Teach English in JijiA Zhen - Chongqing

Learning Teaching SkillsLearning and developing teaching skills is a lifelong study. For me there are 3 ways to learn and develop teaching skills, those are: formal study, such as your degree/diploma or professional development courses, personal study, such as researching new styles or techniques, or incidental learning, the development of skills within the classroom from simple trial and error and reflection. Some people are born with natural teaching skill, rapport with students comes easy and classroom management comes naturally. For others, these skills must be learned and practiced. Regardless which group you fall into, there is always room for improvement in teaching. There is no such thing as the perfect teacher, you can always do better, you can always do more for certain students or a certain group. This is an obvious challenge but it also facilitates constant excitement and room for personal growth within the profession. The 3 methods of study listed above have their advantages and limitations and your preference is a personal choice. However, the key is to have a mixture of the above, for the duration of your teaching career, in order to maximise your teaching potential and truly do everything you can for the students in you care. Formal study is the key for a new teacher to learn teaching skills for the first time. Degree and postgraduate certificates in education are the basis from which most teachers work from. These courses give you a basis in what the skills needed for teaching are. You learn basic strategies for classroom management, lesson planning, delivering a lesson, assessment, keeping students interested etc. However, this learning cannot stand alone. The theory is only that, theory, until it is put into practice in a classroom. While there is observed teaching practice during these courses, the real learning begins when you have a class of your own, and the responsibility that goes with it. The formal study is the key in order to be prepared for having this class, the observed teaching practice will point out key things to do or to avoid and you will start to learn that you have your own teaching style. It is years later however, when actually in front of your own class, that the formal learning becomes most important. Now, with experience, you can reflect on what you were taught, adapt it to suit your class and their needs and implement the theory that you learned, always reflecting on how it works in practice. A tefl course is very similar to the above, the key elements are the same, it is simply a summarised version. This means that you will be in your own class a lot quicker and will have to supplement the formal learning with a lot of personal learning. All teachers should also partake in continuous professional development, attending courses on new techniques, areas they feel weak in etc. Education as a field changes constantly and if you do not keep up to date with the new theories and strategies you will very quickly fall behind, and it is your students who will lose out. Personal learning is vital to any teacher, not simply the information gathered but the skill to be able to do research and use it to improve your standard of teaching. With the internet available there is no excuse for teachers not to keep up to date with the latest studies, tips and ideas. It also makes life as a teacher a lot easier when you research what other people are doing. A lot of the time teachers tend to 're-invent the wheel'. You want to teach something and instead of researching the best way to do this, from the experience of the thousands of other teachers out there we try to go it alone. The ideal mix is to take ideas and tips you find, add them to your own ideas and use this to plan a lesson to suit your particular class. What I call incidental learning, is the development of your teaching skills through experience. For me, this is the most important and useful of the 3 types. Having spent 3 years in university studying to become a teacher, I felt I learned more about real life teaching in my first month in the classroom than I had in those 3 years. The same can be said even more so, to those teaching after a tefl course. Having the skill to recognise when something works in a class, when it doesn?t and how to adapt it is absolutely vital in a teacher's development. The key to this is reflective teaching. When a lesson is taught, to be able to sit down and identify what went well, what went poorly and then to figure out how to improve it for future lessons. The ability to do this, and the willingness, will ensure that you will be an excellent teacher as you will constantly be learning and developing your teaching skill. Learning teaching skills is not something you do in a month of a course, or a year, or 10, it is the constant responsibility of every teacher. People who feel they have more to learn about teaching have nothing to fear, once the willingness to learn is there. Those who think there is no more for them to learn are the ones who need to worry.