My teaching philosophy

Presto in arrivo

I would like to start by saying that I enjoy teaching because I find the relationship you create with the students invaluable and incredibly important both for the students and the teacher and their development as individuals.

A classroom can be a space where the students will feel in some ways bored by grammar, and annoyed by the amount of homework. But it can also be a space where they might learn about a place and fall in love with it so much to visit and maybe move there, where they might meet a best friend or someone that will stay with them throughout their lives or a teacher that will be an inspiration.

While this might be true for any course, I think it is especially true for a language course for the amount of hands-on learning of culture and exposure to real life language and situations it gives you compared to other classes, if it's well structured.

On top of this, there is also the fact that seeing students progress everyday and engage in a different language, therefore giving them the tools to then experience a new world through language, holds key importance for the motivation of the teacher. Not to mention the fact that, if the teacher is also a native speaker (or even if they are not, but more so if they are in my opinion), there is also the passion of passing down a language that most likely represents most of their lives, culture, favorite aspects of it and more, to add to the source of motivation.

The best you can do, in my opinion, to be a good teacher is to keep the students motivated, engaged and curious as much as possible. That, I believe, is what distinguishes a good teacher from the rest. That can be achieved through well-structured activities that encourage meaningful communication and meaning making, through activities that encourage that through discussion and pair work where the students need to negotiate meaning to arrive to the information to complete the task.

In this, the role of the teacher is the one of facilitator, but also of the person that gives feedback, corrects when needed and encourages the students.