My 5 New Teaching Goals as an ESL Teacher
Before we jump into my goals for this semester, can we all just say a “Hallelujah” that this semester won’t be online? This week last year, I was so nervous for the start of our online semester. And I know for many people, they might still have online class. My prayers go out to you.
Online or not, I’m still a bit nervous for this semester. Granted, I’m always a mixture of nerves and excitement stepping back into the classroom, but I just have a gut feeling that this semester will be unique.
Before jumping into a new semester, I always like to write out a list of teaching goals I want to achieve. In the chaos that inevitably is the first week, it’s nice to have a focus for what I want the semester to be like and what I want to accomplish this semester. Without further ado, here are my five new teaching goals!
1) Address students by their names more
My first semester with students is usually focused on just getting their names down. But I realized last semester, even though I knew their names, I didn’t always call them by their names. I definitely want to make a conscious effort to do more of this. I want students to know that I know them individually and I see them during class!
2) Keep on top of attendance/homework assignments
I’ve got to be honest. I really failed at this last semester. And it nearly broke my little type-A heart. I just wasn’t diligent enough with recording details about the class, such as participation, and my homework recording system was a mess. I need to take my own advice and follow my attendance/homework tracking system better. Each day, before I leave the classroom, I’m going to take a minute to update my rosters so that grading will be a breeze a the end of the semester. Well, more of a breeze, anyway. Later this month, I’ll be posting about my color-coded system for keeping attendance, participation, and homework recorded organized (during class time!)
3) Take notes after each lesson
This semester, I have a record number of “new” lessons. That means, lessons I’ve never taught before. Of course, it’s great to be able to bring fresh content into the classroom (A.K.A. teachers get bored of teaching the same thing again and again!), but one perk of re-teaching a lesson is that you have the chance to adjust and smooth out the lesson. When you’re teaching a lesson for the first time, things are bound to go wrong somewhere. That’s why, this semester, I want to take Friday afternoons to reflect on how my lessons went and make notes for improvement. Next semester or next spring, when I teach those lessons again, I’ll be ready!
4) Practice more mini-batching.
This is a tool I’ve recently discovered that has saved my mental health during this break as I’ve tried to get ahead on lesson planning. It’s great when you find a way to improve on a productivity hack you’ve previously discovered, and I’m going to be using this method for the rest of my planning this semester. If you want to read more about mini-batching, I wrote an entire post dedicated to it here:
5) Prioritize My Heath (Physical and Mental)
As an ESL university teacher, I generally have one to two new lessons to prepare each week. In my eight years of teaching, that’s been what usually happens. This semester, however, I will have four to five lessons to prepare each week. Now, I wasn’t that great at math as a kid, but that’s over double my usual work load. As someone who already struggles with being a workaholic, I’m expecting work to take over my life completely over the next few months. Too much work, overtime, and stress = getting sick, feeling exhausted, losing my cool, and being disconnected from family and friends. I know how this cycle goes, and while it might be too ambitious to say it won’t happen, I want to be mindful of my health and stay as healthy and calm and connected as I possibly can.
I know my semester might be starting weeks or months after yours, but maybe this is good chance to step back and evaluate how your semester is going! Do you always set goals before the start of a semester? If so, how are they going?