Students learn in many ways. Among them are the following:

  • Concentrating.
  • Practicing.
  • Relating new information to information they already know.
  • Observation and imitation.
  • By making mistakes (the hard way).
  • Sudden revelation.

To facilitate such learning, I have considered the following options:

  • Give students engaging activities that require them to learn.
  • Demonstrate/model the skill for students so they can imitate it.
  • Ask students to reflect on their challenges and successes so they can improve on it next time.
  • Put students “in charge” in a limited capacity, so they feel the pressure of performing for their peers rather than just the instructor.

The following are a few goals that come to mind upon considering the expectations I have for myself as a teacher in the classroom:

  • Students achieve course objectives.
  • Students improve English skills in the manner outlined in the course objectives.
  • Students learn to speak and write better.
  • Students improve grammar.
  • Students become comfortable using more advanced English than they were comfortable using prior to the course. 
  • Students have opportunities to practice their skills in “real world” scenarios.

When I reflect upon the ways that keep class interesting, the following comes to mind:

  • I use activities because feedback I have received from students suggests that activities, for example online vocabulary games, increase class engagement.
  • I believe giving students tasks that demand language skills rather than using simple worksheets encourages more learning by imposing social pressures of performing within a group.
  • I use vocabulary games, such as Pictionary (wherein students draws vocabulary words while others compete to guess the correct answer), matching exercises (wherein students match vocabulary words to their correct definitions) and cloze exercises (wherein students are shown excerpts from class readings and asked to fill in the missing vocabulary words), as a fun warm-up that also reinforces vocabulary from previous lessons. These activities are also useful because they provide an opportunity to informally assess student comprehension.

Some students will meet every goal, but others will not; however, most students will make progress toward most them. I will continue to research teaching techniques and enroll in courses relevant to my English-teaching career. I will compare student outcomes with the objectives of the course and use experimentation as well as academic literature to develop my approach.