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A man once said that "there is only one corner of the universe one can be certain of improving and that is one's own self". Making reference to this quote, it is absolutely necessary to point out that a teacher's self-analysis begets improvement at certain areas of his/her shortcomings in teaching. First of all, what is self-analysis? Self-analysis, as sometimes referred to as self-assessment/appraisal, is an evaluation exercise carried out by someone to acknowledge the rate or level of performance towards a particular task or objective. This definition applies to the profession of teaching. In the course of teaching, a teacher must embark on a concrete self -assessment exercise to avoid falling flat on certain important areas of the lessons. For example, applying the outlined critical areas in the ESA(Engage, Study and Activate) from the ITTT course. As mentioned in Unit One and Eleven of the course, the teacher must meticulously understand the nature of the learners and the various special groups within his/her ESL class environment in order to effectively implement the techniques and activities designed for the students. By doing this, the teacher is engaged in evaluating him/herself to spot out certain shortcomings. If a teacher avoids the self-evaluation exercise, the teacher might keep re-inventing the wheel and getting the same result, outcome, and exercise without any tangible improvement. A teacher who is pleased with the same lesson results and outcomes without certain improvements tends to impact less in improving the interset and motivation of the learners. For instance, if a teacher keeps starting a class by adopting the Study/Activate Stage of the lesson in every lesson, the students will lose interest in the lessons thus throwing motivation out of the window. The introduction of great class activities and captivating subject matter whether with authentic or created materials opens a spot for the teacher to see the tangible results of his/her lesson plans. The teacher must constructively reflect on his/her attitude and role in teaching the language. Unit one of this course clearly stated that it is absolutely important for the teacher to acknowledge role switching in order to play an effective class role to achieve great results. A teacher has to assess him/herself on the following roles namely; Manager/Controller, Organizer, Assessor, Prompter, Tutor, etc. Also, a clear understanding of the lesson stages will give the teacher a suitable role to play. The purpose of teaching is to get the best out of the students and this cannot be achieved if the teacher is not sensitive, motivated, caring and above all enthusiastic about his/her lessons. Self-analysis will help the teacher to check if all the aforementioned qualities are missing or not. Aside from teaching and ensuring that discipline is equally achieved in the classroom, which is part of classroom management, a teacher must evaluate his/her professionalism. For the assessment of professionalism, the following questions can be asked; Does the teacher report timely to class, discussions, and meetings? Does the teacher receive phone calls and press phone as the classes are ongoing? Does the teacher complete lessons plans and achieve objectives each week? These proactive questions help the teacher to improve on certain bottlenecks and avoid repeating them in order not to diminish learners motivation. Conclusively, teachers self-analysis is absolutely necessary for teaching ESL because it aims at improving the teacher role, attitude and methods which in turns improve the lessons to achieve great results for learners. Therefore the answer to the title of this task is YES IT IS A NECESSITY.
