Note: All Group Lessons information in this article is subject to change as part of the Beta testing phase. Please see the "Beta Testing Group Lessons" section for more details. 

Table of Contents

1. Group Lessons Overview
2. Why Group Lessons?
3. Beta Testing Group Lessons
4. What Have We Learned About Group Lessons Thus Far?
5. Getting Started
6. Group Lesson Structure
7. Testing the Group Lessons Curriculum
8. Navigating the Classroom
9. New Features in Group Lessons
10. FAQs
     

Group Lessons Overview

Group Lessons allow one tutor to connect with up to 3 students at the same time. Each lesson is reservation-only, and has unique content that our curriculum team has explicitly designed for use with groups of students.

Advanced and intermediate Group Lessons are 60 minutes in length, and beginner Group Lessons are 30 minutes.

Why Group Lessons?

Cambly’s mission is to bring high-quality English education to every English learner worldwide. As Cambly continues to grow, we are finding ways to make English education more accessible to everyone while creating an enjoyable and rewarding tutoring environment for you!

Group Lessons provide you with the opportunity to meet and tutor a number of students at one time in student-led discussions, with a goal of maximizing student interaction! We hope that tutors will find Group Lessons enjoyable and interactive, while taking advantage of some significant benefits.

Here are some benefits of tutoring Group Lessons:

1. Schedule Consistency - less likely to experience no shows and cancellations with 2-3 students per class. 
2. Pre-Planned Lessons - Cambly assigns curriculum to each Group Lesson so you always know how to steer the lesson! 
3. Access to Regular Students - You’ll meet plenty of students during Group Lessons who are likely to book private sessions with you and, hopefully, become regulars! 
4. Sense of Community - In a group setting, you will get to meet plenty of new students from different countries and cultures, while your students meet like-minded peers.

Please Note: For the early phase of the Beta test, compensation will be guaranteed! That means, if you sign up for a lesson, you will be paid in full ($12.00 p/hour or $6.00 p/half hour) regardless of student attendance for any lesson until further notice.  

Beta Testing Group Lessons:

Beta testing simply means that we are testing a part of our product for its functionality to work out the finer details before we fully roll out the product. As we continue to learn more and work through the beta, we want to give you early access to this testing phase to keep improving Group Lessons optimally for our tutors. 

During this time, we’ll introduce Group Lessons slowly to tutors while improving the feature for you as we go. Because of this, you will continue to see changes in the Group Lessons experience as well as updates to information and policies on this page. Our goal is to find the best version of Groups that works for all involved, so along the way we’ll notify you as we make changes.

What Have We Learned About Group Lessons Thus Far?

The pilot involved a handful of tutors in the very early testing phases. This helped Cambly get Group Lessons to a place where we can invite more tutors to join the experience. While the pilot only captured a small snapshot of the tutors’ group experience, some of their takeaways are included here.

Getting Started

Signing up for Group Lessons

Navigate to the Group Lessons tab in your Cambly profile. You will see the number of available lessons displayed in each hour’s time slot. Simply click the time you are interested in to see the available Group Lesson options appear to the right. From there, you can click the one you’d like to claim.

Group Lessons are at the advanced, intermediate, and beginner level. You can filter available lessons by level on the left of the screen.

Once confirmed, you will see the slot marked as scheduled in your Group Lessons calendar. You’ll be able to schedule Group Lessons up to 3 weeks in advance. 

A note on scheduling Beginner Group Lessons: If you book a 30 minute beginner lesson and there's another 30 minute lesson available, the reserved lesson will only take up half of the time slot. The other half will be clickable and opens up the side panel to display the other available 30 minute lessons.  If you book a 30 minute beginner lesson and no other lessons available in the other 30 minute time slot, the lesson will take up the entire time slot.

Previewing Group Lessons

Group Lessons will not be available in the Cambly Library at this point in the Beta testing. However, you are able to preview them by following the links below:

Advanced Group Lessons - click here. 

Intermediate Group Lessons - click here. 

Beginner Group Lessons - click here.

Note: You must be signed in to your Cambly account for this link to work.

Once enrolled, you are able to click on the lesson title to preview the entire lesson. You are also able to enter the classroom 10 minutes early to preview the lesson and get a feel for the Group Lessons classroom. 

Canceling a Group Lesson

We understand that emergencies and conflicts come up. To remove a Group Lesson from your schedule, follow the same steps as you would a priority hour:

1. Go to your Group Lessons tab
2. Click the hour you need to cancel
3. Change “I’ll be there” to “I can’t make it”

The time slot on your calendar will then return to white, as that time slot is no longer available to other tutors.

