Four Day Teaching Week
I’ve been helping my wife to run her school, Cambridge English in Sendai, for almost twenty years now. One of our main goals is to make it the best working environment possible.
A couple of years ago I had an idea: what if we could cut the teaching week to four days? Our school needs three full time teachers to teach all the classes, but that means that if someone is sick or wants to take a day off we have a problem.
And that is not fair to the teachers. They shouldn’t feel pressured to work just because we don’t have any slack in the system. But that is how things are at many small eikaiwas.
If we could just hire a fourth teacher, we would have someone to cover. It would also allow us to cut the regular teaching load from 26-7 classes a week to 20.
Each teacher would teach three weekdays and Saturday, and have one day to prep, work on projects, or cover for someone else if they couldn’t be there that day. Teachers who proved they were able to work independently could work from home on their non-teaching day.
It seems like a win-win. The teachers will be more relaxed and have time to work on our curriculum and materials and the school will become more robust.
We are not planning to reduce salaries due to this change, so our school should become a more attractive place to work, which should allow us to keep teachers for longer and have more applicants to choose from when we do need to hire someone.
Is anyone else doing a four-day teaching week or considering one?
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by sendaiben
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Cambridge Academy: Year Four and Five
It’s all coming together. Or is it?
You can read previous Academy posts here:
- Extensive Reading for Secondary Students (April 2015)
- Six Months In (September 2015)
- Year One (February 2016)
- Looking at Year Two (March 2016)
- Stocktake (March 2016)
- Shadoku explained (April 2016)
- Some improvements to the curriculum (April 2016)
- December 2016 update (December 2016)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Two and Three (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2017 (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Another Quantum Leap (April 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Mid-Year Update (August 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Student Progress (October 2017)
- The Academy Fluency Course (March 2018)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2018 (March 2018)
This year was a solid one for the Academy but we definitely had some ups and downs.
Mistakes were made (by me)
Let’s start with the downs: we screwed up badly not just once but twice. The first mistake was getting a bit cocky about the Academy and changing the way we explained it to existing students.
In the past we’d gone into each class with 6th graders in, introduced the Academy and encouraged them to join. Almost everyone did.
Last year, we asked everyone to come to a special explanation session on a Sunday, then asked them to come in again in January and line up to sign up for the days they wanted. Only about half the students joined.
This is a mistake we’ll be paying for for the next five years, as we have a year that is quite a bit smaller than it should be. Looks like we’ll have 22 second-year students next year, spread over three classes of 4, 6, and 12 students. Doubly regrettable because the Academy classes work much better with at least ten students in.
This year we went back to the original, more humble model and right now halfway through the explanations pretty much all our 6th graders have signed up. If all goes well we should end up with 28 first-graders in three classes.
The second mistake was delegating too much. As planned I assigned a teacher to each class, but then failed to monitor them as closely as I should have (in my defence we had some pretty serious issues crop up this year that took a lot of time at first and then burned me out later).
As a direct consequence of me not paying enough attention to how the classes were going, the current first-year classes in particular are not where I want them to be, and all the reading classes have gone slightly off course.
Nothing too serious, but changes will be needed next year.
But lots of good things happened too
Despite the lack of attention from me, the classes mostly went well and students learned a lot. We did Eiken last month at the school, and 78 out of 82 students passed the paper test. Last weekend we did interview practice, and everyone was basically okay to pass. This is very encouraging, as our student body is very mixed and doesn’t just consist of elite students.
We wrote 2/3 of the A3 output course, and it turned out really well. I’m proud of all our materials, but this might be the best one yet. We also finished one year of the A5 advanced course.
Very few of our students quit. We lost a handful to graduation and three quit, but we’re hoping to have a healthy intake and we also had four students join from outside. Hopefully that is the start of a trend 🙂
Student numbers
Junior high school 1: 28? (still in the process of pitching to parents)
Junior high school 2: 22
Junior high school 3: 30
Senior high school entry class (1-2 year students): 10
Senior high school advanced class (2-3 year students): 11
Pretty encouraging. It will be interesting to see how many of the new JHS 3rd years stay on into high school, as they were our first big year.
