The Insider's Guide: How To Enhance Online Teacher Quality

Assessing for quality as an innate characteristic starts at the beginning stages of the recruitment phase, as early as targeting. Reach your ideal potential teachers by correctly identifying them through well-developed pipelines and headhunting techniques, before progressing to the interview stage. 

As revealed in the abovementioned case study, our research has shown that teacher experience doesn’t necessarily equate to teacher quality. 

So, what are a couple things to look for to analyze potential when recruiting online teachers? Build these checks into your skills and competency-based screening and assessment processes.

The Minimum Required Quality Checks

Step one is, naturally, to verify that your candidates are suitably skilled and qualified to effectively teach English online.

1. Vetting Qualifications: The ESL market is flooded with "get qualified quick" TEFL certification providers that don't offer effective learning material or moderation on assessments. It's important that teachers possess an accredited and adequate online teaching qualification, so you can rest assured that your students will achieve successful outcomes.

2. Native-Level English Proficiency Assessment: Using a practical test like CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) is useful to assess the candidate's English fluency and pronunciation. A C1 level is ideal as it indicates the teacher's overall command of the language and their ability to explain concepts clearly and concisely, making your students' learning experience effective.

3. Teaching Skills Observed: A talented educator expresses the ability to adapt teaching methods to different learning styles, managing and problem-solving in online classrooms, demonstrating cultural sensitivity, and thinking on their feet in any situation. Ask candidates to submit a self-introduction video as a visual resume.

4. Displayed Tech-Saviness: A teacher's ability to quickly learn new teaching platforms, as well as navigate and present digital classroom tools and adopt AI functions, will determine the level at which they can deliver memorable and engaging lessons. Requesting a demo lesson, whether live or recorded, allows you to experience the teacher's classroom as if you were the student.

The Exceptional Teacher Checks

Hard skills alone don’t guarantee a great teacher. They need to be able to lead a classroom, develop potential, engage minds and deliver memorable lessons, so your competency assessments should also include the following checks.

1. Passion and Motivation: If online teachers aren't intrinsically driven to inspire their students, lessons will be stale, ineffective, and even missed. Look for candidates that demonstrate a positive attitude, a passion for teaching, and eagerness to engage with students. This will ensure your students are met with a happy, hands-on teacher, every time.

2. Patience and Empathy: Learning a new language can be daunting. Pronouncing strange words and phrases that you don't understand can often make students feel shy and like they're making a fool out of themselves. An empathetic teacher creates a safe environment where students feel comfortable to speak up, make mistakes, and learn from them. Look for candidates that mention individual learning styles, adapting to different student types, and being aware of cultural sensitivity.

3. Classroom Presence and Personality: Not every teacher is comfortable presenting with props or acting in different voices. A combination of the self-intro video and demo lesson will show if a teacher appears comfortable, confident, approachable and in control, and how their presence is projected in a virtual classroom. This is crucial for facilitating interactive lessons that students actively engage in.

And finally, should candidates tick the above boxes, one last but equally important element to look for is company fit. They can cruise through your assessments up until this point, but if a teacher isn't aligned with your company's values and purpose, they unfortunately won't last long.

4. Value and Purpose Alignment: It's important to hire teachers with the same core beliefs as your organisation. If their value system aligns with your expectations, it leads to an easier adoption into your team, seamless output, and less conflict. And when people understand that the work they do has true meaning and makes a difference in the world, they are internally motivated to show up as their best for your students every day.

If current teachers tick all of the above boxes but are still under-performing, there are various initiatives that can be undertaken to help improve teacher quality.

1. Impactful and Motivational Skills Development

Providing powerful skills and career development opportunities not only improves retention rates, but also expands their knowledge and proficiency. We promote growth and learning initiatives that develops their in-class performance, as well as skills outside of teaching, such as leadership, time management, and general knowledge.

1. Learning Courses: Consider courses that covers both a range of hard skills, such as new teaching methodologies, digital tools, AI platforms and resources, and soft skills such as empathy, active listening, and leadership. Developing bespoke certification courses into niche subjects is a bonus! This signals to teachers that you are committed to investing in their growth.

2. Mentorship Programs: Identify star performers that can be mentored into teaching mastery, or primed for leadership roles in future, by senior management members. This provides an incentive to be chosen into a selective program, as well as communicates career progression opportunities, leading to better depth of knowledge and teacher retention.

3. Online Teacher Community Workshops: Facilitate collaborative virtual workshops where top performers share their best kept online teaching secrets, teachers can discuss unique challenges that arose in recent lessons and how they dealt with it, or any new platform features they found helpful. This forum of open and practical knowledge sharing makes everyone better.

2. Wellness Programmes That Make a Difference

Inspired teachers will inspire their students, which is great for your bottom line! But how can you ensure they stay happy, healthy and motivated in their remote-working environment?

1. Focus on Mental Health: The importance of fostering positive mindsets cannot be under-valued. For teachers who work from home, it's important to provide opportunities of connection with peers on similar hobbies and interests. In addition, make available resources on a range of pertinent subjects like burnout, isolation, finance and time management, etc. This will make your teachers feel emotionally, psychologically, and mentally supported.

2. Physical Wellbeing: Work-from-home teams face very real challenges in fostering connection, community, and physical wellbeing. Providing a virtual fitness platform that brings teachers together and gets them moving has many benefits, such as lower absenteeism, a decrease in disability claims, and reduction in employee turnover. Explore our recent case study revealing that investing in your team's wellness has a proven ROI.

3. Volunteering Opportunities: There are many benefits to volunteering, including lower blood pressure, reduced stress levels, improved mental health, and an increased sense of purpose and motivation. Creating opportunities where teachers can volunteer their time and talent to worthy causes will further contribute to their personal development, which allows them to teach stress-free.

It's possible for thriving online teacher teams to consistently deliver quality lessons without much intervention, once these practices and initiatives are established.

The good news is that online schools don't need to spend the time, money or effort to implement these measures! The Really Great Teacher Company's white label Teacher Management and Development as a Service (TMaas) provides a complete solution that includes all of the abovementioned interventions (and more!).

From a global recruitment team to hands-on performance management and our own curated learning platform, contact us to help improve your teacher ratings today.