Articles
Writing for people who run lessons.
Short, practical pieces on teaching online and running a school around it. New ones are added here.
- Teaching An online board for an English lesson: what it needs to hold A whiteboard app gives the teacher an empty canvas every lesson. A lesson board has to remember the course, run the tasks, show the group how it is doing without showing who got it wrong, and forget the scribbles.
- Running a school A language school's timetable: when a missed lesson should be paid for A rule about missed lessons that lives only in the contract gets argued about every month. Written into the register, it applies the same way to everyone and nobody has to decide it again.
- Teaching Online homework: how to set it so students actually do it Students rarely skip homework for lack of time. More often nobody can find it, nothing comes back, and the deadline was one sentence at the end of the lesson. Each of those can be fixed.
- Learning English English levels A1-C2: what each one means and how to check yours The six levels describe what a person can do with a language, not which grammar chapters they have covered. You can estimate your level in a few minutes. Only an exam can certify it.
- Running a school CRM for a language school: what student records really have to do Most software sold to schools as a CRM is a sales funnel with a timetable bolted on. A school earns and loses its money after the sale, in the register, the schedule and the books, and that is what its records have to cover.
- Running a school Why students leave a language school A school usually finds out that a student has gone when a payment does not arrive. The decision is weeks older than that, and it was made on evidence the timetable had already recorded.
- Running a school What one student actually costs a language school Every school knows what a student pays. Far fewer know what one costs to keep, and the gap between those two numbers is where a full timetable quietly turns into a thin year.