Teach English in Menghai Zhen - Heze Shi

Sometimes teacher’s role is unfairly underestimated. However, being a teacher is not an easy task. Being a teacher equals to a constant work, which includes self-education and teaching others. A teacher must educate his/ her students, communicate with parents, prepare lessons, manage the class, do some paperwork and work effectively with the school staff. Meanwhile it is not a monotonous job, as you always work with different groups of learners and adjust your lesson plans according to the current class. In reality, what really defines a real good teacher is a personality plus established rapport between students and their teacher. This complex will make a perfect image for an ideal teacher in learners’ eyes and will help him/ her to gain trust of them. Actually teachers in the kindergartens and primary schools may play a very important role in future lives of young learners, as those years are formative for the kids and can shape their personalities. After their parents, they play an integral part in shaping what they will become in the future. The teacher’s role is far more than just lesson planning and lesson execution. As basically young students spend a huge amount of time with their teachers, they usually absorb a lot of manners and basic skills from them, while elder ones consider their teachers as mentors and models. That is why it is important for the teacher to keep in mind that they are becoming role-models and examples to follow from whom the students will learn. Nowadays teaching roles are quite different from what they used to be. Typical classes are more oriented on students, rather than teachers. It means the students having central roles in the classes, while teachers mostly taking a shadowing and observing parts. But this fact varies from one class to another. As we can see, every lesson plan can be specified by a certain learning goal or objective. Normally an experienced teacher manages to change his/ her roles during one lesson. All depends on his/ her expectations from a class and teaching method. There is no perfect role for any of classes, everything depends on the situation, students and a teacher’s personality. He/ she must decide whether it is comfortable to change roles often or just to stick to one-two and have a class self-confidently that way. From my perspective, there is no better way than to change my roles as a teacher within one class. I always try to put myself on my students place and come up with new ideas to make my lessons more interactive and interesting. Every single time my lessons tend to be structured according to the lesson plans, ESA methods. Those methods ideally require smooth change of my roles from beginning to the very end. Every time I come from what I want to achieve with a task being given by me and what activity we are using at this moment. This understanding helps me to choose from variety of roles: whether I should take a role of an observer or a prompter, or should I be an organizer or a participant and take more active position right now. It is important for me to switch my roles between the tasks, so that my students still feel a relaxed and friendly atmosphere in the classroom. All this knowledge of the right time when to carry out which role, allows me to control and involve my learners to the process of studying with less spending energy and much more profit and effect. Being a teacher is not just standing in front of the students and carrying out a lecture. Being a student is more about combining different ways and methods through the lesson to make it more beneficial for the students. Being an experienced teacher mostly means to be happy about extending boring lecturing beyond the frames and make your students eager to study willingly. Regardless all the existing roles, teachers have a crucial role in shaping learners minds and culture in the classroom, which later leads to bigger societies on world’s scale.