Although it is not the end of the course yet, I would like to point out that my sky-high expectations of the course managed to meet the reality. I have equipped myself with lots of teaching techniques. This particularly concerns such skills as writing, reading and listening. Before that teaching English boiled down to teaching systems with skills assisting that, but now a completely new concept of skills lessons being of the utmost importance is clear to me. I could have never imagined that skills lessons could be structured in such a communicative way.
It was extremely beneficial to me to learn about some individual know-how approaches to make the most of resource materials to maximise students’ progress. Differences of learners, which now I am aware of, their psychological characteristics can and must be used by a teacher to facilitate learning and make teaching more effective.My biggest strength was establishing rapport with students and making sure they are involved in learning activities.
Another achievement is classroom management, which let me make my learners engaged in different activities. It never occurred to me that such elements of the lesson could be much more student-centered, than they traditionally are perceived to be, and can play a huge role in enhancing learner’s autonomy. I was happy with how my lesson-planning and aim-identifying skills improved. Another thing that I was successful at was designing and selecting tasks and materials, which turned out to be engaging. What is more, I learned how to create well-structured and logical lessons plans, which couldn’t help but assist me in teaching effectively. During the course I faced with some difficulties, one of them was overrunning by a few minutes and not allocating enough time for activities. It was a consistent problem of mine in the first part of the course. I did my best to plan the timing accurately, and managed to find the method which helped me ” counting the mean value of activities, by adding the maximum and the minimum amount of time I plan on spending for each activity. This method proved to be effective for me.My timing and pacing was spot on. Another problem of mine not giving the instructions clearly, distributing the handouts before instructing students, etc. What turned out to be effective in terms of handling this problem was scripting my instructions in the lesson plan and asking as many ICQs as possible.This was suggested to me by my tutors.Nevertheless, there is always room for improvement. I still need to work on: eliminating fossilized slips in my speech, in order to be an appropriate model of the language for students providing clear and effective feedback to help Ss see their strengths and weak points modeling correct pronunciation of the language used in the classroomI was glad that it was the part of the course to take part in peer observation. When observing others teach I realized what strengths I needed to develop and how the tasks should have been set. During feedback sessions it was especially clear as the tutors spent time meticulously considering all the invisible (at first sight) nuances of the lesson. For instance, I noted down different interaction patters my fellow trainees used, the ways to conduct feedback, but most importantly numerous ideas for lead-ins, production and follow-up activities, that I would have never come up with. I did use some of the activities during my own lessons, and that turned out to be very effective. For example, during my TP6 I used an activity from one of the videos, which focused on role play. Another thing I incorporated in my lessons, was monitoring technique of Jonnathen., I liked that his monitoring was very effective and unobtrusive at the same time. The lesson which changed my teaching perspective greatly was communicative. I loved how my fellow trainees set the context, thus contributing massively to students being engaged.Doing CELTA course helped me identify action points with a view to developing professionally. One thing I want to polish up is making occasional slips of cross-linguistic nature, especially How What do you think? How What do you call ?. Script my language on my plan in a different font. Ask a colleague to observe me and give feedback on this issue at least three or four times over the coming month and ask him/her to pay special attention to whether I manage to avoid these. I also wish to improve providing clear and effective feedback to help Ss see their strengths and weak points. Observe experienced teachers and analyse their monitoring techniques and ways of providing feedback. My action points would be to observe my students carefully, analyse their strength and weak points anticipate problems for every stage of the lesson, use the anticipated solutions to vary feedback, observed my tutor.Methodology: Alternatives to whole class feedback. I earnestly believe that in terms of professional development, it’s vitally important to implement various methodologies and approaches and base my lessons taking into consideration when planning. It is obvious that I still have plenty of work to do on my teaching skills and I have just started my professional journey with lots of things to be discovered, which is truly exciting.