Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Puliqiao Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yongzhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
It’s almost impossible to avoid the situation where all students will be at the same level. Different people have different learning curves. Most of the schools have a level testing procedure, but, despite this fact, within one classroom we can meet fast learners and slow learners. A good teacher should know how to work with any type of student. So, in my essay I’m going to discuss how to teach mixed ability classes. Let’s start by considering the ways of arranging effective learning process for students that are at varying levels. First of all, I believe that pair and group work can be very helpful with mixed ability classes. Stronger students will help weaker ones to keep up with a new material. Moreover, group work reduce nervousness, since all members of the group are responsible for the result. On the contrary, there is a risk that weaker students will just let stronger students to do all the work. That’s why a teacher should always keep both eyes open and supervise the activities. Secondly, to my mind, it’s a great idea to have additional tasks or activities prepared for the lesson. Some students, that will accomplish the task quickly, should have the opportunity to move on to the next task and not to wait for the others. Maybe it will sound a bit selfish, but I hated to wait for everyone in the class to finish, I was getting bored, using my mobile and eventually could easily lose interest in the subject. In my opinion, a teacher should think up fun and enjoyable games in order to motivate slower students. If they see that they are missing on something interesting, they will start to work harder to join the rest of the class. For example, to sign a song with a new vocabulary or to take a quiz. What’s more, I think that teacher should adapt homework for different levels, for instance, to give stronger students more challenging assignments and for weaker students to prepare less complicated tasks. It’s significant to not just give more homework for fast learners, but to give them assignments at the level appropriate to their skills and abilities. If you overload stronger students with homework, they can feel punished and can try to show less knowledge than they really have. Furthermore, due to the lack of time in the class, it’s always a good idea to send some additional material to a student’s email. We live in a modern world, where everyone has a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone with an access to the Internet. I guess it would be nice to send a video on the topic introduced in the class. Nowadays, there so many English teachers that are making amazing video blogs. Even our TEFL course offers videos to supplement written units. In this way we will give a chance to slower students to work on new material at their own pace. All things considered, it seems reasonable to assume that where there's a will there's a way. If a teacher makes efforts and gets corresponding knowledge, he can effectively work with mixed ability classes. In my mind, it’s very important to improve yourself as a teacher all the time. I’ve learnt a lot from this course and I’m very grateful for all the knowledge I got here. I want to finish my essay with a saying that I think should become a tagline for every teacher – By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.
