Teaching Philosophy

As an ESOL teacher educator, I am committed to helping my student teachers develop their beliefs and teaching skills to become effective ESOL teachers. Thus, I embrace teaching at a TESOL teacher education program as an opportunity to inspire and to empower my student teachers. As I believe that transformative learning occurs when student teachers are engaged with a course’s material and perceive its subject matter to be directly relevant to their lives, I give them the chance to engage with texts and videos, evaluate them, and then reflect on what they have observed. I also design my classes to be a combination of lecturing, discussions, presentations, and peer teaching to encourage students’ self-growth as teachers as well as achieve my goals of making my classes more student-centered. This way helped me give my student teachers the opportunity to have some straightforward instruction as well as I give them the room to expand their knowledge through self-learning and classroom engagement.

My belief in that student teachers come to the program with their beliefs and assumptions about teaching lead me to create a classroom environment that is rooted in the idea that learning in any course is enhanced when it is contextualized in students’ experiences outside of that course. Thus in my classes, students discuss their understandings of what constitutes an effective ESOL teacher and then they relate their ideas to what have been learned through what was read and/or watched through videos. As students practice lesson planning and teaching and classroom management strategies by teaching their peers they reconstruct their teacher identities, beliefs, and practices. To facilitate that, I provide my student teachers with a number of readings and videos of classroom practices and allow enough time for discussion so that I help them reconstruct their knowledge base.

As I believe that practicum provides my student teachers with a critical experience and authentic responsibilities in a classroom, I do my best to help them understand the significance of this stage in their lives and help them apply the research, theory, and strategies they have learned in our teacher preparation program. As a teacher educator, I serve as their model in my classes as I apply various teaching strategies and reflect on my teaching experiences and show them how I work on my professional development. As a mentor, I help them understand what might work and what might not work in their classes/contexts by discussing their ideas and lesson plans and then by providing specific feedback on their teaching.

In my dissertation, I explored the affordances and constraints of a Libyan TESOL teacher education program and the role critical language teacher education can play as an approach for program reform as perceived by the program’s teacher educators, student teachers, and graduates. My dissertation made me believe in the value of allowing myself to change, which means being able to change my teaching style and philosophy as a form of professional development. Thus, I now understand that it is of significance to me and my student teachers to understand the importance of revisiting and revising our teaching philosophy and our beliefs as ESOL teachers to be able to reconstruct our teacher identity.

As an ESOL teacher educator who comes from a conflict zone, I believe in the role of TESOL in uniting a divided country and in reforming education to reach reconciliation, peace and social justice. As a believer in transformative education and as a peace and social justice teacher educator, I am looking for strategies and readings that would help me empower my student teachers to be prepared to teach in a conflict zone.