Tutors from Visayas gathered on July 28, 2018 at Privato Hotel in Cebu City for RareJob’s The Premium Experience workshop.
Aimed to enrich the tutors’ knowledge and hone their teaching skills, The Premium Experience is an event originally exclusive for Premium Lesson tutors. In its Cebu leg, however, the event was made available to General English Lesson tutors so they could get a glimpse of how it will be if they decide to join the Premium Lesson program.
Among the curious ones was Tutor NinoPaolo who has been teaching with RareJob as a General English Tutor since 2014. What got him interested was not only the compensation, but also the opportunity to improve.
“Everybody wants to improve themselves. Being coached as a Premium Lesson tutor, I think, is the best thing for anybody to improve their teaching skills,” he shared. “I think the best way to becoming a better person is to know where your flaws are, and most of the time, we don’t know our bad habits or bad manners or flaws unless somebody tells us.”
Identifying and correcting errors was one of the highlights of the workshop facilitated by Coach Cyrus. He talked about the usual pitfalls that tutors get into when they point out errors.
“Sometimes we get trigger-happy at the chance for corrections, sometimes we don’t give enough corrections, and sometimes we don’t give corrections at the right time,” he explained.
The workshop also zeroed in on the PCPP cycle. Short for Presentation, Comprehension, Practice, and Production, PCPP is a general learning cycle that can be applied not just in online teaching. As Coach Cyrus put it, “PCPP can be used across anything we want to teach—even when we are teaching someone how to ride a bike.”
He said that when teaching someone how to ride a bike, you need to first explain what a bike is, its purpose, and then demonstrate how to ride it. After that, let the person ride the bike himself..
“Some may need training wheels; others may not. Sometimes you just have to give them a nudge and they’re fine. Every student has different learning curves so you may use different teaching methods,” Coach Cyrus said.
After the lecture, tutors were separated into three groups and they were tasked to create and conduct a demo lesson applying what they have learned.
Tutor Kathleenkayeee, one of the RareJob Ambassadors and a BCC Premium Lesson tutor, also attended the event. “The fulfillment [that you get] when you teach and when you contribute a little to the students—who have a lot of aspirations in their life and their career—is a very good feeling,” she shared.
At the end of the event, tutors went home with raffle prizes, new friends, renewed confidence, and better teaching skills that they can use when conducting Premium Lessons.