Canceling a Group Lesson

Please be sure to cancel Group Lessons at least 12 hours prior to the schedule start time. Repeatedly violations of this policy could remove your access to tutoring Group Lessons.

Group Lesson Structure

Advanced and Intermediate Group Lessons Overview

These lessons have been intentionally designed by our curriculum team for group learning. The main goal of each lesson is for students to develop and practice fluency by engaging in authentic discussions around topics that are interesting or important to them. The goal is to maximize their talking time and student-to-student interaction. As with any Cambly lesson, any prompting, question-asking, and facilitating you can do will go a long way to supporting a lively and engaging conversation!

Each lesson will begin with introductions and an icebreaker to help build rapport among the group members. Once completed, the lesson plan will begin.

While each Group Lesson is centered around a theme, students will be prompted to take turns suggesting a specific discussion topic within that theme. For example, in the “New in Sports” lesson, a student may share information about a recent match that they watched, or how their favorite athlete or team is faring during a current season. The group will then discuss this topic together, before moving on to the next student’s topic.  

Because Group Lessons will have a different combination of students each time, with different interests, students will be able to take the same lesson multiple times. We hope that, as students adapt to this new lesson format, they will look forward to sharing new topics each week – so if, for example, a student is a movie buff, they might take “New in Entertainment” on a regular basis and share their thoughts about the films they’re currently watching!

When students take their first Group Lesson, however, this format will be new to them and they may need a moment to think of something off the top of their head. There is built-in time to think, and there are also suggested topics in each lesson to support you and your students. 

See the below example from the New in Sports lesson:

The secondary goal of each lesson is to collaboratively develop a list of vocabulary that students can leave the lesson having learned and/or practiced. The slides will prompt the group to list words related to each student-shared topic. We hope that this activity will help students celebrate their existing vocabulary knowledge and learn new words from each other. If students ever get stuck trying to think of new words, especially at first, anything you can do to encourage them will be helpful! Some ideas: consider tangentially related topics, different parts of speech, antonyms and synonyms, etc. 

See the below example from the New in Sports lesson: 

Tutor Slides

All of the lessons also have tutor slides on select slides to help support tutors in facilitating conversation. 

See the below example from the New in Sports lesson:  

Additional Lesson Resources:

There are additional activities at the end of the lesson with the types of discussion questions and games you’re used to seeing in Cambly courses. These are available as a resource should you complete your lesson early. Also, additional group activities will soon be available in the tutor library.

Beginner Group Lessons Overview:

The beginner level curriculum was designed in a way to support both the tutor and the beginner level students throughout the lesson. Rather than conversation-based curriculum like the intermediate and advanced Group Lessons, you will find that the beginner group curriculum is more structured, with no shortage of slides, level-appropriate student practice, and engaging activities.

Rather than the student generated content in intermediate and advanced group lesson curriculum, beginner lessons are tutor-led, while also having opportunities for students to produce content all along the way. There is an abundance of material throughout the many provided slides to keep the group lesson flowing. 

The curriculum for beginner level group lessons is in its early phases, and will continue to be updated in response to tutor and student feedback. 

Testing the Group Lessons Curriculum

As part of the Beta testing, we are also working to find out what curriculum works best in Group Lessons. On occasion, we will test different curricula to continue learning and enhancing our Group Lessons experience.

We recently concluded the testing of mini-lessons! Keep an eye out for more information on mini-lessons soon.

Navigating the Classroom 

Entering the Classroom:

For Group Lessons, tutors can enter the classroom before the students. Because of this change, you won’t be answering a student's incoming call and will NOT hear a ringtone at the start of the lesson. Instead, you’ll have to follow these steps to start the class:
 

1. When it is within 10 minutes of the lesson's start time, log into your account and go to your dashboard. Group Lessons will appear against a blue banner. This can be found in two places:
    
   • If the lesson is starting soon, you will see it underneath the button where you can toggle from invisible to visible
   • You can also see your Group Lesson in your upcoming events:
2. Within the blue Group Lesson banner, you'll see a button that says "Enter Classroom". This will open a new tab where you can check your video and audio settings before entering the classroom.
3. Once you’ve confirmed that your audio and visual settings are up to standard, click the button that says "Continue". This will navigate you to the classroom.
   • Here you will be able to preview the lesson and explore the classroom before allowing students to enter.
4. Once you are ready, click “Start Lesson” to allow students to enter the classroom.
   • If you plan to open the classroom before the scheduled start time, please be aware that students can start entering the classroom five minutes before the lesson starts.

