My Experience with EF

Living in China is going to be difficult, regardless of which company you decide to work with. In the transition between your home country and China, EF does a pretty decent job with helping you start up and settle in. They lend you 10,000RMB interest free should you have the need, and they help you find a real estate agent to locate an appropriate apartment. The exploring is entirely up to you :)

The Smart School that I worked with gave me a great deal of support when I arrived. Of course, even if you're not new at teaching, you're new at the school and you'll be quite nervous about meeting new students and how different the way things are run etc... The policy in EF is that they let you shadow different classes for a few days and then co-teach* with different teachers for a few days. It lets you come into contact with a variety of classes and it also lets you glimpse into the various ways the same class can be taught (i.e. you might see the same class twice a day but taught by different teacher). You get a lot of support in the first two weeks and you can ask as many questions as you like to make sure you know what's going on. *(Co-teaching means that you get to teach while the other teacher is watching. They're not evaluating you. They're just there for support. I screwed up my first co-teaching class, stood on the spot and froze, and my co-teaching partner flew in to save my day *phew*)

You will find out that when a teacher is sick, you may end up with more classes than you have expected. That is because EF policy doesn't allow classes being cancelled unless there is absolutely no one available at that time. There are times when I've had 6 classes in one day (even though you should technically have 5 maximum), but I get compensated through other means. I have to say, once again, that I was extremely lucky because I ended up with an awesome team at PSQ (People's Square). What happened was that either I would get an hour off the next day for my extra class, or when the teacher came back they would take one class back from my schedule. But this really varies from school to school, because different teams have different dynamics and they work with different internal policies. In all honesty though, taking a class from a teacher who is sick is not that big of a deal, because when you are sick, your fellow teachers will take a class for you because you need your rest at home.

The core classes at EF are already planned, and you simply take a lesson plan with you into the classroom and start teaching. Of course you need to prep for class, but this generally takes about 30-40 minutes maximum per class, and you teach about 3 different core classes each week. Which means, if you are efficient, core classes only need about 90 minutes on Monday to prep, and you're set for the week. The classes run on a cycle, so very soon you'll start seeing the same classes again, which means it takes you a lot less time to prep for classes as you go along, it gets really easy very soon.

There are also classes that are not core classes in EF, something like interest classes, in which you are free to plan the 50-minute lesson as you see fit, given that it fits the topic of your class. With a bigger school, like my school, you might get another teacher who teaches the same topic, so you can collaborate with them and come up with lessons together. For example, I taught a grammar and a writing class, with my fellow teachers we created a cycle of 24 weeks and 26 weeks respectively, and after the initial cycle, it becomes a breeze too.

There is relatively a large amount of freedom for you to be creative in your class. Even though the core lessons are pre-planned, you can add your own little twist to it as you see fit, as long as it follows the lesson aims and teaches the core concepts. The interest classes are completely your doing. I enjoyed so much of the planning and working out the kinks in my thought process for classes, that sometimes I end up re-writing the whole class after my initial try. It's a big part of shaping you to be a better teacher because you start to realize things that work with certain classes might not turn out so great in another.

EF provided me with a great working environment for the year and I am sure if I had stayed there would be great opportunities for me to move up in the company. Unfortunately, Shanghai is a very expensive city to stay in and the financial compensation wasn’t fitting with my financial goals. I would have been happy to stay because of the great opportunities and the comfortable working environment, but even though I haven’t, it was one of the best working experiences I have ever had :D