First assigment

    It's finally the beginning of my last year as a student of the teaching track at the School of Languages. A mixture of feelings, questions and thoughts run through my head "what are going to be this year's challenges?, will I meet new classmates?" and so on. Fortunately, the day comes and I'm 5 minutes late to class, the teachers in charge Pat, Susan and Ana are great, they make our first introductory class fun and nice. I go home with a really big smile in my face because I believe it's going to be a great year.

   Our first assigment was to do an initial reflection on our personal goals as prospective treachers and also we needed to mention our strenghts and weaknesses as a teacher. Here it goes my initial reflection.

INITIAL REFLECTION

            As a prospective teacher, I have some goals I would like to achieve throughout this year. I believe that teaching young learners is different from teaching teenagers or adults; therefore, I’m eager to learn or to acquire all the necessary tools, strategies and tips useful for teaching young learners. Moreover, I am interested in having a general panorama of teaching different ages, that is, children, teens and adults and in knowing their special characteristics and ways of learning. Besides, I want to keep updated.

            Taking into account my strengths as a teacher, I consider myself very committed to my job. I am a very responsible person and I am always eager to improve myself and to make the most out of every class. I am sometimes very critical about my performance as a teacher and when something does not go as planned I try to see why it does not and improve it. I enjoy teaching young learners very much because I love making them laugh and witness the process of learning and how much they have learnt. It is very rewarding. I care about my students and their learning process and think that they are able to cope with any challenge. Furthermore, I like attending workshops, conferences among others things in order to improve my lessons and to be updated.

            As regards my weaknesses as a teacher, I must say that I sometimes speak very fast which is not the right thing to do with young learners; however, I’m working on that by rehearsing the way of explaining and by keeping a low pace. In addition, I think that I usually want to have control of the classroom and expect that everything is in its right place and all students to behave properly. Nevertheless, this is not always the common scenario and sometimes I find myself trying to reestablish pace and over thinking what the problem is.

            For me, it would be very beneficial to incorporate some more strategies for class management because these will very useful in the development of the classes. Additionally, students will be able to learn more. All in all, I think I will also work on being more relaxed and try not to worry so much when something does not turn out okay since I can always re do it and improve it.