I’ve spent nearly a decade working at an Eikaiwa, but unfortunately, most of my suggestions to improve our curriculum and enhance student-teacher relationships have fallen on deaf ears. There’s a senior teacher who consistently displays a superiority complex or the opposite, often coming across as condescending.
For instance, when I brought up “Bloom’s Taxonomy” and how it could be useful for lesson planning, she responded with, “What’s that? A teaching term? How did you even learn about it?” And every time I try to share my opinions on teaching strategies or philosophies, her typical reply is, “Oh right, you studied Education in university, didn’t you?”
On top of all that, when I suggest things, it’s usually met with a casual “Sure, I’ll think about it,” but honestly, not much really happens afterward. But here’s the thing, when this senior colleague of mine decides something needs changing, it’s like lightning – everything changes in a snap. And if that’s not enough, it’s pretty clear that the CEO has a soft spot for her, which can be a bit frustrating.
Have any of you faced similar behavior from colleagues or superiors? How did you handle it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on dealing with such situations.
34 comments
Stop giving suggestions and look into finding a new job or opening your own school.
Unfortunately a lot of people in management positions or owners don’t have any real education on methodology and just got lucky or have the charisma to “teach”.
You work at an Eikawa. Accept that you have no power and either move on to a different work place or accept how things are done where you are.
I experience it daily, so I stopped bringing things up. My fellow native English teachers at the high school have not heard or become familiar with statements like “curriculum design” or “instructional design” or “spiral teaching” or any of a number of other instructional items useful for building lessons plans and cohesive and useful plans. They’d prefer to give vocabulary matching tests and unnatural topic pair conversation work.
Eikaiwa workers are customer service agents, not teachers. Your job is to be the face of the company and keep the customers happy while delivering a pre-developed product. These days most eikaiwas are buying a complete curriculum from Pearson and can’t deviate from their plan or materials due to their contract. If they aren’t buying a complete curriculum, they are getting the cheapest mass market coloring books labeled as EFL texts and sending a foreigner to warm the seat while the customer colors.
I used to work at an Eikaiwa chain many years ago, one of the famous ones that employs both Japanese and foreign teachers. I became friends with the Japanese head teacher and she shared a lot of what goes on behind the scenes. For example, most student complaints were about the piss-poor textbooks and the piss-poor methodology that did not really allow student to speak freely. These complaints fell on deaf ears because there was no way the Eikaiwa chain was going to change anything related to the curriculum. I mean, they use the same books for 20 years! They train all teachers to teach the same exact way! She also told me that most complaints regarding teachers were about the Japanese teachers, that they were too “stick-to-the-book” and robotic. The managers HATED these type of complaints because that was how the teachers were trained to teach and they couldn’t exactly tell the Japanese teachers to change. So pretty much every suggestion/complaint from students was met with “Oh, thank you for your input. We will look into it” and then dismissed.
I am not saying your school is like this. But in my experience in Japan, when a methodology has been set, it has been set in stone. It’s not likely to be changed.
Regarding your senior colleague, well obviously she has some clout with the management. Maybe she brown-nosed her way to the top. Who knows? I know I will get downvoted for the following comment, but I would just work your shift and not invest too much mental headspace into the dynamics of an eikiawa. It’s a job. Just do your best with what they want you to do. Maybe sneak some of your style into the lessons, as much as you can get away with. This is how Japan works.
The fact you have been at an eikaiwa for 10 years and are keen to change things should have indicated to you that you need to move on. Get a better teaching job with freedom to plan classes and syllabi. Its time to move on to high school, business English or University teaching. You will never get the changes that you want at an eikaiwa unless it is your own.
Sorry but this is on you. You’re working at McDonald’s trying to suggest to sauté the Hors D’oeuvre.
