I am a third grade student in EFL department. I have taken many courses about teaching strategies and educational psychology courses up till now and as a requirement of my department I will continue to take these courses until I graduate. As far as I learn teaching methods and teaching strategies from my courses, I've begun to having an idea about how effective teacher should be and I've started to construct my own teaching beliefs.
As we predict that teaching belief is a very relativistic concept and it can vary from teacher to teacher. From my standpoint, effective teacher should analyze him/her learners such as their learning styles, educational backgrounds and English competency level of the students etc. By doing so, teacher can state what students needs clearly and s/he can be more helpful their learning processes. Also, according to my teaching beliefs, a teacher should be an ice breakers in the classroom. In some cases, students might not want to be a part of the activities or maybe they have less communications among them. In these cases teacher should be an ice breaker and create a more friendly atmosphere to draw their attention. Group work may be one of the good solution in that situation. Additionally, I always support student-centered classroom environment and inductive learning. Instead of make students memorize the information, teach students how they use what they learn is a better strategy from where I stand. In that way, they store the newly learned information in their long term memory. I hope that I will apply this in the future.
What I want to add for them is that every teacher should update him/herself and keep up with the improvements in educational area. Today we are living in the technological age. It is a very good way to using more authentic materials in the classroom to get students attention. If only using text books may cause losing students attention to the lesson, but using authentic materials keep their attention and can provide different point of views to them.
As a prospective teacher, the more I learn the more I set up my own beliefs. Now, I am continuing the learning and I have change to observe different teachers' teaching strategies. I hope that in the future I will be helpful my students learning processes in a more professional way.
