Feedback is the section in the profile where you will find a summary of all the ratings that students leave on your lessons. This is another key factor affecting the number of new students. Make sure your feedback is as high as possible.
The most of Fluentbe teachers have feedback above 4.7.
Every single lesson at Fluentbe can be rated by the student. We propose a statement and display responses in stars from 1 to 5 where:
1 - means strongly disagree,
5 - means strongly agree,
You can click on 'Details' next to each section to check the student who left it and after which lesson. This allows you to see what worked well during that lesson, and what could be improved.
We understand that you may sometimes feel frustrated with the low feedback, especially if it doesn't seem fair to you. But please treat it as an opportunity to reflect on your teaching.
Below you can find some tips how to improve specific areas reflected in Students' feedback.
Make your students feel their progress
Helping students feel their progress is crucial for fostering a positive and motivating learning environment. Here are some helpful tips for us to try🍀
🏆Offer a Growth Mindset Environment
It's our role as educators to consistently demonstrate and reinforce the idea that learning is a gradual process. We need to show students that it's perfectly okay not to be perfect from the start and that their progress matters more than perfection. People can be tough on themselves, and frustrations are part of the learning process.
By highlighting their growth and celebrating small victories, we help instill confidence, resilience, and a positive attitude toward learning. Remember, it's not about being flawless; it's about the continuous effort and improvement that lead to success.
🏆Set Clear Learning Objectives
Communicate the learning goals and objectives at the beginning of each lesson. This helps students understand what they are working towards and allows them to track their progress.
🏆Review goals in the Summary section
When wrapping up the lesson, go to the Summary slide and revisit the goals you set earlier, even if you didn't cover everything. This way, students can see what they've learned and leave feeling like they gained something valuable after each lesson.
🏆Provide Opportunities for Revision:
Revise regularly. This reinforces the learning process and demonstrates that improvement is an ongoing and achievable goal.
🏆Provide Feedback and conduct ‘conferences’
1️⃣ Regularly provide constructive and specific feedback on students' work. Highlight both their strengths and areas for improvement. Feedback helps students understand where they stand and how they can enhance their performance.
Here are some examples:
👍Positive Feedback: "Great job! Your analysis of the text was insightful and well-supported with evidence with the appropriate use of the topic vocabulary."
👍Constructive Feedback: "Consider providing more context in your introduction to give a clearer understanding of your perspective."
"Great job on summarizing the text just now! Your ability to capture the key points demonstrates a strong understanding of the material. One suggestion for improvement is to try using a bit more variety in your sentence structure. Could you go ahead and try saying again three sentences in different structures now?"
2️⃣ If needed, conduct ‘conferences’. You may use a different word for it, but the objective is to allocate some time to discuss with students their progress, address concerns, and set goals. This personalized attention shows students that their development is valued.
Here are some examples:
💡Goal Setting: "Let's discuss your goals for the upcoming month. What areas do you want to focus on for improvement, and how can I support you?"
💡Progress Review: "We'll go over your recent assessments. I want to hear your thoughts on what went well and areas where you'd like to see growth."
💡Addressing Concerns: "If you have any concerns or questions about the course material, our ‘conference’ is a great opportunity to discuss them. Your understanding and comfort are important to me."
🏆Encourage Self-Assessment
Foster a culture of self-assessment. Encourage students to reflect on their work, identify growth areas, and set personal goals. This helps them take ownership of their learning journey.
🏆Peer Review and Collaboration
Whenever teaching a group rather than an individual student, incorporate peer review and collaborative activities. Working with peers enables students to learn from each other, gain different perspectives, and recognize their individual and collective progress.
🏆Celebrate Achievements
Acknowledge and celebrate both small and significant achievements. This can include verbal praise, certificates, or creating a "Wall of Achievements" in the classroom to showcase students' progress.
Beyond the classroom, it's essential to emphasize the practical use of English in real-life situations such as holidays and work meetings. Encouraging students to apply their language skills in authentic settings and then celebrate their achievements reinforces the relevance of their learning journey and boosts confidence.
