Amen! 🤪🤓 🇬🇧❗ TOP TEACHING TIP #4 - KNOW YOUR STUFF❗🇬🇧
Summer is upon us and it's time for many a teacher to put their feet up and say: "Forget it for the next 3 months - I'm resting!" Oh how wrong that is, fuu!
For most teachers I would like you to answer the following questions, regardless of the level you teach (you can even reference this to other teachers you know):
👉🏻 When was the last time, you read a grammar reference book like Swan, Mygrammarlab etc cover to cover, or at least did most of it including the exercises not because you were preparing for a lesson but because you wanted to maintain your English?
👉🏻 I know we teachers have a lot of work on our hands but doing 15 mins a day of authentic sources is nothing. How many of us regularly maintain our level of English by making use of authentic sources AND: recording vocab, analyzing structures etc?
👉🏻 How many experienced and qualified teachers regularly maintain a vocab list for their own development?
Why am I asking these? 🤓
Over the past year or so, when interviewing teachers or following discussions on various forums, I was rather shocked concerning the lack of language knowledge: not necessarily the level of English, but the ability to explain simple and obvious things. We as teachers must always develop like in any job and considering the teaching market is really getting flooded these days, you need to make sure your skills are on the up and up - above competition. Like any profession pretty much, no teacher is indispensable.
Anddddddd.... Use native sourced books like Mygrammarlab, Swan, Vince etc.
What's the moral of the story? 😌
Attending seminars on how to play games with dead household pets at B1 level or engaging the imagination of students by singing songs about sandwiches for CPE, fair enough, good on you. But don't forget the foundation of your job: Your skills and knowledge of English. If you don't have those skills, seminars are pretty pointless then - it's like buying furniture for a house which you haven't built yet))
❗ KNOW YOUR STUFF! ❗
