Many ALTs have written saying how their board of education has asked them to do a workshop for the Japanese Elementary School teachers in their town. Many people have written asking for help so here’s a post I put on the forum a few weeks ago:

I’ve also put up an article on the site of the basic Teaching Teachers stuff, have a read of this first.

Here are a couple of practical tricks that work:

* To cure the fear of making mistakes:
Start off with some simple stand up, sit downs. Then tell them that they are too slow, the kids are so much faster! ( The really respond to this). Then really build up to it saying “OK, let’s go really fast!”. Do a big, slow “3, 2, 1” countdown ( some people will stand up here which gets a laugh), then as you raise your hands in the air shout out “Sit down”. Of course some of them will stand. This is a great time to do a really shocked expression and say something like “Oh, no! You made a mistake! That’s it, were finished, oh no it’s terrible” ( Machigaeta hito iru ne? Taihen! Dou shou?). Hopefully then someone will say “No, it’s OK, it’s just a joke.” Then you can say “Yeah, but in Junior High you all learnt that making mistakes in English is bad. You all want to speak with the ALTs, but are too afraid of making mistakes, yeah?” ( Demo mina wa chugakkou de “machigae shitara dame” to naratta deshou? ALT to hanashi shitai kedo machigae shitakunai deshou?”) (nods from the crowd) “What can we do? ” (expression of desperation). This gets a lot of “naruhodos” and you can then start off with the “Making mistakes is good. People who don’t make mistakes aren’t trying hard enough” ( machigae shiteinai hito ha jyuubun gannbatte inai – you will need to say all this in Japanese!).

* To cure the “I can’t teach English” problem

Then I do a bit of a TPR style warm up, showing how you can introduce different themes ( e.g. sports, music, emotions etc.). Then if you have 20 or less teachers it’s great to put them in a circle and each one in turn shouts out a command for the group ( with a gesture of course). If they make a mistake, really make a big thing that they are the only ones who are trying hard! They’ll be able to accept that and you can correct them. That should then spur the rest of them on to try more adventurous stuff than simply “clap” or “cheer”.

The cool thing with this is that later on if they start saying “Yeah, but we can’t teach English” you can say, “You just did!”.

It’s confidence tricks like this that really make the difference.

*Where’s the story?”

It’s also good to spell out your vision of what the target is, where we are going with English lessons, in Seth Godin’s words “Where’s the story?”. If you can show them the beginning, middle, end and where they are supposed to lead up to after the 6 years of study it really helps get the pathway fixed in their minds. For example here’s what I use. From then on it’s just a case of removing any obstacles from the road.

Have a look at the basics article I wrote, and if you you need more help, you could always play the Genki English Teacher Training video, or if you really don’t want to do the workshop yourself, invite me along and I’ll have them genki and stress free in no time!

Be genki,

Richard

If you’d like to add to this post, have a look at the Genki English forum.