Although it is a common misconception among people I’ve met that have never taught, teaching is not easy and everyone cannot do it. I am currently in my tenth year of teaching and I have made this my career because I am able to constantly learn from my experiences. As the times change, so does education and it is my job to change with the times in order to meet the needs of my students. I can never get too comfortable because each year brings new students, new personalities, new learning styles, and new challenges. I am always on my toes and this keeps me intrigued. I am experienced with teaching middle and high school ESL and middle school language arts. Although I have enjoyed all 10 years of my teaching, my heart is in ESL. As an ESL teacher it is my job to instill a love of learning English by creating a comfortable learning environment, connecting to their interests, and meeting their academic needs by learning about their current language skills and the most effective ways to build on them. I strive to meet the needs of my auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners by integrating different activities that involve manipulatives, technology, video clips, art and music while not completely abandoning the idea of traditional structured work in order to practice basic skills.
I strive to create a student-centered learning environment where the language and content objectives are clear and we are constantly assessing their growth informally through activities and formally through quizzes and exams. I say “we” because it is important for the students to be metacognitive and to be active participants in their own growth and understand how they best learn. Some informal activities I use to assess growth include whiteboard activities (or iPad applications such as Sketches) where I project questions, problems, gap-fills, etc. and have the students hold their answers up at the same time, self-made board games focused on the learning objectives, creating flash cards in order to organize words under topics—such as organizing adjectives under the correct prepositions—and speaking activities where they are filmed so that we can look back and analyze their progress and problems so not to fossilize mistakes.
I am constantly going back to the drawing board, analyzing what I could do better as an educator for my specific groups of students, and trying new things. When I feel that I am not meeting the needs of my students, I like to reach out to educators, counselors and administrators to get their input. My classroom is always open to critical supervision so that I can better myself as a teacher and hence help my students gain the most out of every lesson. As teachers progress through the years it becomes harder to hear criticisms about our methods and beliefs. My aim is to practice what I teach—to be a life-long learner receptive to advice and criticisms.