Two or three people, one class
The itinerary’s team size is a pedagogy. One person talks, one watches the back of the room, one runs materials. Then you rotate. If everyone performs, nobody sees the child who cannot see the card. Assign roles on paper in the teaching lab before you fly. Agree who will stop a game that has become humiliating. Agree who carries the modest extra shirts in case someone spills breakfast.
English, Chinese, and games are optional themes, not a competition to see who is most entertaining. A Chinese-teaching team should actually bring simple books, as the guidebook asks, because those materials are scarce on site. An English team should not assume that louder pronunciation is better teaching.
Community-center versus school
School mornings may have a timetable and a host teacher. The community-center block may have mixed ages and less furniture. Pack a lesson that can shrink. Do not assume the same joke works in both rooms. Do not let the strongest English speaker on your team take every minute in both settings. The community block is two hours of the documented service total; treat it as core, not leftover.
Closing day
Certificates and gift exchange are scheduled inside the final school afternoon. Rehearse the exchange so it is not a pile of branded candy. Thank the host by name. Leave the room reset. Team debrief the same afternoon: what to tell the next cohort, what to never repeat, who needs a safeguarding note. Teaching teams that skip that conversation waste the only data the week produced.
Use the teaching lab offering and the team-roles article. A team that only unifies in the airport queue will teach like a queue.
Conflict
Teams fight about who talks. Write the rotation so the fight happens at rehearsal. If it happens in front of children, the scan person stops the lesson and you wait. Afterward, use the mentor, not the group chat, if someone broke a safeguarding rule. Team loyalty does not cover harm.
Mixed language teams
If one of you teaches in Chinese and one in English, do not stack both in the same ten minutes. Sequence. The room is not a talent show of languages. The guidebook’s note about scarce Chinese materials means the Chinese speaker should carry books, not just charisma.
When the team is a whole school van
Classroom teams of two or three sit inside a larger van of twelve. Van culture can wreck class culture if the loud group chat plans nightlife during lunch. Appoint a van timekeeper who is not a teacher. Make the community-center Monday a no-leisure-planning zone. Teams need a membrane. Without one, the source team size is a fiction inside a party.
Debrief by classroom team, not only as a whole cohort. Whole-cohort debriefs reward the best public speaker. Pair debriefs reward the scan person who actually saw the stuck child. Design the conversation size the way the itinerary designed the class size.
The team chat
Make one chat for operations: times, who has the cards, who has copies. Make another, if you must, for jokes. Do not mix a joke about a host into the operations chat. Screenshots of mixed chats become the portfolio you did not want. Pin the brief. Pin Linda’s number. Unpin memes.
If someone in the chat suggests skipping class, the first reply should be the source rule, not an emoji. Teams are where absenteeism becomes social. Break the social early. You can still be friends at dinner.
When the week ends, archive the operations chat and stop adding members “for memories.” Memories are how unofficial guests get a location pin next year. End the chat.