I know what you’re saying to yourself: “What? Another bloody task I have to do? Shouldn’t I focus on teaching? Isn’t this going to be just a giant time-suck with no benefit?”
The short answer is: if you can build a newsletter into your routine, it will have great long-term returns, with minimal short-term investment of time or money. Allow me to show you how to publish a newsletter, what to put in it, and why I think you should, then you decide whether it’s worth it for you.
How to publish a newsletter
When I started our first school newsletter it was a folded A4 piece of paper that I printed using the free Pages software that came with my Mac. We’d hand it to all our students at our annual speech day. That morphed into a monthly newsletter. I think we got up to a print run of 100 and printer ink was becoming a cost issue, when I wised up and realised the newsletter didn’t have to be printed on paper, duh, and I started emailing it on Mailchimp for free. Some time later I realised a newsletter doesn’t have to be every month, it could be weekly or even daily if it is more targeted to specific readers. So now we just use Line. Every children’s class has its own private Line chatroom that we post to as and when we want to communicate with parents, and since we don’t worry about layout or presentation much, it’s super fast and easy, just a 30-second job during, or straight after every lesson. It doesn’t feel like a newsletter when you are just posting a note or a picture or video or two on the spur of the moment. But over time, it amounts to quite a lot of communication with a key demographic of our business: the folks who pay our fees.
But what should I put in my newsletter?
Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
Pictures of your students enjoying your brilliant lessons
A note about what each class is learning or working on
This month’s theme or this month’s role play (don’t have a monthly theme or role play? It’s easy to figure one out for next month, and once you get to 12, you never need to think of a new one again)
Videos of you teaching
Videos of the students speaking English/having fun/both if possible
A grammar or vocab note for parents, for kids, for businesspeople, whatever type of student you’d like to attract more of
Pictures of your cat
Better yet: Pictures of your students’ cats
A crossword or word search
Meet our newest teacher
Meet our newest student
Advertising from local businesses
Why go to all the trouble?
The answer for me (an ex-newspaper hack) is: it’s just a whole bunch of fun being the editor of my own newspaper… but I’ll admit that’s maybe not your dream. Even so, there are a couple of major benefits to having some sort of regular newsletter/email/Line group communication:
It opens up contact with parents and others beyond the classroom walls. Frequently, the people paying for the lessons are not the people in the class, and they’d like to have an idea of what they’re paying for.
Nothing sells your school better than evidence of your students enjoying themselves, learning and, who-da-thunk-it, actually speaking English. Put yourself in the shoes of a prospective new student. Doesn’t the school with its own printed newsletter or videos of students enjoying English look better than a school that doesn’t?
A newsletter becomes a vehicle for you to sell your products to existing students. Got a new course for mums coming up? Put it in the newsletter. Planning a trip to England? Put it in the newsletter. Got a few spaces free in the K1 class? You know what to do.
A newsletter helps foster a community around you, your school and your students. A community is maybe the only thing AI can never create. And that, my dear fellow human, is maybe the only thing that will save us from AI taking all our jobs.
The bottom line?
Start spreading the news.
All the best,
Patrick
Teaching tip
Use a reward system to liven up lessons for younger students. But occasionally randomise results, otherwise the same brighter students keep winning, which can demotivate the weaker kids who need the extra motivation the most. I give out gold stickers for good work, funny jokes, winners of games, good behaviour, cool haircut (if someone hasn’t won a sticker in ages). When a student has saved up 10 gold stickers they get to pick from a basket of goodies (bought from the 100-yen shop). I don’t give sweets (don’t want to rot their teeth or risk setting off an allergy) and I try not to overuse the system because if the kids are only focussed on getting the rewards, that can be bad too — learning shouldn’t be all about Pavlovian bells and electric shocks. Use it if it’s useful. Abandon it if it doesn’t get the desired results or becomes the unwanted focus of lessons. For ages 5 to 10 or so.
PS, Matt Alt has been writing about Japan since before it was cool to do so. I subscribe to his Pure Invention substack, and you probably should too if you have an interest in publishing, Japan, or just being here as a foreigner.