Gentem Academic Training: Strengthening Learning Quality

We recently held Gentem Academic Training at our TBS Centre for English Trainers and Coaches, supporting our brands, including Wall Street English, GAP, NxtGen, and GenPro, as well as other business units. The training is part of our continued effort to strengthen the learning experience we provide to our members by developing the expertise of the people who deliver it.

The session was led by Griselda, Group Academic Director, and Stewart, National Instructional Delivery Lead, with a focus on evaluating and redesigning lessons to create stronger student participation, guided discovery, personalization, and opportunities for real communication. Rather than focusing only on whether learning materials were technically correct, the session encouraged our Trainers and Coaches to consider a more important question: does this lesson actually help members learn?

During the workshop, our Trainers and Coaches worked directly with an existing lesson, evaluating its effectiveness before redesigning it in groups and presenting their approach to the wider team. They reviewed elements including lesson aims, student engagement, Student Talking Time, context before grammar, guided discovery, practice progression, personalization, and the use of authentic examples.

The exercise also introduced several principles that can be applied when designing and delivering lessons. These included creating context before introducing grammar, giving learners a more active role in class, guiding learners to discover language rather than simply providing answers, building activities progressively toward real communication, and making learning more relevant to members’ own experiences.

Another important part of the training was creating space for our Trainers and Coaches to exchange real classroom experiences, including situations involving members who may need additional support with confidence, participation in highly interactive speaking classes, or different learning approaches. These discussions helped the team learn from one another, connect teaching principles with real classroom situations, and reflect on how to better respond to individual learner needs. The learning continued through collaborative activities and an informal gathering, giving Trainers and Coaches more opportunities to share experiences from different classes and centres, before concluding with reflection on what they could stop doing, start doing, and consider differently when developing future lessons and learning materials.

We will hold Gentem Academic Training each semester as part of our continued investment in developing our academic teams. By strengthening the expertise of our Trainers and Coaches and creating opportunities to share practices across teams, we aim to continuously improve how lessons are designed and delivered, respond more effectively to different learner needs, and maintain consistent learning quality across Gentem’s programs and centers.