Teaching Philosophy

As someone who is just starting their teaching career, I am constantly learning from fellow teachers and students. The reason why I chose to teach English to speakers of other languages is that I was a former ESL student myself. My experiences as a former ESL student will help me connect with my students because I was in their shoes before.  As a teacher, my goal is to create an environment where students can feel empowered and think creatively. I would like my students to be able to share their ideas comfortably and take risks. I would like to engage with my students and foster collaborative learning. I will be constantly listening to their thoughts and opinions. I had a few teaching experiences during my teenage years such as teaching art classes and coding classes. I taught these classes by following whatever the lesson plan said. I did not have much control or autonomy on how to teach these classes, but I truly enjoyed them because we were able to do things together creatively. I would like to use the skills I learned from teaching those kinds of classes in an ESL class and add my personality to it.

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I would define good teaching/teacher as being able to adapt to every or most of the students. Since there is no one way of teaching, a teacher should be able to use or try out different methods that would work for them and their students. I believe teachers should be able to experiment with their methods and not be tied down to a single on. Teachers should be constantly reflecting on what they are doing and what is going well and what is not. They should not be letting their students fail on purpose.

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I believe the role of a teacher in a classroom should be a facilitator and not just an instructor. As a facilitator, they guide the students' learning process and considers their difficulties when they are trying to understand a lesson. Each student has their own goals and as a teacher, I believe that we should be able to aid them to reach their goals. I also think that each student is intelligent in their own ways and as teachers, we should help them find their talent. My goal as a teacher is to find out what each student's learning style is to let their knowledge shine. As a teacher, I would also have my students take a needs assessment to get to know them and teach them something they are interested in. A method I would like to use in my classroom is task-based learning because it gets the students engaged the most. It allows students to work with one another and it is very student-centred rather than teacher-centred. As I mentioned earlier, I would like to create an environment where students can share their ideas comfortably and take risks and task-based learning can help me achieve this goal. Another method I would like to use is total physical response (TPR) since it combines physical actions and language. It will help students remember actions and it will be very useful for beginners. It also allows to gamify the lesson by using TPR. This method was effective for me when I was learning my third language and I would like to try it out with my students. At the end of each day, I would like my students to feel more confident with their language skills when they leave the classroom.

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A way for me to constantly improve as a teacher is by keeping up with research in SLA and pedagogy so I can try out modern approaches to teaching. I am also hoping to attend more workshops and conferences so I can learn and gain wisdom from my colleagues about diverse ways of teaching. I would like to consider myself as a student for life. I am open to learning constantly from anyone in my community and students. As I mentioned earlier, I am just starting my teaching career. I am looking forward to creating mistakes and learning from them because I know I would not be perfect in my teaching right away.