A teacher is not a walking textbook. If that were all you needed, a good grammar book would do. What a teacher gives you is harder to replace: someone who can see where you are stuck and adjust the next hour to fix it.
Start with a goal, not a chapter
Before your first lesson, get specific about what “better” means for you. Do you want to order dinner without switching to English? Handle a work call? Pass an exam? Help your child with homework? The clearer the situation, the more useful every lesson becomes.
Use lessons for what you cannot do alone
Some things are perfect for solo practice: vocabulary, reading, listening, a little grammar drilling. Save the lesson for the things that need another person: speaking under mild pressure, being corrected in real time, and asking the questions a book cannot answer.
Bring your real life into the room
The most useful lessons are built from your actual material: a message you need to send, a menu you did not understand, an email you are dreading. Work on those and the language stops being abstract. You leave with something you can use that afternoon.
Practise between lessons, a little and often
Fifteen minutes on four days beats one heroic hour the night before. Short, regular practice keeps the language warm, and it means your lesson time goes on speaking and fixing rather than remembering.
Ask for the right kind of correction
You want to be understood, so ask your teacher to correct the things that block meaning first, and let the small slips go for now. Constant correction can make you hesitant; no correction lets habits set. A good teacher finds the middle and explains which is which.
Say when something is not working
A teacher can only adjust to what they can see. If a lesson felt too easy, too fast, or not relevant, say so. The best progress comes from that honest loop, not from politely nodding through a plan that does not fit.
What a good teacher actually changes
They shorten the guessing. They notice the mistake you keep making and give you a way to catch it yourself. They keep you practising the right things at the right level, and they make the whole thing feel less like an exam and more like a conversation worth having.