What makes a good teacher?

[elodde]

Well you have quoted Gattegno so I would assume you would be using more humanistic approaches in your teaching. I try to do anything that gets me out of the way; I go for a student centered classroom even when I teach writing. The more thinking and talking they do --so as the less I do-- the better they seem to learn. I don’t want my students to be parakeets that memorize and spit out phrases or words given to them. I would rather them internalize it then have them tell me something that has genuine meaning for them. This, of course, would depend on the level of the students.

I was highly influenced by the Comp theorists out there and they have affected my learning style much more than all the theorists who sat back and talking about how we learn. I just had to help give a presentation for a TESOL conference regarding humanistic approaches and I think that if I were to break down my teaching approach it would be a little bit of all of them. I would use task-based learning, providing it was the task that the students wanted (I use a lot of democracy) or found would be useful i their own lives.

Teaching EFL --like so many of you do-- it is important to getting them talking in the classroom since they wont be doing it outside the classroom. I remember the frustration that was trying to get my Chinese students to work outside the classroom, but teaching ESL here I have to give them vocab and things that are applicable to their everyday lives, so they help me design their learning. Keeps me on my toes, but seriously who wants to spend 2 hours planning an activity that will take 30 minutes? Why do we believe teaching has to be rigid? I believe that is because we oftentimes saw that our teachers were very well planned out. But they were also out of touch, boring, taught us things we didn't care about, and we never remembered half of what they taught us.

Perhaps my views are based on the fact hat I went to a very student-centered University. Where our Master's program was taught by people who considered us colleagues, and even in my undergrad there were teachers who realized that they were not the end all in our education. People form other cultural background would hate how I was taught --and how I teach--, but we all have to find what works for us.

[doriangray]

Thanks to all for the thoughtful comments. I did my seminar as planned and think it went OK - partly due to the ideas I got here