Abhay - Week 2 - Expectations

I am really looking forward to teaching the workers at the Pearl. In the Language Bridge Program, I’m sure to gain a lot of knowledge about teaching and hope to improve my teaching skills. Right now, I really am not sure what to expect, but, I know that this experience will definitely prove worthwhile and memorable for me and hence I’m here; taking the class.

I expect the teaching experience to be fairly challenging. Although we have lessons planned out and other activities laid out for us, from my experience in the past, I’m expecting a lot of variation from the actual plan. We need to improvise at times and I think my skill of improvisation will come handy in these challenging situations. I hope that the classes would run smoothly but it’s natural for things to go wrong and I think I must prepare for different scenarios and have back up plans up my sleeve, just in case.

The students are very important part of the experience and I’m expecting them to come with a sincere quest for learning. To me, it really doesn’t matter if the learner is intelligent or if the learner doesn’t even know the alphabet. As long as there is interest, I believe that anything is achievable for them and their interest would also motivate me to teach well and prepare good activities for them.

I’ll try to be a teacher that makes learning for the students a comfortable process. I will try to establish a healthy environment in class, where all students can feel free to express their opinions yet they must do it in a disciplined manner. My first task would be to set the ground rules so that they are all clear about the discipline issue from the very beginning. While I try to make the class a comfortable experience, I will make sure that I am strict on homework or other class material that I ask them to complete.

I think the biggest challenge would be to get the learners to come out of their comfort zone. They may not be used to sitting in a classroom and talking to people outside their camps. I want to make sure that they do not feel awkward while sitting in the class and will try to involve them as much as possible in our discussions. Many learners might be shy or ashamed since they do not know English as well as their friends and maybe some of them might not even know the alphabet. My responsibility is to teach them and I would really like to spend some time and help these students. I think making them feel less intimated of us as teachers is more important at this stage.

In the readings by Brookfield, we discussed that adult learners have an improving long term memory and that they rely on this long term memory to make sense of new information. I’ll make use of this concept and shall try to relate all the new information to some of their past experiences. This way, they’ll not just learn new things, but more importantly, they will also be able to remember them in future.