 I am was talked to you today about making reality match the marketing, which is basically the story of a revised syllabus. And I worked with ATC language schools to revise the syllabus to make sure we were delivering, hoping that we were delivering. But I also like to call this, for the purpose of today, two years of work, shut it into 12 minutes, which would be fast. So expectations versus reality. It's a well-worn meme at this stage. You book something, or you buy something, or you go somewhere, and the expectation doesn't always match up. We bake a cake, and the expectation doesn't really match up. Or you open the biscuit tin, and it's for a soul, and you're like, man, I don't believe it. So when was the last time your expectations as a kind were met or exceeded? I was going to get you to discuss this, but actually we had a rain talk about it earlier, so you're not going to discuss it, but you'll see that a lot of what I talk about has come up already. I promise I didn't make it throughout the day. This is not why I'm going last. So to give you context for our syllabus and why we put it together, ATC has eight junior summer centres. The largest centre is over 600 students, that's in UCD. The smallest centre is about 100 students. We're in Kilkenny, Limerick, Menut, and then in various centres around Dublin. The resources vary in each centre, so some centres have loads of technology, PCs in every classroom, interactive whiteboards, and then in other centres it's a blackboard and a piece of chalk. The student demographic is also quite different in the centres, so in our youngest centre it's 10 years of age to 12 years of age, and then we go to middle school in our bigger centres, 11 years of age up to 16 years of age. And then we also have students who are 17, 18, our young adults. 5,000 or more students pass through our doors. This is just in the junior centres from June to August. That's a lot of people to keep happy and make sure that they get what they expect. So I want you to call out to me, the client. We have different types of client. We have parents, teachers and agents, and I tend to think of them as clients, but separate clients to learners. So I want you to shout out to me, what do parents, teachers and agents expect from someone? Value for money, excellence, anything else? Safety, safety, safety. None of these are on my list. Don't tell anyone. Progress, yes? That's on the list. Anything else? Success. And what about learners? What do you think learners expect? A good time. Obviously I understand learners, which one do they understand, adults? So I find that generally the expectations are the same. They're just prioritised differently or thought about from a different angle. So our learners want fun and engaging tours, but that's kind of the same as immersion in the culture. It's pretty much the same thing. And they want new friends from their own and other countries. Again, that's kind of like interaction and nationality mix. They want lots of opportunities to speak. And we find that parents and teachers in particular, at the top of their list, they come to Ireland to speak. Speaking, speaking, speaking and practicing. The reason ATC's clients expect this is because this is what ATC sells. You come to our school to get as much communication practice as possible. And this is what we want to do. And progression. So we find that students 12 years of age understand the concept of progression and are they getting better just as much as their teachers do. So they want to see that as well. So the reality of some recourses. The coach exploded. Nobody's listening in the tour. They're all snatching. Somebody threw the pack lunch in my face. Hordes of students testing at the same time. You might have 250 students on a Monday morning. All into a room. All tested together. Quick, quick, quick. 15 students per class. The right teacher is with them. The door is closed and then you breathe for the first time in four hours. Oh, oh, oh. Hang on. We forgot the picture of me up here. This is me at the end of the day. A teacher is doing paperwork. Worn out because it's paperwork heavy. And then there's a call on top of all of that. So within all of this, how can an academic manager or a director of studies or a principal say yes, they're getting a community of lessons. Yes, it's an interactive class. Yes, and we are absolutely delivering what we seek. So you need academic consistency. And in the past, we were placing a lot of pressure on the teachers. And I think that happens in summer centres all around the world. There's a lot of pressure on teachers. So, you know, we were, you know, explaining. So explain, train, then they don't do it so we complain. Teachers aren't doing what we say. And it's like what Liam said earlier. It's not the teacher's fault. We have to give them the materials and give them the opportunity to provide the customer service and to provide the service that we expect and that the clients expect. So we looked at the old syllabus. This was two years ago and we scrapped it. Got rid of it. It was planning heavy. It was assuming a lot. It was assuming that the teachers were, you know, very, very experienced. Well, actually they may have a year experience or two years experience or they might be straight off a short course. So we revised the syllabus. We made sure it was student-centred, topic-based but able to, you know, manoeuvre within that topic. Functional lessons that link directly to activities and tours because we wanted a holistic feel to the course. We didn't want, here's your lessons, here's your tours. We wanted them to link up together. Learning outcomes in student-centred language that would actually be shared with the students. Teaching outcomes to keep lessons on track and focused. So if you're a teacher who looks through the lesson plan and says, well, I've got a better idea for that, hits the outcome, perfect. And this was the key thing. Full lesson plans with pronunciation, error correction and classroom management instruction in them. So that where possible, your teacher can't go wrong. They're being helped along the way in a situation that is