English Language Teacher’s Continuous Professional Development through Reflective Practice

English Language Teacher’s Continuous Professional Development through Reflective Practice

Krishna Chaitanya E. (Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology)

With the unprecedented pandemic status quo across the globe, a lot of unforeseen changes have taken place in the lives of English language teaching professionals. I feel the prevailing situation has given time and space for teachers besides breaking the routine rat race from teachers’ busy schedules. In my presentation, I will be narrating my exciting self-reflective journey of transformation from low-tech teaching to hi-tech teaching with an exclusive focus on a few tech tools, i.e. Nearpod, Flipgrid, Floop, and Screencast-O-Matic. In addition to this, I will be sharing my reflective practices, self-awareness, and professional development. After listening to me, my audience will learn and get motivated to use these tools in their teaching.

By employing the Nearpod tool, I have made my e-lessons interactive and boosted learners’ participation through polls and game-based quizzes. Through the Floop tool, I have saved time in conducting formative assessments and giving feedback to students when they need it. My students and I enjoyed the video discussion experience offered by Flipgrid. Apart from this, my experience of Screencast-O-Matic tool to record video, edit it by adding images, sounds, and captions and sharing it with students is the most satisfying experience. The whole exercise has reduced my time and energy.

By using these tech tools, I recorded my classroom lectures and used it for systematic self-reflection on the aspects of quality of content, the relevance of illustrations, and clarity of language besides feedback of students for further improvement in the next sessions. This kind of self-reflection has been a common practice for many teachers whereas in my case such reflection during the lockdown has become more organized and meticulous. It helps to focus and elicit the learning insights and expectations of the students, necessity to customize my teaching as well as learning. Therefore, I consider every online class that I have delivered has prompted for systematic self-reflection and it results in opportunities for my continuous professional development.