So, you’ve mastered your self-introduction video and we’re now asking you to either a.) record a teaching demo and send it to us, or b.) do your demo live.
We understand how intimidating it can be to teach in front of someone (or a group of people) if you’ve never taught before. Lucky for you, we’ve got your back again on this one.
Keep in mind the only time demos are needed is when you’ve been offered a position at a school teaching kindergarten classes. The main objective for teaching kindergarteners are to focus on pronunciation and basic sentence structure.
Creating Your Base
If you’ve talked to me before about a teaching demo, you’ve probably heard me ask, “What children’s songs do you know?” The reason for this is so we can pull words from that song to create the base of our lesson plan: one song and three to four beginner words.
Let’s say we’re teaching The Wheels on the Bus. From here we can grasp that the lesson will be about transportation, meaning we can use words like “bus”, “car”, “taxi” etc.
Now that we have our words and our song, we can create a template:
1. Self Intro, Say hello, High fives, etc (2-3minutes – sit down)
2. Introduce and drill words. You say words, they repeat, 2-3 times (2-3minutes – sit down)
3. Sing Song(1-2minutes – stand up)
4. Drill Words Again (1-2minutes – sit down)
5. Play Game(2-3minutes – stand up)
6. Drill Words Again (1-2minutes – sit down)
7. Sing Song Again (1-2minutes – stand up)
8. Say Goodbye(1 minute – sit down)
Total Lesson Time: 11-18 minutes
3-4 beginner level Handmade flashcards
*Note that this should be the only time you write your own curriculum. In the future you will never have to choose what to teach, you’ll only decide how to teach it. Aka: lesson planning. Your school will provide all of the books and materials needed to have a successful lesson.
- Use our Teaching Tools section to give you some ideas on games to play for your demo.
- Whenever you’re introducing a game or just drilling vocabulary, avoid saying things like, “Repeat after me.” Your students will likely just say everything you say, so it’s best to use body language.
- Instead of explaining how to play a game, just slowly play one round by yourself using the words your focusing on. The one thing that stuck with me from my $1500 TESOL course was that you should only be doing 20% of the talking. Body language is key for introducing and demonstrating new words and games.
- Notice the pattern of this template switches between standing and sitting. Your students should be moving around frequently.
- Read my article here about why your classroom introduction is so valuable. If things start off awkward, they will absolutely, positively stay awkward. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
- Smile and have fun. I can’t ever stress that enough. If you feel silly at some point during your demo, go ahead and laugh at yourself. Schools want to see that you can enjoy working with kids. Plenty of things will throw you off course when you’re actually teaching and your students will do the cutest things unexpectedly. Just laugh it off and keep going.
This is what works for me. If it doesn’t work for you or you have your own methods, great! Share them with us in comments below so we can create a successful and fun learning environment all throughout China.