Statement of Teaching Philosophy

My Beliefs about Education On the very first day of my first teaching job, at a small academy in rural South Korea, one of the most influential teachers I have met told me teaching is the most demanding job you will ever do, but when it gets tough, remember being someones teacher is the greatest, and most rewarding, privilege that can be bestowed on you. This is a statement that has, and will, stay with me throughout my teaching career. After all, to be responsible for the planting of seeds that will create knowledge and beliefs throughout a persons life is, without a doubt, the greatest of responsibilities and privileges. To meet this responsibility I hold a number of important beliefs regarding my pedagogical approach (including both what and how I teach), my goals as an educator, my approaches towards reflective practices and professional development and the learning environment I strive to create. I will now offer some more details on these beliefs, while trying to keep my philosophy as concise and informative as possible.

My Teaching Methods My over-arching goal as an English language educator is to help my students develop the ability to use English as a means of communication with a variety of audiences in a variety of contexts and in a way that will serve them best as members of society. To achieve this, pedagogically, I believe that students must be the center of the classroom. My role as the teacher is to facilitate their learning by helping them to discover, and therefore create, knowledge themselves. To facilitate this approach I enjoy the use of materials that promote self-guided discovery. For example, rather than telling the students when and where a certain grammar structure should be used, I will provide them with the tools to determine this information for themselves. My job is to guide them towards this destination and, through careful use of error-correction and feedback, ensure my students reach a clear understanding of the knowledge they have created. For me, language use is not just about knowledge though, the major benefits to putting students at the center of the classroom is the scope it allows for the development of skills that are integral to personal development and language use, as well as the essential opportunity for students to not just learn, but to do. It is by doing that we truly learn how to use a language and this is why my lessons feature a heavy orientation towards task-based learning. Of course, to successfully employ such an approach we must be aware of our students particular needs and abilities; this is why I strive for direct interaction with every one of my students. My belief in the attainment of these goals is reflected in the high school English course I created and tailor each year to account for the nature and needs of my

students. This course structure includes hands on projects at the end of every unit that are specifically designed to development personal skills while practicing the language knowledge being created throughout the course. Each of these projects entails a different mode of learning to appeal to the hugely diverse range of learning styles, backgrounds and levels of experience with the English language contained in a high school classroom.

Learning from Challenges Teaching in Korean high schools has represented a number of challenges. One of the biggest challenges was to appeal to the diverse learning styles and motivations of large groups (of 40+ students) of young, multi-level, over worked students. This challenge has demonstrated to me the need for, and benefits of, using as wider range of materials as possible. This is reflected in the use of authentic materials including images, videos, audio tracks and written articles found throughout the course. By using these authentic materials I have learnt how to select, and scaffold materials, to provide logical steps moving from one concept to the next while appealing to the diverse range of students I teach. Whilst I do not believe authentic materials must necessarily circumvent the use of a textbook, I do believe they allow the teacher to focus more clearly on the needs of the particular students at a certain time. A further challenge I have faced, and learnt from as an educator, is the difficulty in providing Korean high school students with the support needed to help them get over their anxiety of speaking in English. One of the biggest failures in the early days of my career was to try to directly apply the teaching techniques I had learnt during my CELTA training course to my Korean high school students. To begin with, I could not understand why techniques that were so effective during my CELTA were proving so ineffective in my Korean high school classroom. However, determined to help my students overcome their anxiety, I began testing adaptations of the approaches I had learnt, this is when my passion for reflective practice began. I came to realize that every group of students is different, that every group of students must be approached differently and that teaching methodologies, no matter how well document in research and studies, must be adapted to the needs of each group of students. I believe it is through reflective practice that this can be achieved. In the case of my current teaching context I learnt, for example, the need to provide more time for students to prepare their answers and to build into lesson plans space for students to practice with one partner before speaking in front of a group. As students became more confident, this allowed me to slowly introduce activities that required more spontaneous language use. I began to recognize the need to show my students their strengths and how much knowledge they already knew at the beginning of the course before asking them to

produce newly acquired language in front of their peers.

Reflective Practice & Professional Development Both reflective practice and formal professional development have been integral to ensuring I am meeting the goals of my students, my personal goals and the goals of my employer. Reflective practice has become an essential part of the learning process not only for me as the teacher, but also for my students. This is exemplified in the reflective assignments I require of my students throughout the course. These reflective assignments help students to consider the usefulness of what they have learnt in class to both their current lives and their future needs. This helps them to understand the link between language in class and their lives outside of the classroom. It also encourages students to reflect on their achievements on the course, to make goals and strategies for achieving these goals. This also encourages students to continually assess their individual progress as language learners and develop autonomous learning strategies. I also introduced students portfolios as part of the course assessment, these portfolios allow both the students and I to look back through the work they have done and track their progress throughout the course to ensure they are meeting both the goals I set and their own personal learning goals. With regards to my personal reflective practices and professional development, I maintain a popular and lively reflective blog, I organize, facilitate and participate in monthly, free, reflective practice workshops sponsored by KOTESOL, I also write articles for local teaching magazines. However, the most effective strategy I employ is to obtain regular, in depth feedback from both my students and colleagues regarding my course, assessment methods and teaching qualities. It is from this feedback that I can evaluate whether I am achieving my teaching goals and my students learning goals. From my most recent feedback, for example, I developed classroom pedagogical goals including: Providing students more time to complete activities. Providing more explicit feedback and error correction. Allowing extra teaching periods for preparing students for their speaking assessments

Future Goals My future teaching goal is simply to provide my students with the best learning experience I possibly can. To achieve this goal I have a number of more specific goals to achieve over the next twelve months:

 I have become extremely interested in research concerning English as a Lingua Franca and Inter-Cultural Communication. I hope to begin building into my lessons strategies to help prepare my students for the reality of communicating in English with other non-native speakers based on ELF and ICC methodologies. I wish to build on my current professional learning network. I currently have a strong network within Korea through presenting at conferences and attending professional workshops. Over the next 12 months I hope to begin presenting at conferences through Asia. I have already been accepted to present at ASIATEFL (Philippines) and GloCall (Vietnam) and have applied to present at CAMTESOL (Cambodia).

To conclude, while the experiences and qualifications I have gained so far in my career have helped me to develop into a reflective, positive and knowledgeable educator, I am in no doubt the learning process has only just begun. It seems the more I read, the more classes I teach and the more I work with other educators, the more questions I have to ask of my teaching, and it is through answering questions I hope to continually develop as an educator.