Note: Students will not be able to enter the classroom until you start the lesson. So please be sure to give yourself enough time to set up and to click the Start Lesson button so your students can join on time!
 

Late students:

While the lessons appear as 60-minute time slots, the actual content of the lessons has a run time of 55-minute time slots. This means that you have 5 minutes of buffer time to wait for your students to enter. That being said:

• If you are in the classroom and have clicked the Start Lesson button but have zero or only one student, please wait until 10 minutes after the scheduled start time.
• If no students have entered the classroom at that time, you may end the lesson.
• If you only have one student at that time, you may start the lesson.
  

Note: You may have to modify the lesson slides slightly to accommodate only one student.

• If you are in the classroom and have clicked the Start Lesson button but only have two students, please only wait until 5 minutes after the scheduled start time to begin the lesson.
• If the late student ends up joining the classroom, please try your best to get them up to speed!

Note: Students are able to make a Group Lesson reservation up to the start time (though not after). In the rare case you have no student reservations for your reserved Group Lesson, you should still attend your scheduled lesson in the event of last-minute student reservations. If at the 10 minute mark you do not have any students in the lesson, you may leave the lesson.
 

Ending a Group Lesson:

To end a Group Lesson, simply press the end lesson button when the scheduled time for the lesson has elapsed.

Classroom features:

To simplify the classroom, you will notice we have removed some tools/buttons that exist in the private lesson classroom.

The following tools/buttons will still be available when tutoring a Group Lesson:

1. Buttons to move to the previous slide and the next slide.
2. Timer
3. Mute Tutor's mic button 
4. End Lesson button
5. Invisible / Visible toggle with incoming calls and upcoming events.
6. Ability to start a text chat with the students. See the 2nd image below for the view when the chat is open.
7. There is now a drop-down menu for classroom functions. Here is where you can open and close the whiteboard and access other classroom features. See the 2nd image below for the view when the drop-down is open.

Note: Pressing the End Lesson button will permanently end the current lesson for all students and is irreversible. If you press this button before the lesson is supposed to finish, you will NOT be able to reconnect with your students. If the End Lesson button is clicked, a confirmation modal will appear to confirm this action.

New Features in Group Lessons:

Highlighted Speaker

For a variety of different reasons, a student may not have their camera turned on. In order to ensure tutors and group members are clear on who is speaking, a white box will appear when that person is talking. For Example, The white box in the image below indicates that Student 1 is speaking.

Removing a student

A new feature available for Group Lessons is the ability to remove a specific student from the classroom in the middle of the lesson. To utilize this feature, you will need to:

1. Using your mouse, hover over the video feed of the student you would like to remove. You’ll see a “Remove” button ⊝
2. If you click on that button, a confirmation message will appear. This is because once a student is removed, a message will appear for the student explaining that they have been removed and will not be allowed to rejoin the classroom.
3. You’ll then be able to continue the lesson with the remaining students. 

Note: Here is also where you can mute a student.

Note: As always, in extreme circumstances, you still have the ability to ban a student when you go to remove them.

When to remove a student: 

For many students, this will be their first time interacting with other students in an online classroom. Because of this, students may need time to adjust to learning in a group setting. Having the patience and understanding to navigate these interactions while ensuring that all your students have a great experience is essential.

We understand that sometimes you'll encounter situations where even your best efforts can't resolve a case with a problematic student. In those situations, we encourage you to use the remove student button for your and your students' safety. These situations include:

• Disrespectful / Rude students. We have a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who mistreats another. If any student discriminates against anyone else in the classroom - be it based on race, culture, religion, physical appearance, sexual orientation etc. - you should remove that student from the classroom. 
   

• Students who are disruptive to the lesson. In a group setting, it is important to minimize distractions so that the students and the tutor can focus on working through the material presented in the lesson slides. If a student's behavior disrupts your ability to teach or other students' ability to learn, you should remove the student from the classroom. This includes behavior such as:

• Being in a background with excessive noise or inappropriate visual displays.
• Lewd Behavior.

Note: You may encounter situations not listed above where you feel that it is appropriate to remove the student. We trust that in those situations, you are making the right call! If you ever encounter a situation in which you are unsure whether or not to remove a student, please write in to support to receive further guidance. Please be sure to include the date and time of your call, and a detailed explanation of the issue you encountered. Cambly is always here to support you in any uncertain or uncomfortable situation.

FAQ: