My teaching experience

                  My name is Tetiana Mykhailivna Kosa. I’m an English teacher of a  secondary school in  Kulykivka, Chernihiv region.

                   I teach to communicate by communicating. The activities in the classroom are organized around real-life situations. Students use the language in problem-solving tasks.

                 Teaching is the greatest art in the world. A teacher creates the most beautiful masterpieces of his/her art – a teacher creates a person with his or her own point of view, unique inner world.

                  I enjoy teaching. Being a teacher is one of the greatest ways that a person can contribute to society. According to Henry Adams, a teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

              There is no teaching without studying. That’s why a teacher is in constant process of creative search and self-perfection. We study our students, new methodologies and approaches, changes in the world around us, creating our own innovations on basis of the learnt material. If we stopped doing it, we would stop being teachers.

             So, being an English teacher in a creative search is my teaching goal. It is to create harmonically developed personalities in individual, moral and physical spheres. Here I see some tasks:

1.     to stimulate and motivate students in studying English language, literature, history and culture, to make them interested in the life of English-speaking countries;

2.     to give my students knowledge, which they may use in their life;

3.     to give my students the opportunities to realize their creative abilities;

4.     to develop intelligent people, who can be tolerant to other opinions, defend their own ones, communicate with the world without losing themselves, have a self-control system, based on moral qualities and values;

5.     to cultivate physical health as well as intellectual and moral ones.

       To reach this goal I try to make my English language classroom a place which students would like to come to. I don’t want them to be scared or bored at the lesson. I hope they will come every morning with smiles on their faces, expecting something interesting from our meeting.

Nowadays English teachers face many challenges, but I think everything depends on our desire to make this life interesting and colorful, sharing it with our students.

                   I try to involve my students in different kinds of activities either at the lessons or after classes. I tell them “You’ll never know what you can until you try”.

                   I try all my best to make my English lessons interesting and memorable for my pupils. In my opinion, pupils remember only what is interesting and useful for them, what helps them enjoy the world or get along in it. All the rest they forget quickly, if they ever learn it at all.

                   I treat my pupils the way I want them to treat me. We are good friends.

                   I never stop improving my knowledge and enriching my outlook, because “Learning is a lifetime process”.

                   While planning a lesson I try to take into consideration the level, interests, needs, activities my students enjoy doing, the way they will benefit from the lesson.

                   Every lesson becomes a tiny creative laboratory for myself. I use a wide range of interesting texts, tapes, pictures, texts, role-cards prepared. I use a lot of group-work or pair-work and self-correction.

           In group-works students are allowed to share ideas and grammar structures with a small group before speaking in front of all their classmates and the teacher.

            I believe that learning should be fun, interesting and useful. So, games and physical activities in the classroom are not just time-fillers, but they are helpful in learning the language. Students use the language more naturally if they are relaxed and using it for a purpose.

          Warm-up is the first activity I do in my class. Students speak English 2-3 hours a week. They forget a lot between those hours; so, warming-up activities help the students just to come back to their English language classroom. Sometimes the warm-up is based on homework, sometimes it is just a fun  activity.

             I teach to communicate by communicating. We had none-standard lessons “Christmas in Ukraine and Great Britain”, ”Easter in my family”, a round table  “Education in the USA, Great Britain and Ukraine”, presentations “My Region”, ”Kyiv”, ”My Restaurant”; quiz-lessons: ”London: known and unknown”, “Do you know the USA?”, “St. Valentine’s Day”.

My students are fond of English extra-curricular activities. Traditionally we held “St. Valentine’s parties”, English weeks, fairy tale shows, students also do crosswords and make presentations, projects or posters…

Every year my students are winners in the district English -  olympiads and are the participants of the regional one’s.

        So, learning is a lifetime process and there are three steps to success: believe in yourself, dream big and make it happen!

          

Let’s remember the words  “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value”.    Albert Einstein