Flexible TESOL Course

Of course, there are a few things I have gained and learned from this course. I am a teacher of english and German for more than two years now and this course gave me absolutely new ideas and information about how to teach. In a lot of cases, however, this course helped smoothing out sharp edges in my teaching. I will, for instance, and already have put even more focus on my presence and role as a teacher in class. I follow ‘simple’ advice as for example in the order of handing out exercises and explaining the task. I used to do it the wrong way around. But there are also more major ideas that I took from the course. It helped me a lot to see the ESA principle explained and exemplified. I can now much more focus on a grammar point for instance and look at it from different angles. I think my students will benefit from this in a way that I don’t ‘rush’ through language points as much anymore. I used to go rather quickly – rushing would be exaggerated – but I see now that it is much better for the students to go even slower than I did before. And I can go through these points slower because I look and them from different angles and focus on different elements in each phase of the lesson. I applied somewhat similar phases in my classes before, but not as good as now. Going slowly through these different stages also makes me feel more comfortable because I used to feel ‘dumb’ and too slow when focusing on one point so much. The course therefore also helped me to put me in a better perspective. I have been learning a lot in my present job, but this course allows me to improve and work on myself more precisely and target-orientated. As it is stated in the course, the teacher should always have the motivation to improve himself/herself and the course was the right tool to do so from now on. In the end, however, I reckon that my biggest personal gain will be the higher satisfaction of the students with my teaching. And this, in turn, will encourage me to become even better.