My Teaching Philosophy

"The man who can make hard things easy is the educator" Ralph Waldo Emerson

Teaching is a hard job. I do not mean that it is impossible. In order to become a good teacher, you should explain every single point in the book to students. However, to be an educator, you should facilitate learning process to your students. I want to be an educator. I seek for every mean that help me accomplish my goal. I believe that learning process would not be sufficient without the interactions and the cooperation between teacher and students.  

Developing students' productive skills (speaking & writing) and receptive skills (reading & listening), and facilitating learning the English language are my aims in order to foster students' inherent abilities. To do so, I tend to provide authentic materials that students need to develop their learning. My students and I share the responsibility of learning process. I do my best to encourage my students to become problem-solvers, critical-thinkers and be independent learners.   

Regarding my philosophy on teaching methods and approaches, my teaching style is a student-centered, and I prefer using different approaches because they enhance students' learning and create a competitive environment in the classroom. Such approaches are cooperative learning, communicative language teaching, and skills-based approach. For the cooperative learning, students develop their social and group work skills that they need inside and outside the classroom. As for communicative language teaching, students need to develop their communication skills in order to use them in daily life situations. The skills-based approach helps students develop the four language skills reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Since the era now is the technological innovations especially in teaching, I take advantage to utilize any tools that are available in a place where I teach. The Computer as Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and multimodal assignments are essentials in my teaching philosophy. Employing CALL in classrooms encourages me to be an innovative teacher and enhances students learning. I regularly use PowerPoint Presentation, e-mail, Blackboard, Google Docs., Google Drive, YouTube, and authentic learning websites in my teaching. When it comes to assignments, I favor assignments that provide students the opportunity to be creative, imaginative, and to take advantage of their skills. In writing courses, for instance, Google Docs. and Google Drive are ones of the most useful tools that I employ. Moreover, multimodal assignments are enjoyable and beneficial, where students design and create a product (i.e. assignment) rather than just answering it. In a multimodal assignment, students have the abilities to use their imaginations instead of using textbooks to answer an assignment. I do believe that such these assignments are necessary since today’s students are considered as technology savvy, in which these assignments fulfill their needs and desire.

Relating to my philosophy on assessment, I should ask myself a couple of questions before I take a step forward to assess students’ performance. What do my students need? Do I allow my students to be part of the assessment process? When do I need to evaluate them? What are the elements of the assessment? In order to answer these concerns, students and I share thoughts, opinions, and recommendation before developing grading rubrics. I believe that students have to contribute to grading system. Honestly, I make efforts to be fair enough and assess my students based on specific elements. Such elements are students' participations and attendance in the classroom, to what extent their weaknesses are decreased, the developing of different skills, doing assignments and projects. As for the means, I assess my students by using different written and oral tests, rubrics, their participations (in a blackboard if it is online), term papers, portfolios, and assignments. Rubrics, in written and oral tests and assignments, help me measure accurately students' performance and to what extent the objectives have been accomplished. Term papers aim at developing the coherence and cohesion of students' academic writing while portfolio assesses the process of improvement skills, especially in writing. Assignments are used to ascertain some specific skills.