Hi, I'm Noel from Sri Lanka. I am an ESL trainer for adult students. Can't wait to get know other enthusiastic power teaching souls all over the world! Feel free to message me anytime

Hello!
Welcome to Power Teaching. I hope you find that PT is as fun and useful as we do.
What is your situation in Sri Lanka?

Nice to hear from you, Heather ...

Well I've been teaching in this private institute (which now I'm working as a senior teacher as well as the Officer In Charge)since 2006. So, my work includes both teaching and administration work. In Sri Lanka we learn English as a second language. However, due to various reasons, most of the school leavers are not competent in using English in a satisfied manner. They find it a great barrier in order to achieve their targets in life as a good command of English is becoming almost a necessity to enter into the job market.

Being a language trainer for adult learners, I've been using various teaching methodologies (from traditional methods to TPR) to serve my students. I was bit doubtful in the begining when I tried to include power teaching methods in adult classrooms as there is a cultural issue I had to be aware of (in Sri Lanka you have a teacher centered teaching model where the students highly respect the teacher and expect the teacher to "take" them to achieve their target).

Anyway, taking a bold step, now I'm using the "class-yes" and "teach-ok" teachniques in my teaching. I haven't completely eliminated the traditional approach in teaching, rather I'm using a hybrid approach. Oe thing I noticed was that the students gain more confidence as they teach each other speaking in English, it also creates the energy in the class, also zero boredom in the classroom. The power teaching techniques clearly shows positive signs for effective delivery of the lessons together with better classroom management.

By analysing the feedback from students, I'm looking into developing lesson plans that can be completely taught using power teaching techniques. It takes time, hundreds of experiments, but I'm positive of the outcome I'm looking for!

Hello Noel,
I am glad to hear that you are confident about using the Power Teaching in your class and that you are giving it a try! I was recently teaching in rural China where they had a similar sounding situation. The students had a whole routine of warning the class when the teacher is coming and introducing the teacher and standing and bowing, it was quite a shock to me! I did use power teaching in these classes and I did have some of the teachers comment about it but, overall, it worked out for everyone. The students became less terrified to speak English and they were learning English much more quickly because of the active involvement. It was VERY difficult to stand in front of a class 70 Chinese high school students and teach them these strange procedures but, after a few weeks they were very appreciative of it. I understand your feelings and I agree that if they want to learn English (and they need to) that this is a very effective and necessary way of doing it. Keep it up!
How are things going now that you have been using it for a while? Have you noticed a big difference? Keep me posted