Teach English in Shiqiao Zhen - Nanjing Shi

While my teaching experience has been extremely brief, I still learned a lot from the past three month of teaching. While most of my knowledge about teaching has been attained from TEFL/TESOL, through the hands on and practical knowledge that I learned from working with young learners in China I was able to learn about classroom management and lesson planning in foreign country. When I first accepted a job at TOBY English in Hangzhou, China; I was unprepared on how to effectively manage children in a classroom setting. All of the knowledge I had before starting as a teacher was from my ITTT TEFL/TESOL course, which prepared me for many situations that could arrive in the classroom, but I did not truly know what it would take to have “control” of a classroom. While teaching a classroom of three, four, five, and six year olds, one learns that they can never really be ready for “everything,” the key is learning how to calmly recover the class’s attention and how to quickly handle whichever issue arose. As it states in the Young Learners course book unit 4, “There is no best method, there are too many independent variables at work…. your teaching style should be flexible and adapt to the situation you find yourself in,” (YL_Unit 4, pg. 14). This is absolutely correct as to have an effective teaching style, one must use multiple ways in order to keep control of their classroom. For example, in one of my class’s a student wasn’t sitting in his seat. At first I told him to sit down in his chair, but when that didn’t work I said it in a slightly more firm manner; when he still didn’t listen my instructions, I took away his “stars” or his points that he earned throughout the class. While normally this motivates the students not to misbehave so that they don’t lose face or validation, the student himself did not listen and instead continued to act out. When all methods did not work, I told him that if he does not listen or follow instructions, then he must leave the classroom the next time he acts out. This was a last resort scenario and did work for the situation, however, it is not an ideal solution to use every time for classroom management as it will make the class believe that the teacher is mean and the students won’t want participate in class or listen to the teacher. Another major experience that I learned about was lesson planning. As also stated in the Young Learners course book unit 4, “A lesson plan is a working document… A lesson plan tells us what should happen throughout the lesson in a series of stages,” (YL_Unit 4, pg. 6). In other words, a lesson plan can never been seen as a “complete” or followed “exactly” as one has to be open to changing the lesson if something causes the lesson plan to go array. At TOBY English we have been given lesson plans that were already preplanned, but the foreign teachers are given time to view it over and organize or collect supplies to teach classes. While it is not traditional lesson planning, these activities are considered lesson planning in their own right. In order to prepare for these lessons one has to read over the plan, figure out if they can implement all of the activities formed in the plan, gather the materials for the class, and setting up the classroom itself. For myself, specifically on the Saturdays I teach four classes throughout the day, I have to plan everything early in the morning and gradually I have to work on my lesson plans, read them, and figure out how to implement them. Despite this, there is not much freedom that is given to the plans because we aren’t allowed to change anything significant in the plans or change the layouts or objective words that we teach. This causes little freedom in the actually planning, which causes some of the teachers not to really do planning at all or just get their supplies ready a few minutes before their classes start. Due to my own inexperience, I try to plan as much as possible for my classes so that I will be able to do well and become an effective teacher at my school. While becoming a new teacher in China, I have various challenges in my path, but it is a great experience in learning how to become an educator in a foreign country. From learning to manage my classroom and planning, I am slowly climbing up a metaphoric mountain to become an effective and enlightened teacher.