Also, the mathematically gifted among you will notice that this would give us 101 students, finally reaching our longstanding goal of 100 students in the Academy. Eventually I am hoping we’ll have something like 200 in the program (see below for how this may be possible).
Future plans
We’re going to rent the third unit on the ground floor of our building. This will give us all the car parking spaces (an additional four) plus get rid of the grumpy guy that used to rent it so no one will be complaining about our students going forwards. This extra unit will give us about 280 new class places and allow us to have all junior high school levels of the Academy, plus one high school level, every weekday.
I’m going to be much more hands on with the reading classes next year, and with the junior high school first year output classes. This will allow me to develop them a bit more and address structural problems (as well as train our teachers).
I’m going to take another leaf out of SEG’s book and try to find supplementary reading material for our beginner levels. At the moment the students read sets of readers with CDs, but I would also like to mix in picture books and other reading material that they might find interesting. A big work in progress.
We’ll finish the A3 course and start working on our final level, A4. We’ll also write a second year of the A5 course. This will complete the Academy materials, at which point we might start working on a course for elementary school students.
Outlook
The outlook is good. I am not going to be able to be as hands-off next year as I was this year, but I think the program will get a lot stronger because of that.
We will be in a position to recruit hundreds of new students next year, including almost 100 new Academy students, so we will need to start working on advertising for April 2020 from now. It’s going to be intense but also kind of fun 🙂
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by sendaiben
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The Academy Fluency Course
The Cambridge Academy is a six-year English program for junior and senior high school students at Cambridge English School in Sendai. You can read previous Academy posts here:
- Extensive Reading for Secondary Students (April 2015)
- Six Months In (September 2015)
- Year One (February 2016)
- Looking at Year Two (March 2016)
- Stocktake (March 2016)
- Shadoku explained (April 2016)
- Some improvements to the curriculum (April 2016)
- December 2016 update (December 2016)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Two and Three (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2017Â (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Another Quantum Leap (April 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Mid-Year Update (August 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Student Progress (October 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three and Four (February 2018)
Background
The fluency course was not originally part of the Academy plan. Originally I wanted to run the Academy purely as an extensive reading course that would supplement what students were doing at school (and cram school/juku). This is much easier logistically and makes scheduling and running classes very simple. It’s also more profitable as you can fill classes with students of different levels.
This first iteration of the Academy did not work well. We found that without help it was difficult for students to learn English just from reading. We also found that students did not form a social bond with the school or their peers and thus missed out on motivation. Some students did well with the ER-only model, but many did not.
The second iteration of the Academy imitated SEG in having reading classes and communication classes. For the latter we used commercial textbooks. This worked better than ER-only, but there were problems with the tone, content, amount of material, and amount of repetition in the textbooks. The classes also worked well if run by an experienced engaged teacher but less well with less experienced teachers.
In order to deal with these problems, we created the Academy Fluency Course. It was written from scratch, extensively trialled with our classes here, and is designed to provide students with huge amounts of repetitive practice in reading, speaking, listening, and writing. Fluency is gained by repeating tasks you can already do, and the goal of the Fluency Course is not to teach students new language (although they do encounter huge amounts of new vocabulary and grammar in the course) but rather to allow them to practice enough to internalise some of the language they know and become fluent in using it.
The Cambridge Academy now consists of 140 minute classes: 20 minutes of workbook/school work/individual study, 60 minutes of input (extensive reading and listening), and 60 minutes of output (fluency course).
The Academy Fluency Course
Junior high school 1: Year One (these materials are in beta and are described in detail below).
The theme for this level is the students daily and school lives.
Junior high school 2: Year Two (these materials are in alpha).
The theme for this level is Japan. Students read and talk about different areas/aspects of Japan.
Junior high school 3: Year Three (these materials are not written yet).
The theme for this level is the world. Students read and talk about different areas/aspects of the world.
Senior high school initial course for first and weaker second years: (these materials are not written yet).
This level will provide a transition between the junior high school materials and the advanced course below.
Senior high school advanced course for stronger second and third years: (this is being written now).
This level is based on the PDR method and involves students reading, thinking, discussing, and writing about topics each week.
In 2017 we ran classes using the Year One materials. Halfway through the year we started writing the Year Two materials with the second and third graders. The plan is to write Year Three this year alongside the advanced high school course and to use them with the third year JHS and our advanced high school class.