10 years in was plenty of time to set up your own shop and do things your way, yet your 10 years in moaning about your superiors. Get to work on yours or you’ll be 10 more years in with similar frustrations
“I’ve been working at McDona’d’s nearly a decade and these condescending people won’t listen to my ideas on how best to clean the grill”
I decided to start my own class. Got tired of the zero progression in students.
“Oh right, you studied Education in university, didn’t you?”
Is she British? I can’t help but read that in a British voice.
I would try and see if there is a supervisory position in the company. If not, I would call a meeting with her and her superior and express that you’d like more dialogue about changes and teacher input.
If that fails, I would consider finding a new job, perhaps a supervisory one but if not make sure to clarify how teacher input contributes to course development, or accepting the way things are and focusing on your own materials and teaching and just do what you like doing anyway.
Get a new job, preferably not in eikaiwa. Eikaiwa isn’t for real teaching. Most eikawa teachers have little to no background in pedagogy so they won’t understand if you try to genuinely improve things.
Also, just FYI, Bloom’s is considered REALLY outdated and there have been many extremely valid critiques published about it in the last 70 years.
> I’ve spent nearly a decade working at an Eikaiwa, but unfortunately, most of my suggestions to improve our curriculum and enhance student-teacher relationships have fallen on deaf ears.
I’ll be honest… 10 years is probably too long to spend working for an eikaiwa and if you think that you can do better then maybe it’s time for you to setup your own eikaiwa?
The one you work for is a business that’s owned by somebody else. They’ve set it up and made it commercially viable. You’ve developed opinions as a long-term employee. They’ve politely disagreed with a lot of your opinions and basically said let me do the figuring here mate’. Rightly or wrongly it’s their business and there’s not a lot you can do about that (again, unless you wanna go your own way).
Time to chill out and plan the next step in your career rather than trying to argue that your current employer should improve its curriculum.
I’m not directly involved, but there’s a situation like this at my company. A lot of others who actually care somewhat about teaching have been making suggestions, and passing them to the “Head of Curriculum”… who then says “I’ll think about it” and never brings up the idea again.
It’s made quite a few people upset, and some people have actually simply left over it.
Japan is a relationship based country. It’s a bit frustrating for task based/results based people . You either have to play their game or move on. They aren’t going to change.
Unfortunately, eikaiwas are NOT in the business of providing excellent teaching/tutoring services, they ARE in the business of keeping asses in seats. Anything that could potentially lead to an ass being out of a seat is frowned upon.
Nah. All my coworkers are supportive of ideas to improve or change. We’re all adults that see the goal of increasing the quality of English taught as a primary goal. Also, we’re all mature enough to see the bigger picture than the individuality.
It is sadly a McJob in Japan.
This is a dead end job for a real teacher and you must get out. You xan come back and do it for fun later on a part time basis if you want to stay in a language school
This feels like one of those plot in those drama. GTO or Gokusen.
Too bad you can’t just do what they did in reality.
When you make suggestions, you’re threatening her position. She can’t admit there are things you know that she doesn’t know, or else she’ll be admitting you’re more competent than she is. When egos are on the line, you’re not going to win. You can’t change her mind or go over her head, so I’d advise you to stop hitting your head against that brick wall.
As others have said, your only real choices are to give up, go with the flow, and stop giving a shit about student progress, professional development, and best practice, or quit.
Look, we all know eikaiwa is not real teaching. The corporate owners don’t give a flying fuck about education because they know that real learning is hard, and that the students don’t really and truly want to be pushed to learn. All the students want is an easy ride, to be entertained, to have a fun hobby, and maybe learn a little bit along the way. They have no goals or illusions of attaining real English proficiency.
The owners also know that real professional development for teachers will cost them money – no one who has qualifications would work for the peanuts they pay, and no teacher who understands second language acquisition would accept their convoluted, outdated methods.
The only solution for you is to get your quals and move up to a better, more professional teaching context. After ten years, you really have to make a commitment to a real teaching career, or get out of ESL altogether. From this point on, you’ll only become more and more frustrated and feel more and more unfulfilled.
