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My experience as not only a student but a teacher has given me an insight to how students feel in the classroom. Not only here I America but abroad as well. I have cultivated an idea of how a teacher should act and how available the teacher should be tom the students. Lending support and encouragement seems to be the most important factor in interacting with the students. My philosophy of education is primarily that a child constructs their own knowledge in an enriched environment through positive interactions with peers and adults. This essentially means that a kid needs to feel safe and be able to discover things for themselves. The teacher then acts as the guide on the side to help facilitate that learning. This can be enforced with using pair or group work to get the students talking to each other more often in the language they are learning, English. I think it is also important to teach the same topic in a variety of ways as some children learn differently than others. Knowing which students have which of the four learning styles; visual, auditory, tactile or kinesthetic, will help them best succeed. Having the different approach will allow the students to learn the same topic multiple times but still keep the lesson interesting. I also believe that positive reinforcement is always the best option. Focus on what you want a child to do rather than what you do not want them to do. For example, say “I want you to speak English” rather than “do not speak Korean.” This will allow the child not to feel scolded and will let then feel that the environment we have created is a safe and judgment free one. Encouraging students has been proven to increase self-esteem and provide confidence to the students. Teachers should be able to communicate with their students lending support, they should also be approachable. Students should never feel as if they cannot talk to their teacher. I have developed these ideas based on my own experience with teachers in and outside of the classroom. Being able to communicate with my teachers and tell them I do not understand the material and having different options to approach the same problems has definitely let me succeed in my education. I also felt the importance of gaining a rapport with the students in my past experience teaching English as a foreign language in Spain. That experience showed me that having that rapport with the students increases the ability for them to ask questions and feel comfortable asking questions about topics they don’t understand. Having an enriched and open environment will help the students, in my experience, reach their full potential in the classroom. Fostering the student’s abilities will not only help with the topic at hand but also help the students grow as people gaining confidence and self-esteem. I hope to translate all of the things I learned and add it to the experience I already have to become the best teacher I can for my students.
