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ESA, which stands for Engage, Study and Activate is a method of teaching students a new topic successfully in the most dynamic way possible. Creating immediate rapport with your students, teaching them the new information they need to know and then observing the immediate results of the class is what ESA is all about. Although the first time I had seen ESA was during this course I can assure you I was no stranger to the method. Allow me to tell you how I had applied this method well before I began lesson 1 of the ITTT TEFL course. During my time working at a call center I learned many things related to teaching and training individuals from scratch. Our client had already provided a syllabus of what was expected to teach all new hire associates. The existing syllabus included a break down of what had to be studied, how long it would take to complete each lesson, which activities had to be used to complement it and what tests had to be done to grade the progress. It sounds like a complete syllabus doesn't it? The fact of the matter is that it was an effective set of courses however; because the training occurred in Latin America where I live they didn't take into account the lack of general knowledge regarding american terms. I admit my first classes were by the book because it was all I could refer to but I quickly found out the gap between their resources and our knowledge. I sprang up to action and developed very basic additions to the process. You could say I created the Engage phase of each lesson in order to include an opportunity for the trainer to gauge the room as to how much knowledge there was of the soon-to-be mentioned topic. This change, unbeknownst to our client, led to the discovery of a knowledge gap that wasn't being addressed and needed a whole course to do so. With the responsibility on my hands, and my job as well, I created a brand new course for the topic following the guidelines I had learned and trusted from our client. The course was about the three steps a debit card transaction had to go through for a purchase. It would start by eliciting knowledge about the cards and clarifying common misconceptions between debit cards, ATM cards, credit cards and clave cards. After doing so the trainer would talk about the three steps the card goes through and answer questions as they arose. Finally after addressing all concerns and system usages there would be a role-play session and as one person role-played the call the rest would navigate the system applying the knowledge. The course was created 4 years back from this current day and is still in use by my successors, whom I dearly contact every now and then. The success of a course created by someone who had never learned about ESA was the fact that that someone had understood and learned the structure of a successful course design and applied it to his own. Without proper engagement you lose focus, without proper study you lose success and without proper activities you lose interest. Take it from a 20 year old kid who designed a course comparable to those designed by a 5.2 billion company.