Fluency Course Year One
The first year of the Fluency Course is based on the first year junior high school textbooks and has the following student components:
- 12 4-week student textbooks (April to March) with a total of 512 pages and 84,249 words
- a 48-unit student writing workbook
- 12 monthly reference sheets with questions and vocabulary
- 3 4-month student record sheets
There are also reference/class/teacher components
- 240 index cards with questions and answers (you will need one set for every two students in the class for pair work)
- 48 verb exercise answer sheets (you will need one for each student in your largest class)
- 48 Quizlet vocabulary and question datasets (available through the Quizlet website)
The main component is the student textbook, split into twelve montly booklets. It provides the vocabulary and questions for all the other components. The April book is slightly different from the others because it provides a gentle introduction. Each book contains the following:
Week One and Two
Vocab quiz (15 items from the timed reading texts, previewed by Quizlet)
3 timed reading texts with questions (April 45 words, May-July 60 words, August-November 80 words, December-March 100 words)
Verb conjugation table (to be read aloud -one verb per week)
Timed verb translation (30 items)
Example dialogue for reading and memorizing (April-July 3 exchanges, August-November 4 exchanges, December-March 5 exchanges)
Week ThreeÂ
No example dialogue. Instead students write their own (length as above).
April has example dialogue.
Week Four
Instead of three short timed readings, there is one reading with three times the word count.
Teacher corrects and chooses the best student dialogues, then prints them for students to practice with.
April has example dialogue.
Results
The Fluency Course depends somewhat on the fact that students are also learning English at school. It is designed to cover the gaps in students learning, mainly speaking, reading, and writing exercises, and particularly drilling these.
So far results have been very encouraging. Our students are not all particularly academic or motivated, and it has been very encouraging to see all of them improve and succeed using the Fluency Course. More able/advanced students are able to challenge themselves within the course, while weaker ones can support themselves and keep up.
I will write a description of an output class in a future blog post.
Cambridge Academy: Year Three and Four
You can read previous Academy posts here:
- Extensive Reading for Secondary Students (April 2015)
- Six Months In (September 2015)
- Year One (February 2016)
- Looking at Year Two (March 2016)
- Stocktake (March 2016)
- Shadoku explained (April 2016)
- Some improvements to the curriculum (April 2016)
- December 2016 update (December 2016)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Two and Three (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2017Â (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Another Quantum Leap (April 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Mid-Year Update (August 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Student Progress (October 2017)
The Academy is still going well, although we ran into an unexpected problem this year. I’m still having a lot of fun and the students are doing extremely well. I’m particularly encouraged by the fact that all our struggling learners have built a solid base and are no longer struggling!
Good news
There is quite a bit of this. We have finally taken the plunge and rented a new classroom next to our main classroom. This will give us a dedicated Academy classroom (that will be used by other classes in the daytime) and allow us to have all classes do reading first and fluency second. This matters because doing it the other way around results in students trying to read at the end of the day when they are tired from actively speaking and writing English. It also means that we will be able to increase fluency class sizes to twelve.
In the schedule for next year I am not in charge of any classes. I will definitely be there every day, at least to start with, and will work with all the teachers to set up routines and address problems. Once the classes are running smoothly though, I plan to cut down to 3/4, 1/2, or even 1/4 class time. I think at least for now I will want to go to each class at least once a month at a minimum.
We’ve started working with a marketing expert to redesign the school website, improve our online advertising, and write new copy for all our marketing/informational materials. So far it’s been really helpful, and I’m excited to see if it makes any difference to our recruitment. Just having the website say what we mean more clearly has been completely worth the cost so far though.
We’ve been filling holes in classes by having the odd student join and also by persuading students to shift from input only (extensive reading) to input and output (fluency course). We currently have space for five more new second years and ten more new third years.
The fluency course materials are really coming along. We made some great little tweaks this year and the course is a lot more solid. We have pretty much finished the second year materials and are thinking about what the third year will look like. I’ll write a post about the fluency course soon.
