Eight Challenges Facing Full-Time Educators in Private Education Institutions
By Dr Goh Seh Kai
5 Feb 2022
I have been a full-time lecturer in private education institutions (PEIs) for many years before the pandemic.
This article shares my experience as a lecturer in PEIs, which might be helpful hints for those who wish to be viable full-time teachers in these institutions.
In my view, although PEI educators may experience differently, they usually encounter eight challenges below.
Eight Challenges Facing Full-Time PEI Educators
Attain High Pass Rate: PEIs usually provide accredited overseas university programmes for people who wish to attain undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.
Since the government does not subsidize PEIs, most PEIs are profit-oriented — they must increase student intakes to improve revenue and profits.
While many factors can affect student admission numbers, such as university accreditation status, the usefulness of courses, passing and employment rates, etc., PEI teachers are usually responsible for achieving a “high pass” target for their classes.
The reason is while PEI trainers cannot control many of the factors mentioned above, they may attain high passing rates by enhancing their delivery quality, helping students understand complex concepts, and so forth.
Therefore, even though not everyone can clear the hurdle, most PEIs believe their instructors should be responsible for improving the passing rates.
Encourage Unmotivated Students: To achieve a “high pass” rate, PEI teachers must encourage students to study diligently, although it is sometimes challenging to motivate them.
They may have students who are often absent from class, miss assignment deadlines, submit low-quality reports, fail examinations, etc.
Thus, PEI trainers would face the challenges of improving these students’ learning attitudes and feel pressured to rectify these issues — such as high failure and poor attendance and punctuality percentage, etc.
They shall counsel these students and recommend disciplinary actions against those who fail to change. But they shall be prudent to avoid causing unhappiness which may cause high dropout rates that affect their school’s revenue and profits.
Coach Slow Learners: Generally, PEI Teachers may encounter slow learners, even though these students might have good learning attitudes.
From experience, some common issues of these students are inadequate language proficiency, poor cognitive skills, low concentration ability, etc.
PEI educators must understand how to help these students progress at the same pace as others.
Although it is crucial to strengthen their learning capability by coaching them individually and separately after class, it is sometimes quite taxing.
The reason is teachers might have many sluggish learners who will cause additional workload to them — spending more time for explanation in addition to their routine duties and responsibilities.
In addition, if these students also have poor learning attitudes, teachers will face even more challenges, such as these students might not turn up for coaching lessons scheduled for them.
And when these students fail the courses, PEI teachers’ superiors would query why they fail to uplift the students’ performance to clear the exams.
Teach Numerous Subjects: Since most PEIs are profit-oriented, cost reduction is critical to them, especially for small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Aside from remuneration concerned, most PEIs usually require their teachers to teach various subjects regardless of their expertise.
Hence, PEI instructors shall be versatile and possess various knowledge to be viable — It would be best to deliver numerous topics at different academic levels.
Nevertheless, it is often impossible to be well-versed in many different subjects. As a result, they would need to spend more time on research and teaching preparation tasks, resulting in heavy workloads.
Thus, they would frequently have to stay in schools after office hours or work from home to prepare their lessons.
Although it might be fruitful and rewarding to learn new knowledge through research, they would feel challenged to strive for work-life balance in the long run.
Since they always have something to complete urgently, they may ignore leisure for social activities and events. If this condition persists, they might feel exhausted in the long term.
Uplift Teaching Performance: Students and superiors will conduct teacher performance evaluations in each module in most PEIs.
The evaluation criteria are articulation clarity, ease of understanding concepts, helpfulness of learning materials, teachers’ subject knowledge, student support, etc.
The two-way assessment by students and superiors will provide a fairer judgment on an instructor’s teaching performance.
Moreover, students can provide feedback to the school anytime regarding their trainers’ teaching issues, such as difficulty understanding lessons, unbeneficial to learning, etc.
Hence, the assessment and feedback system will keep teachers on their toes to avoid complaints.
Teachers shall understand the assessment criteria to uplift their evaluation scores and eliminate their weaknesses to be viable.
They might often receive negative evaluation comments, which they would have to defend themselves if they deem the feedback is unreasonable or untrue.
Pursue Lifelong Learning: If you are an educator, you need to continue to upgrade your knowledge and skills to stay relevant.
The reason is you might have already left your previous profession some time ago and lost touch with the latest industrial know-how.
Although you must teach according to the syllabus and course materials prescribed by your school or university partners, it would be best to provide the latest real-life examples to enhance your teaching quality.
Moreover, it would be best to continue mastering the contemporary delivery techniques, such as online teaching tools, student engagement methods, etc.
The latest teaching techniques and industrial experience would help enhance your competency and solidify your competitiveness and indispensability.
Although your company might not provide you with training opportunities, you shall take the initiative to enhance your teaching capabilities through lifelong learning.
Possess Teaching Passion: Without a passion, one can’t do well in any job, let alone the teaching profession.
As mentioned above, teachers’ duties and responsibilities are substantial since they are responsible for improving students’ pass rates and acquiring knowledge and skills to enhance school revenue and profits.
From experience, students prefer instructors who are passionate about helping their studies — for example, make lessons simple and easy to understand, put in extra miles to explain sophisticated concepts, etc.
Hence, passionate PEI educators will not avoid troublesome tasks but are keen on improving teaching quality and handling students’ issues.
For example, they would quickly respond to students’ questions. They would maintain rapport with them, show care and render help to them, etc. — which are essential to inspire students to do well in their courses.
Therefore, it will be challenging to be an excellent PEI teacher without teaching passion.
Maintain Healthy Body and Mind: To sustain heavy workloads, PEI teachers shall keep a healthy body and mind through regular exercises and nutritious diets.
Since teachers usually need to spend long hours sitting down to prepare for lessons, they may neglect regular exercises. Likewise, they may have to sit down for two to three hours to conduct online classes, which might strain their eyes and vocal cords.
Since sitting down and staring at computer screens for too long are unhealthy, they would have to devote some time exercising weekly to avoid long-term health issues.
Similarly, standing too long during offline lessons also exhaust trainers’ physical energy, especially their leg muscles.
Strengthening the leg muscle to sustain the body weight during two to three hours of delivery is also essential to an instructor.
Besides physical fitness, mental health is equally crucial as a good trainer who must think and speak well in each lesson.
It would be best to eat nutritious diets and get enough sleep and rest, which would boost their cognitive ability and analytical mind to support their teaching performance.
Thus, to have a good performance, PEI trainers need to toughen their physical and mental capabilities to cope with the heavy workloads efficiently and effectively.
In conclusion, the following are the eight recapped challenges that full-time PEI educators would need to overcome during work.
· Achieve high passing rates to help enhance student enrolment and the school revenue and profits.
· Encourage unmotivated students to work hard by counselling and disciplinary actions but beware of minimizing dropout rates.
· Ensure slow learners keep pace with others by coaching them individually, although it might incur additional workload.
· Teach various subjects at different academic levels to help the organization reduce costs.
· Understand training evaluation criteria to help attain high teaching evaluation scores and minimize weaknesses. Defend any unjustified negative feedback.
· Acquire the latest teaching techniques and industrial experience to enhance competitiveness constantly regardless of if the organization has provided any training opportunities.
· Be passionate about improving teaching quality and handling students’ study issues.
· Keep a healthy body and mind to cope with heavy workloads through regular exercises and nutritious diets.
Thank you for reading, and your feedback is welcome and appreciated!
