My teaching philosophy

As a teacher, I am able to leverage the best parts of my personality and make them work for me in the classroom, to the benefit of my students. As such, I use tasteful humour when planning and delivering my lessons. I also believe that language is best taught explicitly, but better acquired implicitly. This means that while it is important to focus on form and the rules of language use, it is equally important to learn language organically, through projects and tasks that closely resemble the real-life scenarios in which the students will use the target language.

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In the classroom I like to mix things up, but each period, I always try to integrate one activity that makes use of cooperative learning structures. My favourite is the team Jigsaw structure, and I use it to add a cooperative element to comprehension activities. For example, I have four students in one group so I put four different posters on the walls of the classroom and give students a good chunk of time to go over to the poster, read it, and record the answers to questions that can be found on their dedicated worksheet. In the second part of the activity, students get back in their groups and share what they have learned from their poster, as experts, with their peers.

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Finally, I see myself as a life-long learner and I accept the fact that the person I am today will change based on my experiences and the way I can process and assimilate them into my own views.