Bad news
There is one piece of bad news, but it’s a doozy. Last year pretty much all our elementary school sixth grade students joined the Academy when they moved to junior high school. This year we had 31 sixth grade students and we assumed (hah!) that they would pretty much all join. At the same time we made some changes to how we handled the signup and explanation sessions.
Well, right now we only have 19 students signed up for the input+output course, and one for input only. We have a couple of trial students who are interested too, but as our capacity is 36 this is pretty bad.
I’m hoping a combination of some people changing their mind, some people introducing their friends, and some people seeing the new website will help, but otherwise instead of three classes of twelve we’re looking at one class of six, one of four, and one of nine. One of the best things about the fluency classes is the atmosphere from larger groups, so I am a bit worried about the smaller classes.
We have two months to find another 16 junior high school first years to join the input+output course. Wish us luck!
Next steps
We need to buy a lot of new books and get ready for next year. We are hoping to hire one more intern to join our current three. I am planning to write a couple of blog posts (one about the fluency course and the regular stocktake post). We need to get the new classroom set up once we get the key on March 1st.
Any questions?
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Cambridge Academy: Year Three Student Progress
Encouraging developments
Second-year junior high school students in the output class
You can read previous Academy posts here:
- Extensive Reading for Secondary Students (April 2015)
- Six Months In (September 2015)
- Year One (February 2016)
- Looking at Year Two (March 2016)
- Stocktake (March 2016)
- Shadoku explained (April 2016)
- Some improvements to the curriculum (April 2016)
- December 2016 update (December 2016)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Two and Three (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Stocktake 2017Â (March 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Another Quantum Leap (April 2017)
- Cambridge Academy: Year Three Mid-Year Update (August 2017)
The Academy is still going well. I’m having a lot of fun and I think at least some of the students are enjoying it too 😉
We lost one more student on average (lost three, gained two), but I think this is normal and it isn’t something that worries me. The students who are leaving tend to be our older students who started before the Academy existed and haven’t benefited as much as our newer students will from improved lessons and system. Here are our latest numbers:
Right now we have 78 students:
- 32 junior high school first years (29 regular, 2 reading only, 1 advanced)
- 21 junior high school second years (15 regular, 4 reading only, 2 advanced)
- 8 junior high school third years (5 regular, 3 reading only)
- 7 senior high school first years (4 regular, 3 reading only)
- 6 senior high school second years (5 regular, 1 reading only)
- 2 senior high school third years (2 regular)
- 2 ronin students (1 regular, 1 reading only)
It looks like we’re going to fill our first year output classes, as one student has changed to output after a few months of tutoring, and a trial student last week is going to try to do the same.
Today I’m going to share the students’ reading numbers. This gives some idea of how much our students are reading given an hour in class (probably more like 50-55 minutes) and for a few of them also reading at home. All numbers are up to date as of today.
First year (six months or so): 16,885-111,509 (most students are in the 30,000-50,000 range), YL0.2-0.4
Second year (eighteen months or so): 75,850-354,976 (most students are in the 120,000-160,000 range), YL0.3-0.6
Third year (thirty months or so): 197,892-748,564 (most students are around 300,000), YL0.6-4.0
You can’t really tell from the numbers above, but each year is reading more/better/faster than the years above them. Our current first years seem to be doing much better than our current second years did in their first year, who did better than our current third years did in their first year. I predict our current first years will be hitting 500,000 words by the end of junior high school, which should set them up to read a couple of million by the time they finish high school.
We need to continue buying intermediate books, and I am working on that. I am trying to find more leveled readers and books aimed at native speakers rather than graded readers (which tend to be a bit more dry). We already have mostly graded readers anyway. Students who find a series they like (Magic Tree House is very popular) and then read all the books in the series tend to do very well in terms of motivation and reading progress.
I have pretty much decided not to increase class sizes above ten, mostly due to the physical constraints of our current classrooms. I think we could do twelve easily, and probably up to twenty, but we just don’t have the room.
In terms of who will teach the classes, I am hoping to assign a teacher to each class next year. I will then join certain classes to model, observe, give feedback, etc. This should allow me to develop the system and get more of a birds’ eye view. Eventually it should allow me to take a step back with regards to the actual teaching too (and maybe open another school, but that’s a different blog post).
What do you think? What are your students’ numbers like? Any good intermediate books/series I could get?