Throughout my teaching career, I’ve never had a student stop taking lessons from me solely because they were dissatisfied with my teaching.
I know what you’re thinking: they just don’t tell you!
Alright, let’s assume they wouldn’t tell me. Would they still leave detailed five-star reviews? Seems quite unlikely.
Plus, Preply gets monthly student satisfaction metrics from anonymous post-lesson surveys. You can see for yourself how mine look.
So, how do I keep students happy long term?
⚖️Manage expectations
Keeping students happy starts with making sure they know what to expect. When they embark on a journey with you, students expect to see results. This is perfectly reasonable. However, students often struggle to estimate the time and effort needed to achieve a goal. It’s your job as a teacher to make sure the gap between their expectations and what they will truly achieve is as thin as possible, even if that means scaling back. So, take time to address your students’ expectations: the sooner, the better.
🔒Create a safe learning environment
This is a huge one, and it comes with so many layers I may make a post just about this. What I can say here is: learn how to give feedback! Basic principles: 1. Don’t interrupt constantly; take notes instead. 2. Don’t correct every mistake, just what’s relevant or causes miscommunication. 3. Smile. 4. Use a playful and relaxed tone. 5. Move on: the world keeps spinning! Bonus: 6. Show your students that you make mistakes too!
🎯Make lessons relevant
Think of your adult student like the sun; everything should revolve around them. When a student pays for 1:1 time with you, they generally expect a tailored approach. If, after six months of lessons, a football trainer is not able to hold a basic conversation about gameplay and tactics with their foreign players, they are going to feel like your lessons are useless, even though they may have learned enough to pass the DELF. Your students can hardly value what is irrelevant to them.
🎉Make lessons engaging
Pretty much every adult spends at least eight hours of their day working. If your lesson feels like an overtime shift, very few will stick around. Studying a foreign language is hard enough by itself; you don’t need to make it boring too. Two tricks: 1. Connection first, tasks second. 2. Keep it varied.
🤝🏻Constantly check in with your student
Once you have established trust, your student should be comfortable sharing with you how they feel about their learning journey, so that you can continue to adjust and manage expectations as you go. If this doesn’t happen naturally, make it a habit to ask monthly: How is it going? Are you where you feel like you should be? If a student feels like their efforts are not paying off, they are much more likely to lose motivation, even though you, as a teacher, may know they are exactly where they should be.
What are some ways you keep your students happy long term?