One-to-One or Group Lessons? How to Work with Groups

By Katya Kravchenko

If you ask the all-knowing Google about “teaching English in groups or one-to-one”, you will see an endless sea of content about the pros and cons of group learning for students. But this article is about the advantages and disadvantages for freelance teachers (tutors) and language schools.

Let’s start with some stories =)

Story #1: Once upon a time there was a freelance teacher. They gave high-quality, great lessons. The number of their students kept growing, but the number of hours in a day stayed the same. That is when the teacher wondered: “How can I keep growing and scaling?”

Story #2: Once upon a time there was an English school that offered one-to-one lessons. The business grew and developed, great reviews spread, and new clients came faster and faster. But finding new teachers was much harder than finding clients. And the business wondered: “How do we keep scaling if we have clients but not enough resources?”

These stories share a common problem: scaling. And the solution in both cases is group learning.

I know you might be thinking: “What about the results? You scaled up, made big groups... What about the quality of learning?” Do not jump to conclusions. Well-organized group lessons have a number of advantages for students.

The advantages of group lessons for students

• Healthy competition in a group increases each student’s motivation.
• The communicative approach. A group has more conversation partners with a similar level of English, which means more opportunities to practice speaking (in pairs and small groups, in discussions and games).
• Peer interaction. Students can interact with other group members who have a similar level of English (unlike one-to-one lessons, where communication is only teacher–student, and the two speakers have different language levels). This gives them confidence as they notice that making mistakes is normal.
• A chance to hear English in different voices and accents.
• Socialization, which is very important, especially for children’s groups.
• The price of a lesson. It is no secret that the business model of group lessons means a lower price than one-to-one lessons. For the client, this is also a significant advantage.

However, one-to-one learning obviously has its own advantages too. Besides my favorite, “in a one-to-one lesson, all the teacher’s attention goes to one student”, there are a number of other advantages, and, of course, there are cases when a client’s request can only be met through one-to-one lessons.

The advantages of one-to-one lessons for students

• The chance to teach students with an unusual level of English (for example, a 9th grader at pre-A1 level or, on the contrary, a 7-year-old with conversational B1 because they live in a bilingual family). In these cases, putting together a group of students at that level would be almost impossible, so one-to-one lessons with an individual program work perfectly.
• Building a curriculum around the client’s individual request (for example, preparing for a special exam, or a need for specific vocabulary such as medical or technical).
• The chance to build a schedule around the client’s request (for example, a student can study only on Mondays and Fridays from 8:00 to 9:00 and has no other options, or the client needs a very flexible schedule because they are a schoolchild who often travels to sports competitions, or an adult with irregular working hours, and so on).

If by now you believe that group learning works and its advantages resonate with you, read on :) Many tutors and school managers believe that putting groups together is very hard and almost impossible. I agree that launching a group is harder than starting one-to-one lessons with a single student. BUT let’s be honest: the first step toward any very difficult goal is believing that you can do it :), and then let’s work through it step by step.

How to recruit groups

Step by step:

• create a clear, understandable offer (with a course description, price, duration and a specific start date);
• prepare a clear client journey, that is, understand what you do with leads (placement test, demo lessons, agreeing on a schedule, prepayment);
• visualize the offer: post it on your social media page with clear banners and a description;
• promote the course through your social media page, targeted ads, Telegram channels and so on;
• support clients after they buy the course and do not leave them without attention (a feedback system).

In fact, there is a lot more to say about different marketing strategies, promotion channels and so on. But that deserves a separate article :)

Typical mistakes when recruiting groups

I would highlight the two most common mistakes made when recruiting groups:

Mistake #1. Trying to launch a group in 1-2 weeks (that is, in a very short time), then nothing works out, and you go back to one-to-one lessons.

Groups are a long game. If you are launching ads for group enrollment, plan them at least 2 months before your course starts. It will not work the way it does with one-to-one students, where you get a request today and start lessons tomorrow. So if the course starts at the beginning of October, the ads should start at least at the beginning of August. Open group enrollment well in advance of the start date.

Mistake #2. Poor handling of leads and inadequate client support.

Imagine a client contacts you a month before the course starts. It is important that at the consultation stage the client already feels the quality of your service and your expertise. They should have a clearly built path to joining a group: a placement test, agreeing on a schedule, a clear start date and, of course, ready answers to all the questions they might have. Just imagine what a client might want to know at the start: how missed lessons are made up, the maximum number of people in a group, the course program, how payment works and so on. Important! If it is not you but a consultant who handles leads, all this information should be written down in scripts.