After a decade you probably don’t want to hear this, but it sounds like your mentality is better suited to a professional teaching role or at least a solo teaching gig at a high school where methodology may (and I repeat, may) be a serious topic of consideration. Eikaiwa is a hostess club without the booze and chiffon dresses. The customer expects X and they’ve been dishing it out for decades. Why change now?
You can change jobs though.
“I’ve spent nearly a decade working at an Eikaiwa, but unfortunately, most of my suggestions to improve our curriculum and enhance student-teacher relationships have fallen on deaf ears.”
Well, in all due respect, you’re being kind of complacent in staying at the same company for almost a decade. Why haven’t you moved on?
Create your own school or – if you studied Education in university – move on to something else – if you don’t have the credentials yet, work on them ASAP!
Long story short … u r not Japanese thats why ur opinion does not concern us
My advise is try to make ur own job as much easer as u can .
As someone who has both a Bachelors and a teaching license in English, I often felt frustration when working at an eikaiwa or any other English teaching job in Japan.
I feel your pain.
only way to deal with ppl like that is to figure out how to make them think your idea is really theirs (and a good one), but it’s hard to do, lol
The way to advance in big chain eikaiwa isn’t by teaching better classes or by having better curricula, it’s by getting more students to sign up for more classes and more materials. The principle skill is sales, not teaching. I mean, hell, at least one and I think more than one of the classic big eikaiwa chains got started by a Japanese guy whose chief qualification was getting a foreign woman to marry him. All anyone in eikaiwa cares about is getting the customer to say “yes” to as long of a commitment as possible.
My first question is, are people complaining about those things? If they aren’t, why fix what isn’t broken?
You’ve been here a decade. I don’t need to explain the shitty ways English is taught here. This is how it is. And eikaiwa is a business. They aren’t going to change if people are happy with what they offer.
However, are people complaining? If so, and management isn’t doing anything about it, that’s a problem. That’s on them if the school loses money. Can you complain to the owner about it? How long has your manager been in Japan?
The guy that “trained” me when I got my first Eikaiwa job had never heard the word “pedagogy” before. He literally needed to google it. He was condescending too, mostly due to him having a mid-level Japanese ability while I was still learning basics, which he used as a crutch in all his classes since he didn’t know the first thing about teaching.
I think you should get a job and let them rot.
Two things.
First, your actual question: In my experience, it’s almost impossible to come in as a relatively new worker and start asking for overall change. Imagine if you, who has been working for 10 years, gets confronted by someone with 2 months of experience who tells you to change and use TPRS more.
I’ve had success with the following: Instead of asking if we can all start teaching more lexical chunks, I just announce that I’d like to start doing it myself as a side project just to see how it goes. Most teachers don’t care if you try new things yourself as long as nobody complains. Maybe later down the line you can show the difference in progress between your classes before and after you implemented the change.
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Second, “Bloom’s Taxonomy”… was just Bloom riffing one night not giving it much thought. The triangle that you probably know about isn’t even the final, “serious” version. The triangle version is *wrong*.
That’s a hostile work environment.
Could you try talking directly to the CEO. Some managers with a huge ego won’t pass on good ideas as they didn’t think if it themselves
As someone who comes from a management background, this is my advice.
Like other people have noted, the senior teacher does not have a degree in education and doesn’t understand it the way you do. Giving advice to them is pointless, and there is no hope they will pass it onwards and upwards.
The best option would be to go to the CEO and present him your advice properly, including the pros, cons, costs, benefits, etc. Make it clear to him that you have a background in this field and can implement the changes. If he is smart, he will listen to you.
If he doesn’t, it is clear that he just wants to run the company in a simple manner and earn money, with no real intention of doing something “innovative and new” until the whole industry has implemented it and he is forced to.
You can then decide whether remaining at this company is what you want to do.
(If you start your own company, hire me!)