Here you will find more useful information on how to apply the topic in real-life situations.
🏆Remind students of self-work
Reiterate the significance of finishing pre-lesson activities and homework assignments. This reminder is crucial, even for students who might be hesitant.
🏆Involve Parents and Guardians
Should you teach young adults or kids, keep parents informed about their child's progress. Regular updates help create a supportive network for students and reinforce the importance of their academic journey.
By incorporating these strategies, we can create an environment where students are aware of their progress, motivated to improve, and engaged in learning. And well, it also helps us to have great feedback, doesn’t it? 😉
Show how to apply the topic in real-life situations
We know we provide you with materials to follow and want you to follow them.
We also believe that they can always be related to real-life situations 🤓 You know your students, you know what is relevant to them.
⚡When teaching a topic, remember to show the students the social and cultural aspects of the English language. You can think of different life situations, such as a wedding, an interview, going on a date, going to the gym, etc. Think about contexts relevant for your students. Think of what’s an appropriate and inappropriate thing to do and say.
⚡Try to see the world with their eyes and use their life experiences. Remember that they usually have great knowledge about their field e.g. management, marketing, or doing business, but what they lack is the language to present themselves as experts and effective communicators.
⚡Talk to your students and ask them for feedback - which activities they have found useful and would like to do more of? Remember that your students will be more than happy to provide you with some ideas.
Give each student as much speaking time as possible
Ensuring that each student has ample speaking time is crucial for language acquisition and classroom engagement. This article explores practical strategies to maximize student speaking time, addressing potential challenges and offering innovative approaches for educators.
👍Minimize teacher talking time: It will allow students more opportunities to express themselves.
👍Provide preparation time: Give students time to prepare before engaging in exercises, enhancing their confidence and readiness to speak.
👍Ask open-ended questions: Encourage discussion by posing questions that require more than a simple yes or no answer, fostering extended conversations.
👍Elicit rather than provide answers: Prompt students to think critically and articulate their thoughts by eliciting responses rather than supplying solutions.
👍Demonstrate activities: Enhance understanding by demonstrating activities instead of delivering lengthy explanations, promoting a more hands-on learning approach.
👍Conduct brainstorming sessions: Generate essential vocabulary and structures through collaborative brainstorming sessions, preparing students for upcoming activities.
👍Scaffold activities: Gradually introduce and practice vocabulary or structures in controlled activities before progressing to more open-ended exercises.
👍Encourage pre-lesson preparation: Motivate students to complete their pre-lesson activities in the student profile.
👍Make lessons relevant: Tailor lessons to align with students' interests and needs, ensuring that they find the topics engaging and worthy of discussion.
👍Vary interaction patterns: Foster engagement by incorporating individual work, pair work, and group work, catering to different learning preferences.
👍Summary: Reinforce learning by revisiting tasks at the end of the lesson, allowing students to recognize and celebrate their progress.
Make your students feel they have learnt the topic
✅ Step 1: Lesson Goals:
When using our Presentations, make sure you cover the three goals of every lesson at Fluentbe.
When using other materials, present the lesson goals to your students at the beginning of the lesson.
✅ Step 2: Follow the activities, but feel free to tailor them to your students’ needs.
Keep an eye on time management.
Choose relevant questions.
Omit activities you find irrelevant to the student’s progress.
✅ Step 3: Make time for the Summary
Allow about 4 minutes to reflect on what the students learnt
Choose questions that suit their needs best
Let them share feedback
✅ Step 4: Remind students of the importance of self-study
Check if students completed pre-lesson and homework tasks
Remind students of the homework and pre-lesson tasks systematically
Let them share feedback
💡Positive Reinforcement is always a good idea
Use abundant positive praise, acknowledging effort, even in challenging lessons.
Remind students that language learning is a gradual process and making mistakes is a natural part of improvement.