How to organize group learning

Level

75% of successful group learning is a correctly matched group level. That is, it is important to bring together students with roughly the same knowledge of English and give them a program at a level that is comfortable for them. With children, age must also be taken into account (5th and 9th graders cannot study in the same group, even if all the students are at A1 level).

Placement test

With one-to-one lessons, the first meeting with the teacher can serve as an assessment of the student’s level, but this will not work with groups. Already at the stage of inviting someone to join a group, you need to know the student’s level, and a placement test will help. You can find a ready-made placement test that suits you, develop your own and use online services to run it (for example, Wordwall), or use the placement test on the TalkEn.Cloud platform.

Tests are usually 90-95% accurate, so if you have the resources and the desire, you can also add an oral test to determine the level even more precisely. The final confirmation of the level is the first lesson in the group, when the teacher can assess students’ level in action. Do not worry if after the first lesson you suggest that a student move to a group with a different level: that is normal. It is much worse if you suggest it in the middle of the course, as that shows you made a mistake in determining the level.

Group schedule

When you open group enrollment, you should already have schedule options prepared: imaginary “houses” where you will place students. During consultations it is important to offer clients a schedule rather than leaving them with “We have noted which schedule options suit you, enrollment is in progress, and we will contact you when the schedule is set”.

When drawing up group schedules, think about your target audience’s daily routine. Primary school students finish classes around lunchtime, while high school students find it more convenient to study in the evening. If you work offline, students need time to get to the English school; if you work online, you can schedule lessons even late in the evening, because children are already at home and do not need to travel home along dark streets.

And, of course, if the schedule you offer absolutely does not suit a client, do not lose their contact! Keep a list of such clients, because you may end up with a full group for a new schedule. If not, you can offer them one-to-one lessons.

Making up missed lessons

In one-to-one teaching, the question of make-up lessons does not arise (the student is either present or not), but in group teaching, make-up lessons are a separate organizational challenge. The school needs a clear strategy: what happens if a student misses a lesson?

Below are several ways a school can organize make-up lessons:

• If you work offline (in a classroom), students can join the lesson online. In this case it is important to equip the classroom with the right technology, and the teacher must be able to work with students in the classroom and online at the same time. This is very convenient for students, but the teacher’s attention is somewhat divided. It is important to train teachers to work in such lessons.
• If you are a large school with several groups at the same level, on the same programs but with different schedules, the student can join the same lesson in another group. But it is important to remember that for children, joining a new group is always stressful.
• If you use a platform with learning materials, a make-up lesson can also be replaced by the student going through the material on the platform on their own. This keeps them from missing material and helps them stay at the group’s level in the next lesson. The TalkEn.Cloud platform can provide this solution.
• For online learning, a video recording of the lesson is also a good solution. A lesson on Zoom (or another video service) can easily be recorded and shared with the student who missed it. This option works well with adults, especially in combination with the previous point on this list.
• An individual consultation with the teacher is a good way to make up missed lessons. I know many objections come up as you read this: it is expensive, and students will skip lessons on purpose to get one-to-one time with the teacher. But let me address these objections. First, a consultation is not a lesson: the teacher does not give a full lesson but goes over the material the student missed, always after the student has worked through the missed material on their own (ideally, when it is on the platform). So the goal of the consultation is not to provide the same service the student missed, but to cover the material so that no gaps appear and the student can move on. Second, under your school’s rules, an individual consultation may be offered not for every missed lesson but, for example, for every two. And the consultation does not have to be as long as a lesson. Third, of course, this type of make-up needs to be included in the school’s budget and financial planning, and you need to plan the teaching team’s resources so that at least one teacher can take such consultations as extra work.
• Extra (bonus) lessons at the end of the course can also serve as make-up lessons. For example, you announce a 15-lesson course and assume students may miss 10-15% of it. So at the end of the course you offer two extra lessons that students who missed lessons can sign up for. This is a much more attractive option than the previous one in terms of budget, because you can form the extra-lesson groups from students who had absences. Clients get the services included in the course, and to avoid missing material from the lessons they skipped, students go through it on their own on the platform.

So you can choose 1-2 ways of making up lessons and announce them to your clients. As you can see, they work best in combination, but you should not spread yourself across too many.

And if you have read this article to the end and your interest in group lessons has only grown, watch the video of our TalkEn Talks meeting, where we talk about group learning (in Ukrainian).

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