can use this in any type of teaching environment I've got a video on it over here demoing a very easy thing to do but also really important it kind of goes hand inand with the earlier skill the economy language teachers voice a lot of teachers what they do is they get up and they lecture Direction to people don't do that instead show the students what they're supposed to do if it's a role play you play the role if it's a fill-in-the blank sheet you do it demo it out try to get rid of this idea that you can communicate with your voice because with lower levels you can't and not only is it good for directions but it's a great way to sell that activity if you do a fun demo of your role play if you play that role really well your students are going to see that it's a fun activity they're going to jump in it so demo everything all of the time another big skill is to try to run your entire course in L2 that means no L1 no mother tongue nothing no translation we want this completely in English some of you especially if you speak your students language might go ah that seems really daunting or it's impractical but trust me if you have these other skills down you should be able to run it all in L2 without any problem it will help them learn the language better if it's all in English all the time you've got your students in groups great they're using a lot of student talking time even better it all goes to waste though if you're kind of in the background passively watching them you don't want to do that the next skill is monitoring and this means you need to get close you need to probably Crouch down and get to their eye level and while you're here you're going to be doing a couple things you're going to obviously be error correcting them you're going to be doing also a lot of positive reinforcement and pushing the good things that they're doing you're going to be controlling for L1 so making sure that they're using English all of the time you're going to be pushing the specific language and grammatical structures that you want and also you're just going to be hanging out a bit and building report that's important too good teachers monitor you need to be able to monitor to do error correction speaking of which error correction one of the most important skills for any teacher is their ability to error correct you can be the most engaging teacher in the world you can have the highest student talking time you can use the best materials but it all goes to waste if you don't error correct contrary to popular belief students crave to be error corrected and the reason is obvious they want to get better and students will get better through your ability to error correct them the trick to error correction is not to tell them what they're doing wrong you want to elicit those mistakes out and you want your elicits to be fast and to the point and to be quick so you get those Corrections fast this will allow you to error correct in a really seamless way that's really tight and sharp and that's what you want pace and flow nothing is worse I mean nothing is worse than watching a teacher and their lesson just kind of just kind of drags on right everything's so slow like everybody's so bored like that is just it's so terrible to watch this if you suffer from insomnia this would be the perfect thing to watch to put you right to sleep as a teacher just dragging on good teachers have a Brisk Pace you should set your activities up in advance they should have clear breaks when they end and you as a teacher should be pushing the pace to reach their completion your class starts on time great everybody's in their desks perfect it ends on time even better the desks are arranged to your liking your materials are all organized and everything just kind of works skill teachers incorporate a variety of tricks to keep that ship running smoothly number one prepare what you can in advance number two delegate specific duties to your class you don't have to be doing it all get them to do it and number three use your leadership skills to get it all done use your voice use your gestures use your body posture and the simple way that you interact with people if you have these leadership skills your students will follow your command your lessons should have a clear goal in terms of the language that they're using and the improvements that you want your students to make a lot of teachers just get in there and they kind of teach a bunch of stuff and then they leave but good teachers should visualize in a lesson like where do you want your students at the end of the lesson how do you want them sounding how many mistakes you want them making what type of language you want them to be using what's their volume like contractions blah blah blah blah blah all those other things and you want to push your students to what that goal is so what I do in my lessons I try to visualize like I really think like what do I want my students to be doing how do I want them to be sounding and through error correction positive reinforcement studies and everything else in the lesson I try to push them to that specific point and that point can be for a lesson but it can also as mentioned be for many lessons for the entire semester that I have with them and I'll spend a little bit more time here because it's really important students when students see that your brain is thinking this way that you have a goal for them you will just kind of Skyrocket in their brain in terms of an educator like so many students would come up to me and say I actually feel like there's some sort of progression taking place like I understand where I was and I understand where you want me to be and I understand how I'm supposed to get there and this is great because in so many of my other lessons we showed up we played some games blah blah blah blah blah and I left but I didn't know where I was and I didn't know where I was supposed to be so this is important having goals and reaching those goals we are on the last skill did you watch the whole thing are you still watching if yes grab yourself a juice box cuz that's pretty incredible the last skill on my list is empathy good teachers have empathy and when we think of empathy a lot of times we think about like caring and feeling and that is true but when I think about empathy in the classroom it's more about reading the room the only way that I can motivate and reach my students is I need to try to see the world through their eyes students are different people are different there are students who I can have fun with and I can make jokes with and I can even kind of criticize a little bit kind of have a playful banter and they'll love it and they'll do it back to me and everybody thinks it's funny and everybody's going to laugh there's other students if I do that same exact thing they're going to cry like they're just going to start crying you know how do I know which one I can do that with and part of it is just as mentioned being able to look at people and to try to make those flash judgments you're not going to be right all of the time but you have to start doing it a little bit some classes will want you to dress more formally other classes will prefer it if you're more casual some students are going to like like really interactive wild Bonkers activities other people aren't going to like that they're going to want things more subdued so the way to do this is You can predict it a little bit based on age and like cultural backgrounds and other things but a lot of it is simply like looking at your class and taking in all of this information and then if something isn't working or if you're getting a vibe that is off a little bit you have to Pivot and you have to reach their expectations guys and that is it 15 skills work on these they're really important as always thanks for watching