Emphasize the value of practice and assure them that every effort contributes to their language proficiency.
Correct and give feedback
Feedback and corrections in language lessons are essential for effective teaching. This guide highlights the significance of providing constructive feedback to students, emphasizing its impact on motivation and progress.
💚Dos:
Communicate that mistakes are part of the learning process.
Be kind, polite, and patient.
Establish clear symbols and gestures for feedback.
🛑Don'ts:
Mock or make fun of students during correction.
Exaggerate in either way.
Give up even when students keep making mistakes. Consider tweaking your strategy instead.
⭐ Be specific: Provide detailed feedback on what students did well or where improvement is needed, avoiding vague statements.
⭐ Make it measurable: Align feedback with task and lesson success criteria, focusing on expected outcomes.
⭐ Be sincere: Offer genuine praise when deserved, avoid exaggeration, and recognize both big successes and small efforts.
⭐ Relate: Prioritize mistakes related to the lesson's topic or target language, based on exercise goals and students’ language levels.
⭐Timing: Know when to correct mistakes, considering the exercise goal, student level, and the nature of errors.
✅Correct immediately for accuracy, communication-focused activities, or target language emphasis. Use techniques like gestures, facial expressions, and reformulation.
✅Delayed correction is for fluency-focused activities or complex tasks, encouraging self-correction and noting examples of good language use.
⭐Enhance Strategies for Effective Correction: While teacher’s feedback holds value, consider integrating advanced strategies such as self-correction and peer correction for a more impactful learning experience.
✅Self-Correction: Encourage students to take a moment for introspection. Ask them to reflect on their sentences and identify errors independently. Provide constructive hints, guiding them towards recognizing and rectifying their mistakes.
✅Peer Correction: Create a supportive learning atmosphere before introducing peer correction. Make teacher and self-correction a routine practice to establish the norm of providing feedback. As a teacher, deliberately make errors and encourage students to correct you. This light-hearted approach helps normalize the correction process. Gradually transition to peer correction by having students correct each other, ensuring a comfortable environment. Post-activity sessions can include peer feedback, fostering collaboration, and strengthening comprehension.
Make the difficulty level appropriate to your student's abilities
We understand the importance of adjusting the difficulty level of our lessons to meet the needs of our students.
We assign levels to adult students based on a placement test that consists of grammar knowledge, vocabulary range, comprehension skills, and speaking fluency skills. All group students and all company students have also an oral placement test. Our young learners do not take a test, verifying their level is done during their first lesson. With all that said, we count on our teachers to evaluate the level during the initial lessons.
We appreciate that it’s a somewhat complex task, especially when dealing with groups of learners with possibly varying proficiency levels. Here's a guide to help you with assessing the level:
Adjusting for Individual courses
During the first lesson with a student, it's crucial to gauge their actual proficiency level beyond what the platform suggests. Once you have a clearer understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, you can decide what to do next. Complete the planned lesson with them and reflect at the end of the lesson.
With individual students you are able to change their level and materials to match their skills and abilities (it is different with company students as their level was already assessed. If in doubt - contact our team). However, it is often not about changing the level, but adjusting your language to the student, focusing on specific activities, giving more or less time to think about an answer, etc.
Remember that the lesson goals are about using the skills or vocabulary actively. If students understand the phrases, but can’t use them independently, it means they still need to practise.
Adapting to Group courses
The above applies also to group courses. It is more difficult though, as there may be some differences between students. One is more confident, another one better at grammar, etc.
Teaching a group of students with varying proficiency levels can be challenging but manageable with the right approach. Begin by identifying the range of proficiency within the group. Then, aim to strike a balance between challenging the more advanced learners and supporting the beginners.
However, if the differences are too big, please report it to the Customer Care department and suggest a solution. Perhaps one student needs to change the group, or the entire level needs changing.
