User

This academic year I am teaching two courses – School Experience to BA students and Advanced Teaching Practice to MA students. My short-term goal is to help my students to develop the necessary skills and abilities, to equip them with theoretical and practical knowledge essential for teaching profession. My long-term goal is to prepare, encourage and motivate my students for the adventure of discovery of new horizons on their own, since it always more beneficial to “teach them to catch the fish” instead of “giving them fish”.

Teaching Style: I believe that the major purpose of an education, in general, is to prepare students for real-life situations. That is why my teaching style is based on Authentic Approach. I am teaching undergraduate students, who need to be able to manage their class effectively and design valid and reliable exams, as well as conduct and interpret exams to be successful teachers, consequently, it is essential to improve their classroom management and assessment skills. For this purpose, I work hard to provide my students with the sufficient practice of all skills by simulating real life situations (debates, discussions, lectures, writing reports, projects, etc.). During my lessons, I often ask my students to perform deductive and inductive tasks in pairs or small groups. From my point of view, group work is especially productive for several reasons: students can learn a lot from each other, group work reduces anxiety enabling students to feel more confident, it improves learners’ critical thinking, and provides learners with the opportunity to develop their ability to work in teams.

To make my lessons interesting, attractive and aligned with the objectives I use a variety of teaching techniques. I believe that students performance increases if they know what they are expected to know and able to do at the end of a lesson/chapter/week/term/etc. For this reason at the beginning of a course, after a careful needs analysis, I introduce to the students the goals or learning outcomes they are expected to achieve at the end of the course. To make these long-term goals achievable I split them into small short-term goals explaining and discuss them with the learners at the initial stage of almost each lesson (warm-up). In order to ensure the accomplishment of the objectives, along with formative and summative assessment, at the end of a lesson/chapter/week/etc. I ask my students to evaluate the realization of the learning outcomes in form of check-list or discussions (as whole group or in small groups). This procedure enables me to find out what is needed more practice or explanation.

We live in the age of information technology, that provides easy access to almost any desired information, however, to gain automaticity in using information and developing teaching skills, it is essential to apply this knowledge and information into practice. Without a sufficient practice, there is a low possibility for students to master their teaching skills. For this reason, I dedicate most of my class time for practicing new material following the principal 80/20. I especially thank and praise students for mistakes they make because it helps me as a teacher and the students themselves to master their knowledge by working on the weaker spots.  Streaming the lesson this way helps me to minimize anxiety and fear of making mistakes, consequently, motivate students to continue learning.

Finally, I believe that establishing and maintaining rapport plays an important role in education because there is not significant learning without significant relationship. Good teacher-student and student-student relationship helps to create a good working relationship in the classroom.  That is why I pay a lot of attention to the development of the quality of relationship with my students to provide excellent learning opportunities for every individual student. So, my students (future teachers) in their turn will become more authentic and professional for the sake of improvement of the quality of education in general and in Kurdistan in particular.