TEFL Managers — How Good is Your Academic Quality?
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TEFL Managers — How Good is Your Academic Quality?
How do you know if you’re a good academic manager?
When you become an academic manager, you’re expected to pay close attention to a load of numbers, which are supposed to tell you how well the school is doing. For example:
Demo sign ups
New students
Drop-out students
Referral students
Re-signing students
Academic quality is tough to measure directly. So tough, in fact, that you have to measure the effect it has on related stuff (like retention). In a previous article about using data, I talked about three things to measure — dropout students, student retention and student referrals.
Today I’d like to suggest two new metrics that have all this information embedded into them and are a great way to measure your school's health.
For students: total average completed course time at the school.
For teachers: total average completed contract length.
Both of these are measured in months. You can calculate these in the same way, for example:
A teacher is a third of the way through his third-year contract. He has completed 2 x 12-month contracts, so his completed contract length is 24 months.
Supposing he negotiates to leave his contract because of a sudden family emergency. He has now completed 24 months + 4 months = 28 months.
This principle is the same for students. If a student has paid for 5 x 5-month courses, she has completed 25 months (even if there is a gap between courses).
Once you find the average of all your students and teachers, you can keep an eye on these long-term figures and work on improving them.
See you again in two weeks.
Whenever you're ready, there are three ways I can help you:
1. Learn how to plan better, faster and stress-free with my book Lesson Planning for Language Teachers (90 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).
2. Develop calm students, a relaxed mind and a classroom full of learning with my book Essential Classroom Management (16 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).
3. Improve your teaching in five minutes daily with my Reflective Teaching Practice Journal (4 ratings, 4.5⭐ on Amazon).