Who I am as a teacher

Who I am as a teacher

a) My teaching philosophy

There are two important things that I like about teaching English language, one of them is the fact that I love languages and English is one of my favorite ones, the other thing is that I found out how much I like teaching so I quit two professional careers to become a teacher. I want to make a living as an English teacher because there is so much I like about it. So then my teaching philosophy is “enjoying what I do, have students enjoy it and do everything I can to accomplish that”, something that I feel when I really think I gave a very good class, when learners say that they were able to understand something they never did before or when students and I have a good time while we also learn one another.

b) My beliefs about my teaching

When I was in high school, I did not like the English class at all so I grew up hating such language. When I was studying my first professional career, I had to suffer for not knowing English. In contrast I was very good at other important aspects of my career but everyone was better at English than me. Years after that I decided to start learning English and that process has not stopped so far. It was a little hard at the beginning although I could do it without that much support. I started from scratch which led me to some of the most significant beliefs I have that are “Anyone can learn, at any age and anywhere”. So learners just need the proper method, strategies and motivation, and the teacher has to be able to achieve the goals either if there are a lot of technological resources and tools or if there is just a person willing to learn.
Another important belief that comes from the fact that I never give up on any student is that “every student is different so people can learn in a lot of different ways”. In that sense, I have seen how learners, who find hard to learn in a regular listening and speaking class, are able to accomplish an important learning when they are taught in a method that involves more writing and analysis of the language.

c) What I learned about teaching speaking skills

One of the things that I learned is that students such as the UNAD English teaching program students are not having that many opportunities to produce spoken language. The students are able to understand rules, remember vocabulary and produce spoken language when the teacher takes them step by step. However when they are asked about general topics of conversation, it seems that everything they know is forgotten, even basic grammar rules.

So what I have learned about teaching speaking skills is that a lot of theoretical knowledge is just the starting point when it comes to have good speaking skills and that practice and lots of repetition are probably the key, so I realized how important it is to have opportunities to speak in English in order that in some point students are able to use what they already know properly during their speaking production.

d) What I learned about teaching in online environments

Something truly significant that I learned is how teaching in online environments is quite different than teaching in face to face environments. In that sense, I never thought that teaching in online environments was going to be demanding but it certainly is. The thing is that you need to prepare everything, from your lesson plan to your teaching materials for the lesson, while also trying to think about the students’ response and performance along the class. So I learned how important is that you design materials and activities that you can use to develop an interesting and productive class considering that during a live online speaking session you do not have the chance to improvise and that your online students are always waiting something from you.

e) My principles about teaching speaking online

·        Mastering of the topic of conversation.

·        Having a wide range of vocabulary and grammar.

·        The lesson planning must be focused on the students’ needs.

·        Careful preparation of the class considering the students characteristics and possible performance with the topic and response for the activities.

·        Active listening of the students’ speech.

·        Being careful with the way feedback is provided so students never feel uncomfortable.

·        Highlighting the students’ improvements and progress.

·        Being sure that students had learnt something totally new, that is different from the main topic, by the end of the class such as a new word, expression, conjunction or phonetic of an important word.