Since my childhood, I wanted to be a teacher as my parents were also in this educational field. I started to love this career when I was three years as I went to school with my mother instead of going to nursery. I have noticed and grew up in the background where always teaching was happening. After graduating from university, I will select teaching as my future career as I loved and still love teaching.
My official teaching career started just after my Advanced Level examination in 2014. I joined to Alliance Francaise de Matara as a trainee French language teacher and meanwhile, I was assigned to teach for the special needs students at a government school in Matara. I had a new experience with the special needs students as they all were auditory learners. At that moment, I was in a dilemma whether to choose this career ahead or not. However, the experienced had from the internship and the love I had for them and the love they had for me, made me continue and be fond of teaching.
As a teacher, I always believe the saying by William Arthur Ward “Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change, learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding”.
When I teach, I always attempt to create a student-friendly atmosphere by sharing funny stories, jokes and my own experiences. In the beginning, I couldn’t remember all the students’ names. Therefore, as a strategy, I used to call them with a positive adjective for each one that was given to me by themselves.
I always try to create the lessons, activities and lesson materials according to the learners’ competency level and/or a level up and adjust my teaching strategies in response to the pace and the depth of the students’ understanding. In that case, I usually incorporate pair work, group work and games. With the primary learners, I have done a lot of such tasks such as Hangman game, Charades etc. Moreover, I am very concerned with the fact that whether the students understood the lesson or not. I try to maintain the students’ focus unchanged during my lessons and incorporate new methods of teaching and strategies. Moreover, I believe that for effective teaching the lessons should be created going beyond the textbook and the workbook. For all most all the lessons, I incorporated additional activities apart from the textbook and the workbook activities. Moreover, being prepared and having enthusiasm for the lessons should be there with the teacher for effective teaching.
Time management and instruction checking play a vital role in the classroom as I have to teach a lesson within forty minutes in a comprehensible way for the learners. In some lessons, I encountered situations in which the learners couldn’t understand the instructions that I was given. In such situations, I had to check instructions, again and again, to check whether they have understood the instructions. Moreover, as a teacher, I believe that feedback should be given to them when the task is finished as it allows them to think about the reasons for the correct and incorrect answers. Furthermore, I used mostly L2 (English) to explain the lessons with the occasional use of L1 (Sinhala) to explain some complex theories and instructions for the young learners.
Along with all these aspects, I believe that a teacher should be pleasant and attractive. I always try to be friendly with the students and smile at them in the class as well as the outside the class. Moreover, the teacher should be confident in whatever she is teaching and be happy with the teaching.
Throughout my experience as a student teacher, I have developed a multifaceted set of skills that have provided me with the insight and knowledge that I can build from as an English language teacher. In my future career as a teacher, I will take the experiences that I had as a guide and will create an explicit learning atmosphere that will engage students, require them to think critically and creatively while implementing high standards and expectations for learning.
Teaching Practicum Portfolio 