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Teaching has always been a profession of great importance. For centuries teachers have been highly appreciated and respected because what they did affected the others and took part in forming society. That's why it is so important to be responsible towards how well you work. Continuing professional development is obligatory for those who chose this profession. You can improve your skills reading books, watching webinars, discussing emotive issues with your colleagues. But the easiest and still one of the most effective ways of professional development is self analysis. It's undeniable advantage is in its availability: sometimes the other opportunities are temporarily unaccessible for teachers who might be the only English teachers in their place of work or might not have enough financial ability to buy webinars or courses. Here self analysis will be of great service. There are several ways how to analyse your work, and in my opinion, a good teacher must resort to all of them. Firstly, the most obvious way to make your lesson great and productive, you need to prepare a well-structured lesson plan. Those plans should be written in detail and include timing and staging. After your class is over, it's worthwhile to analyse it. Was its goal accomplished both for a teacher and their students? Was there enough time for all the activities? Or maybe there were not enough activities? Were there any good ideas developed spontaneously during the lesson? Sometimes only after the class is over, you see what exactly could be rearranged to make it better. This is just how a single lesson plan can help you improve your way of teaching. To make it more effective in a long run, it can be worthwhile to analyse your lesson plans for the last week and for the last month. It will demonstrate you clearly if your lessons are interesting or unvaried and dull, how effective for students they are. How often do you achieve your goals? Which methodics of demonstrating, explaining or reviewing the material turned out to be the most efficient? What could be improved? Secondly, making video records of your teaching can help. Although it can hardly substitute observation made by a professional and impartial methodist, it will definitely show you some drawbacks of the way you teach. You will see how students reacted to any particular decision you made. Was this intonation encouraging for them? Was that attention getter helpful? And so on and so forth. In the same way, it's helpful to take in consideration your students' progress as it's the rate of your work. If they make the same mistakes over and over, or face some kind of misbehaviour for a long time, or the whole group didn't understand any particular topic - it means you need to choose another strategy. In addition, it is the teacher's speech, which can be analysed with the help of a dictaphone. Is their voice too loud or too quiet? Is it expressive? Isn't teacher talking time excessive? Aren't there any grammar or vocabulary mistakes? Was the classroom language used and directions given clear and relevant? Should the teacher work on his utterance? Is it necessary to improve their own level of English? Do they always sound respectful and encouraging? The last but not least, it's beyond discussion s that every teacher should keep up with the modern tends in methodology, so it's necessary to check now and then how successfully they apply the newest methods of teaching. All these methods are always accessible on every place of work, and thus can and should be applied by all teachers who care about the quality of their work.
