I, David Steenkamp, I care.

I promise I will care about you and your development.

Ingrained in the hearts of Africans, regardless of skin colour, is the ability to co-exist and help others. I am fortunate enough that my dad, a high school teacher of 30 years, taught me what it means to have a lasting impact on somebody’s education and life. There is a beauty that exists when you are able to help; when you are able to change somebody’s perspective for the better. 

As an educator, I am trying to help students be free of their unnecessarily harsh self criticisms. Analysing one’s performance is important but not if it destroys your confidence. My work in Poland with English learners has been largely devoted to empowering my students to be open, free and expressive on:

• ‘trivial’ matters such as small talk, jokes, storytelling and travelling;
• important careers steps like job interviews, customer meetings, corporate mergers;
• deeper psychological topics connected to mental health, family relations and marriage;
• philosophical topics such as the meaning of life, religion, happiness and many more. 

What I find interesting in Poland is that most people think English fluency will equate to a more informed opinion. However, in my opinion, they are independent of each other. Someone can have the best idea in the world, be the smartest person in the room but not necessarily have the English to articulate their thoughts or ideas. 

What I do is:

1. Get you to speak your mind
2. Get you to speak your heart
3. Make sure it covers the outline of what you believe
4. Be able to listen to others responding
5. Enable you to respond again
6. Be confident during the interaction 
7. Be proud once it finishes

• To get you to be free usually takes between 3 to 6 months. In many cases, this is where our journey ends. 
• To get you to be proud usually takes 6 to 12 months. If we don’t stop our journey here, then you are paying me to be your friend.

During my time as a teacher, I realised many students became extremely comfortable with me. We broke their barrier with me but not yet their barrier general English barrier. They would speak openly to me but then regress to their old version when sitting in business meetings or travelling. I realised that I would need to update my approach to teaching and this is where I started hiring other native speakers so that we could implement a rotation system with each student. 

This means that if a student has 3 classes per week, they will see me once, Gary once and Charl once. They will have 3 native speakers in one week and I guide the overall direction of classes and development. 

If a student has 1 class per week, then every week there will be a different native speaker. Again, I am the overall guide of the process and the main teacher. 

The implementation of rotational native speakers for students saw an enormous boost in all my students’ confidence and this philosophy has been permanently adopted. 

We as a team at EnglishDave.PL are a group of people who care and find enormous satisfaction in getting people to be open, free and happy when they speak English.