high stress, very, very busy. You don't get the support that you would normally get from a director of studies. You get usually very quick instructions, everything has to be done very quickly and you're asked to perform at a very high level. And it's paper light and accessible by a drop box. So we're trying to cut down on the cues of the photocopier and that stress of the photocopier jammed, especially if you're in one of the centres that has PCs and projectors. It's very easy to project most of the lessons and you're not stressed out on a Monday morning. So how it works and we wanted to make it accessible and easy for our principals and for our teachers. So it's a four week syllabus and every level, every single student on day one, week one is doing a lesson based on their family. But that lesson obviously is different from day one to at sea one. So let's say you get that sick call on Thursday morning and your cover teacher comes in with 20 minutes to spare and you bless yourself and go, oh my god, you're absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for coming in. You tell them to go to day four, week one, day four, lesson one and the entire lesson plan is there. So within the lesson plan you have your outcomes, you have the teacher outcomes, you have instructions from beginning to end of the lesson and this is a paper light lesson where all the material the students need is this projected on the board. Everything else is student produced and functional language. This is an example of a very short, very paper light lesson but we do have lessons that are more complicated with lots of handouts. So this is a sea one science lesson and this lesson is where students get into groups and they analyse different flight devices that you can make from paper and then they make the ones that they think are the most effective and then they try them out and then they report back. So you can't go wrong, the teacher can't go wrong, your cover teacher can't go wrong. Within that you've got classroom management techniques such as for this task move your students around. For this task highlight the pronunciation of the following words. When you have eight summer centres and you have five thousand students coming through your doors it's keeping the consistency that was what we wanted. We wanted to know that within reason these things are happening in each centre and it's no problem for teachers to veer off this as long as they stick to the learning outcomes and the teaching outcomes. But then what we wanted to do because students on their phones and tours and then they come back into the classroom and the teacher says, what did you do on your tour? And they go, pennies. And you go on and on and on and on. Or they've gone to Starbucks and that's all they remember of their tour. So what we did was designed and created the learning journal which my beautiful assistant is now handing out. So this was to help with solid tour preparation in lessons. Every student knows what tour they're going on and there is written into the lesson plan 10 to 15 minutes for the students to have a look at the workbook of their upcoming tour. So they have a look at Hoth Village and they look through the tasks and they decide these look okay or I need some help with vocabulary and the teacher helps them and the teacher reminds them on your tour today you're going to fill in this information. And then the next day they come back into class and the teacher checks it for them. We also have a reflection section at the back of my learning diary and we used to get the students to record just in copy books but we found that they were just talking about what they ate that day and it was kind of hard and in a short course with teachers that you only have for a month it's very hard to make sure that everybody is instructing the students to reflect on what they've actually learnt. So again, keeping it simple, making it easy we constructed it in a way where they have to reflect. The questions encourage reflection. And again this is checked by the teachers but it's not corrected, we're not correcting their grammar this is for the students to take home show their parents look back on new words I learnt in lessons new words I learnt on tour and we found that it increased engagement in the classroom and also on their tours which then linked to the ATC junior platform this provides further tour information so the learner can research where they're going in class I'm nearly there. So the learner can the teacher instructs the learner ok, you go to your tour information on your junior platform which is on your phone find out three interesting facts and then report them back to the class so the student is engaged before they go on the tour they've done a little bit of research supervised by the teacher then they head off to the book of Cells and they have a little bit more buy-in into where they're going Send a student off to look at a book a couple of pages of a book that was written thousands of years ago it's very hard, it's hard to get them interested but if you can engage them somehow beforehand we had been asking teachers to do that but we weren't giving them the materials to do that but now that's what they have it also gives learners access to the learning outcomes and this is another way that teachers can be reminded get the students to check their learning outcome and as I mentioned before with Chris we can put that on to the lesson planning template so they tick it off as a reminder so it's all about helping the teachers deliver what we want them to deliver instead of just throwing them in and hoping for the best so expectations versus reality we expected them to use them we expected them to fill them in but we were really happy when they were posting on Instagram sorry you know how much they enjoyed it they loved their learning journals actually they were their prized possessions by the time they were at home but perfectly stayed on Instagram a picture even when we forced them into stocks to finish the identity statement and even when they were taking them making out of Renaissance paintings so we were pretty happy with that