Life in the 21st century is challenging for everyone…
It is definitely very challenging for us Teachers. We do our job out of passion. We invest all we have in our jobs (time, energy, mental activity, focus, financial resources) and most importantly we pour out our hearts.
Mastering content and pedagogical knowledge (professional knowledge and skills) no longer seems to be enough in today’s class reality for ESL Teachers.
No wonder we often experience moments when we end up confused, exhausted, overwhelmed, drained…
Personal development skills and knowledge are necessary to make a lasting impact and ensure sustainable development. A personal development action plan will definitely help us, Teachers, restore our balance, refill our cups, and enable us to serve our students more accurately and efficiently.
As ESL teachers in the 21st century, we are not teaching our students just the English Language.
Learning English in a formal environment is happening more and more as the consequence of a well-balanced mix of academic information, methodology, and life skill practices. Students come to learn English by experiment, guided discovery, trial, and error, by using the target language for real-life situations such as – communication, effective listening, self-expressing, and cooperation.
We, ESL teachers, model, not just the English language that our students acquire but especially the skills needed to socialize, connect, persist, manage anxiety and anger, communicate efficiently, empathize, offer help, ask for help, searching for solutions, be flexible and resilient…All these are skills that we come to master during our Personal Development journey.
Teacher Development implies both Professional and Personal Development.
The real preparation for education is a study of one’s self. The training of the teacher is something far more than a learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit. Maria Montessori
Teacher Development
Professional Development + Personal Development
Professional development as an ESL Teacher includes:
1. The subject matter
We, as ESL teachers, need to make sure that we are constantly improving our understanding of how English Works and the way we use it. In order to do so, we can interact with native speakers -on all the possible communication channels, we can subscribe to EFL/ESL magazines, join EFL/ESL groups
2. Theories, Methods, and Practices about Learning and Teaching English as a Second Language
3. Classroom management
4. Syllabuses, assessment procedures,
5. Technology usage in the classroom
Professional development as an ESL Teacher can be achieved by constantly:
1. Attending training/workshops/conferences
2. Reading books/blogs/researches in our field
3. Increasing our Professional self-awareness via:
*video or audio recording our lessons (auto-observation)
*asking a colleague to assist our lesson and provide feedback (peer-feedback)
*asking for Professional feedback provided by an expert/authority in the field or benefit of the lesson observation system in your school
*asking feedback from our students (we can prepare anonymous forms and hand hem over regularly)
4. Learning from our peers (in our schools and other schools) ask for permission to observe other teachers in our field (we never know where inspiration, new practices or information come from).
Personal development as a ESL Teacher includes mastering skills, practices, and habits such as:
1. Self-awareness
As we come to find out who we really are, who we want to become, what our strengths, weaknesses, values, passions, and needs are… we become more aware of our students’ identities, preferences, and needs too.
Mindfulness (an essential personal development practice) will help us become more present and more aware of what is actually happening around us at the given moment. A better awareness helps us deal more efficiently with any kind of situation.
As we learn to tap into our inner voice and to trust our intuition and intrinsic wisdom we will feel more comfortable to explore new class activities and ways of authentically engaging with our students, to gain their trust, stimulate their curiosity and boost their engagement. (more on self-awareness HERE)
2. Self-management
When we know who we are we manage ourselves efficiently. We can control the way we express our emotions and we can professionally deal with the most challenging situations that might arise in our classroom.
We plan, adapt, follow-through, prioritize, and persevere in order to achieve our goals.
3. Self-confidence
Personal Development journey will help us improve our self-confidence too. As we let go of misconceptions, and perfectionism we will feel more comfortable expressing our authentic self. Our students will sense our authenticity and will trust us even more.
Students scan us, they see through the appearance we might want to impose. They understand who we really are, what we stand for, what our values are and what we care about.
4. Balancing Personal and Professional life.
When we invest in personal development we become better equipped to deal with stress and unexpected events. We don’t allow our private problems to interfere with our teaching performance.
5. Better engagement and relationships
As we learn to nurture a better relationship with ourselves we will be able to transfer this skill to all the people around us.
Our developed Emotional intelligence helps us understand, use, and manage our own emotions in positive ways to communicate effectively, empathize with our students/their parents or carers, our peers, and school administration. Our conflict management skill improves too.
As we learn to be kinder to our own selves we will become more empathic, genuinely caring, and effectively listening to our students. Our students will trust and like us more. They will naturally become more engaged in our lessons. We all know that students learn better from the teachers they like, trust, and respect.
As we stop judging and criticizing ourselves less we will naturally and genuinely model the same behavior for our students too. We will be more supportive and patient along our students’ learning process. Students will feel more comfortable exploring the unknown under our kind and encouraging guidance.
A higher engagement rate in our classes triggers a better focus and commitment to the learning/discovering process and automatically better learning results. Students will fear less of making mistakes and will become bolder explorers.
6. Expanding our comfort zone
We get better at something by continuously learning and practicing. Testing new methods, approaches, techniques, and activities with different classes, in contexts, adjusting and adapting them to the students’ age, levels, needs, and interests are practices that ensure our professional progress.
7. Leading and inspiring by role modeling
One of the ESL teachers’ roles is to lead by example, to instill the love of learning as a lifelong process, to inspire their students to become better professionals and better human beings for the World they live in.
A teacher’s horizon doesn’t limit just to his classroom. Teachers are educational leaders that have the needed skills and knowledge to train and inspire generations.
Conclusions
As ESL Teachers, we are not only teaching our students. We are also constantly learning from and about them in order to help them progress and develop.
Most of the time we are so absorbed into our students’ needs that we often forget about our own needs.
We forget that to be able to provide for others, we must first provide for ourselves.
We need to learn how to set kind and clear boundaries to be able to recharge ourselves, study more, acquire new skills, or upgrade the existing ones …We can learn and master all these through personal development.
Personal development is a lifelong journey. If we add Personal Development knowledge and skills to the professional ones, we have already acquired, we automatically reach higher levels of success in our teaching career.
As we come to master personal development practices and tools, we constantly improve our self-awareness, make better choices, achieve better results, develop new skills, improve our weaknesses, develop our strengths, learn new skills and bring some of them to excellence level, we GROW as human beings overall not just as professionals.
More on Personal Development HERE
More on Teacher Development HERE
This Post Has 4 Comments
That’s a real motivation talk. Top notch 👍You have touched on what teachers in fact do with all the facades… By saying not only teaching a language, oh yeah that’s definitely what I agree the most 🤗
I have subscribed for a power point file… I would like to use it in my classes thank you.
Thank you so much for having read it and for your feedback! Which PowerPoint got your attention? Please let me know how it was using it in your lessons! I have checked your website too. very well structured and easy to navigate. Some topics got my attention and I will come back to read them in-depth – also a good opportunity to practice my Turkish 🙂
I have downloaded the ‘animal parts’ power point. I haven’t used it in my lesson yet… But I will at the first occasion or at any lesson related to animals accordingly… That’s why I took a copy. I will check what other options we have to download on your website and will try to recommend my students to download them… Those contents seem to be such a lot of time taking to create. We say Elinize sağlık in Turkish 😅👍a cultural way to say thank you
Yes, indeed it took me a lot of time to create but it was worth it. My students loved them and now I am more than happy to share them with ESL teachers (especially as I know how demanding teaching life is). Memnuniyetle :). Feedback ve yourumlarınız için çok teşekur ederim.