Teach English in Mashang Zhen - Zibo Shi

Within a classroom setting, it can be quite daunting when the teacher gets caught up in quieting the class or managing disruptions. Managing a classroom can feel more like a chore, and it is hard to know whether students are progressing well. Tailoring individualized attention to students in a one-on-one setting plus maintaining a larger group progress can be difficult. Some of the strategies that I have developed in my teaching and mentoring experience regarding students have been developed over mistakes. I recall once giving a writing prompt to all of my students and asking them to write an essay about their biggest challenge, a passion, or about a time they had a conflict with someone. The assignment required students to fill out a worksheet and write different points of their essay into boxes. While the assignment was simple, it did not fulfill the individualized needs of each essay prompt nor each students’ needs to understand how to plan their essay in a coherent manner. I saw how my students didn't feel passionate about what they were writing about, and focused more on completing the worksheet rather than the writing itself. Delivering this unified curriculum to the class in this case would have erased each person’s unique approach to essay writing. In order to fully tailor the assignment to students’ needs, I decided to sit down with each of them for ten minute writing conferences to check in about how they felt. While giving writing conferences, I unfortunately had to take away from class instruction or I had to give assignments that lasted for at least 30 minutes, so that I could briefly ask students to sit down with me. It also provided students with opportunities to get distracted, since I was not monitoring the group’s progress constantly. Another time I dedicated one-on-one teaching time was when I noticed one of my students had missed a whole week of class. She was already at a lower reading level than other peers in the group. Because she had missed many days of instruction, she struggled a lot with following directions given in class (since it was ahead of what she was working on at the time). I asked her to come to study hall in order for me to explain the assignment at hand. It became increasingly obvious that she was frustrated and did not like how her time with friends was being robbed by me as a teacher. However, I knew that she had to complete the assignment or else she would fall behind even more. My advisor eventually told me to begin modifying the assignment so that it would tailor to her needs. For instance, she always wrote in run-on sentences and neglected to use correct punctuation. Setting miniature goals such as having a paragraph with correct punctuation, rather than working on larger content and essay structure, would become her goal for this assignment. In this case, teaching one-on-one meant changing the assignment requirements for the student in order to help them fix the mistakes they uniquely faced. While it felt uncomfortable, I realized I could not rush her progress in a few days for mistakes she had made for years. Teaching on-on-one requires setting aside time and shifting the standards of achievement briefly, in order for a student to excel in the long run. Class sizes are often the biggest hindrance of individualized teaching time, as you want to be a fair teacher. I had to make mistakes in curriculum design and implementation to realize the importance of one-on-one teaching. If it is possible to shift attention to students in an individualized check-in fashion, I believe that this will help the group grow as a whole when you make sure no one is behind.