💡Utilizing Fluentbe Materials Effectively: It's essential to recognize that our materials can be tailored to the student’s needs. As a teacher, you have the autonomy to adjust the pace and content of the materials to achieve a student's learning goals. You can learn more about this technique in our webinars.
Give clear and straightforward explanations
Clear explanations not only facilitate understanding but also foster confidence and motivation in learners. In this article, we'll delve into the importance of giving straightforward explanations while providing additional tips for communicating with students at lower proficiency levels.
🥇Stick to the Plan
While it's crucial to give clear explanations, it's equally important not to overwhelm students with unnecessary information or changes. Straying too far from the provided instructions in our Fluentbe presentations can confuse learners and disrupt the flow of the lesson. Therefore, it's advisable to adhere to the designated program while incorporating supplementary explanations and examples to enhance understanding.
Tips for Communicating with Lower-Level Students
Communicating with students at lower proficiency levels requires patience, empathy, and simplicity. Here are some additional tips to help you effectively engage with these learners.
💡Provide Repetition but Tweak it: Repeat key concepts or instructions multiple times using different phrasing or examples. Repetition reinforces learning and helps solidify understanding, but sometimes we need to adapt it if the students don’t respond one way.
💡Speak Slowly and Clearly: Enunciate words and phrases deliberately, allowing students ample time to process information.
💡Simple language: Especially with beginners use short instructions, e.g. instead of Could you please read the text on the slide, say: Read the text. Avoid using slang, idiomatic expressions, or complex vocabulary that may be unfamiliar to beginners.
💡Facial Expressions: Let’s make sure that we can always see your face clearly and entirely with enough light. It’s of the utmost importance that students can read your facial expressions and respond to the cues.
💡Chunk Information: Break down complex instructions or concepts into smaller, more digestible chunks. Present information sequentially, allowing students to absorb one concept before moving on to the next.
💡Encourage Questions: Create a supportive learning environment where students feel comfortable asking questions or seeking clarification. Encouraging active participation fosters engagement and demonstrates your commitment to their learning journey.
Make lesson activities diverse and interesting
Engaging in lesson activities is the cornerstone of effective language teaching at Fluentbe. As teachers, we have the unique opportunity to captivate our students' interest and foster their enthusiasm for learning English. In this article, we'll explore the importance of utilizing Fluentbe materials and strategies for bringing activities to life while maintaining flexibility.
🕺Utilizing Fluentbe Materials and Bringing Activities to Life
Fluentbe provides a wealth of materials for teachers, ranging from interactive exercises, role plays, and discussion to authentic texts and multimedia content. Leveraging these materials not only saves time but also ensures alignment with the course program and learning objectives. To make lesson activities more dynamic and engaging, consider the following strategies:
✅Flexibility and Adaptability
While lesson planning is essential, it's equally important to remain flexible and adaptable to students' needs and preferences. Some activities may need to be adjusted or skipped altogether based on time constraints, student engagement, or unforeseen circumstances.
💡You can learn more about this technique in our webinars.
✅Role-Plays and Discussions: Make sure you always save time for these activities. Encourage students to participate in role-playing scenarios and discussions related to real-life situations. It’s then that students see the previous activities they completed earlier in the lesson come to life.
✅Problem-Solving Approach: Introduce activities embedded with real-life problem-solving approaches that demand the application of language skills for resolution. Within Fluentbe presentations, you'll discover ample hints and cues tailored to ignite problem-solving instincts. Encourage students to immerse themselves in these scenarios, utilizing their expertise to navigate through language barriers and effectively articulate their thoughts and experiences.
✅Interactive Activities: These are an important part of the lesson when students work on their own. As mentioned above, do not skip other elements of the lesson, like Discussion slides. But additionally, each interactive activity has at least 2 steps. Typically, in Step 1 students do an activity, then in Step 2 you have prompts on how to build on what they have just done. If you miss to add these discussion points, the lesson will become boring.
The same applies to other materials you use. It is not only about doing all exercises, but your role is to ensure that they can apply their knowledge into real life situations.