Last week at Smith’s School of English, Tsuruhashi we had a student who had just returned from a seven day vacation in Hawaii. Instead of the usual holiday questions, and always keeping in mind our philosophy of 70% S.T.T (Student Talk Time), I suggested that we construct a routine of one of her most memorable parts of her trip, which she quickly responded with “My two days visiting Molokai Island”. She is a strong Red level student, so she had already experienced the benefits of these routines in previous lessons.
At this point I should explain to any potential Smith’s School of English students who may be reading our website for the first time, that our curriculum contains two types of routines, Q&A (Question and Answer) and L&R (Listen and Repeat), and they have proven to be very successful in our student’s English language development.
As this was her first time at creating her own routine, I could sense that she was a little hesitant, so I began with suggesting a keyword for the first sentence. She confidently and quickly built around this first keyword to complete the sentence. With me coaching and eliciting vocabulary, she finished her ten sentence routine in quick time and we were both delighted and thrilled with the outcome. This is indeed another fine example of how coaching routines can instill confidence into the learning process and in this case even educate the coach about what a beautiful place Molokai must be.
She finished the lesson feeling confident, proud and full of self belief.
And how did I feel? ……………………well, all of the above.
I love when opportunities like that arise. Nice work.
The SSE curriculum is excellent as it has numerous routines, lesson plans etc. which contain flexible frameworks that can be moulded to suit all circumstances that arise during a coaching session thereby ensuring that our students become confident English communicators.
Ken
Smith’s School of English Koenji