You may think this is a crazy question and I expect a lot of you ESL teachers are denying that you do this already, but I am ready to bet my last British pound that you are writing ESL lessons for free and this is how?
When you work as an ESL teacher for large companies and even freelance websites, you are constantly in competition with all the other ESL teachers. ‘Competition’ is the keyword.
Now in any business, competition is great. It is healthy and helpful, if it is relative. But sitting yourself in a room or a virtual booking system in this case with thousands of other ESL teachers from the same compnay or companies, hoping that some student will pick you as their ESL teacher, is like waiting to be paid one million for every minute you teach! It’s never going to happen. Be realistic. And that there is my point.
When you teach ESL through these huge companies your value is depreciated immediately because the percentage of competition is too high, amongst other ESL teachers. So you end up looking like this to clients. How attractive is that to a student?
At the same time that the percentage of competition for ESL teachers in this business model is too high, it is also too similar to all the other ESL teachers.
ESL teachers that work for companies, all wear the same coloured uniform, use the same, ‘often’ out of date lesson plan that lasts about five minutes in reality because the plan was just a few words on a page at most but often in reality you know that the lesson plan was just PDF’s of flashcard.
SO WHAT DO YOU DO?
- Well you do what most teachers do to:
- Avoid complaints from the student.
- Which would otherwise mean you will receive a low rating.
- Which will then mean less bookings.
- Which will then mean less income.
So in a desperate plea as a professional ESL teacher, to please everyone, you start doing the one thing that you shouldn’t. You start adding bits to the ESL lesson plan, changing it or replacing it with something altogether from your hard drive. But once you do this once, you have made the rod for your own back and raised the level of what the student receives, for no extra pay, no extra guarantee of bookings and often no extra high rating as students on ESL platforms find leaving ratings after their daily online, ESL lessons very tedious, so many simply just don’t do it.
By effectively writing lesson plans be it on the spot or dragging it from your hard drive to the platform whiteboard you are giving more than what you are being paid for and at the same time you are depreciating your value even more.
Remember! Your relationship with the student is not a direct one as you are the middle man or middle woman in the chain. The loyalty exsist’s between the student and the company in this model and this business frame and you are as in material in that process as no one caring when your daily professional tasks resemble a hamster in a wheel!
HOW TO CHANGE THIS
Know your value, understand it’s impact on leaners and learn how to leverage and implement that.
In the Teacherpreneur programme one way I teach you how to this is by courses. Think how many courses you could have written if you had not of been writing all those lessons for free.
But creating the course is just one part of the process into getting paid a lot more for your work.
Lots of people think that writing the course is hard. It isn’t, it is probably the most easiest part of it. You are effectively writing your own curriculmn and that is something that you can only but grow.
The marketing is often the biggest learning curve most teachers have to learn in the Teacherpreneurs course.
But this knowledge that you gain from this program will serve you well for years to come and it will allow to monopolise your area instead of sitting in a box, hoping to be picked, for a poorly paid rate, where there is no real growth or future.
Now ask yourself this. Do I really want to write lesson plans for free?
