Monitoring Your Own Teaching

Teaching involves an on-going process in which the educator is constantly reflecting on their teaching in order to ensure that they are meeting the needs of the students. This process is achieved through analyzing the student’s progress in their competence of the content material. Therefore, in teaching one must think critically about what the students accomplish in their learning. By doing so, the educator is better able to differentiate instruction to assure that each student achieves the correct understanding of the material. For this reason, I see the teacher as the learner and the learner as the teacher. In being reflective, the teacher is able to learn from the students what is effective in their teaching and what is not. If the teacher realizes that something is not working and the students are not understanding, the teacher should then consequently make changes to make certain that the learners to acquire the material.

It is so necessary that we are constantly observing ourselves and our students, or have another colleague observe our classroom for a different perspective. When I begin teaching I would love t have this happen as much as possible, because I feel like my first year will be so overwhelming with getting the hang of everything, that my time to reflect will be intruded upon since I will be focusing on other tasks. As the years go on, I am sure that my observing will be much more accurate since I will already be used to the schedule of the day, however, I still believe that it is necessary to bring in multiple perspectives to the classroom.

There is a program that is called Response to Intervention (RTI) and it is a great program in which the teacher is constantly monitoring each students progress through data collection. They collect data about how well the student is doing on tests, how many words the student is reading a minute, how well they are comprehending what they read, etc, etc. In RTI, the teacher is constantly differentiating instruction to meet the needs of the student. I feel that RTI would be ideal for the ESL classroom, especially since there is often not a large number of students in each classroom, and I believe that it is an effective way to monitor the students progress, but as well as the effectiveness of my teaching approaches and methods.