TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Before a teacher, I was (and am still) a learner. I was taught English by what I would call a “Grammar First” approach. Every class hour was spent on learning a new rule and applying the new knowledge to carefully designed written exercises. And I call it a success. The explicit grammar knowledge that my education rigorously provided became the backbone of my improvement and pride. And therefore, I had a strong, unbreakable belief that a language learner must solidify grammar first and foremost and then be allowed to produce output. That is how I approached teaching English to my police officer students, but to my disappointment, they always happily expressed their love for the interactive, communicative activities that a native speaker teacher prepared for them. I never understood why. I was firmly convinced that their grammar was still immature and that letting them use the language would reinforce errors.
However, teaching in the Community Language Program (CLP) at Teachers College (TC) has helped me to cultivate a more forgiving attitude. I have come to realize, through teaching ESL with the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach, that input as well as output are an essential part of language learning, along with a language focus. Although my belief still remains that grammar cannot be sacrificed in language teaching, now I recognize the importance of providing meaningful input and preparing the students to be successful in using the language in a meaningful manner. The teacher’s role, therefore, is to promote understanding of how the language is used and to assist the students in fluently applying the knowledge in an authentic context.
Thus, in my CLP class, I promote and maximize interaction between the students so that they are pushed to use the language to accomplish a task, negotiate meaning, and repair miscommunication. I also regard interaction as an opportunity for the students to monitor their language use. Oftentimes, believing in the power of peer feedback, I have the students correct each other’s errors, collaboratively explore and experiment with the language, and learn together to be proactive, autonomous, and responsible for their own learning. In other words, my role as a teacher is to keep the students at the forefront of the learning experience.
Nevertheless, that does not mean that the teacher can sit back and relax. The teacher’s assistance is equally important. Corrective feedback in particular requires the teacher to employ the most delicate and sensible tactics. When employed effectively, it will indeed lead to success and improvement. Yet thoughtless feedback can hurt the students’ self-esteem. A barrage of explicit feedback, in fact, can be understood as merciless attacks on students’ errors and devastatingly discourage them. As I tend to provide explicit corrective feedback, the type of feedback I mainly received in the past, my goal is to become better at providing implicit corrective feedback, guiding the students to self-correction, and more importantly, genuinely believing that they are capable of noticing and self-correcting their errors with a little help.
Most importantly, however, my teaching philosophy centers on humbleness and willingness to learn. The teacher’s work must be selfless dedication which requires her to be brave and humble. To be brave in the sense that she admits her mistakes and humbly accepts and listens to feedback, no matter how negative it may be. To be humble, Thomas Jefferson beautifully summarized it for me: “He who knows best knows how little he knows.” Indeed, a good teacher must constantly reflect on and learn from her experience, up-to-date research, colleagues as well as from the students. By enriching my pedagogy through diligence that will never stop, I want to reciprocate my knowledge and skills not only to the classroom and students but also to professional communities. Striving together with my students and colleagues, I will continue my journey, sometimes painfully, but at some other times with joy. I look forward to teaching students I have not yet seen, joining professional organizations, sharing innovative ideas and resources with my colleagues, and most importantly, making a positive impact in the lives of my students.