My background and Teaching Philosophy.
I have been working as an English teacher for 12 years and along my journey I have had the possibility to work in different environments with children from different ages and levels, since preschoolers, elementary, secondary and high school lerarners, adults and finally university students; after analyzing the process of some of the places where I had been working on, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like the way English was being taught, because of different factors like the quantity of grammatical topics that the students had to learn and the poor communicative results evidenced at the end of the course. Also it reminded me about the way I learnt English, the collection of books that I had to fill in and many moments when I felt ashamed of talking in English.
All of these experiences encourage me to look for a way to change a little bit this reality and start my own business: Green Book. My company aims to help my students to really learn English using the language as a vehicle for expressing thoughts, likes, desires; to introduce them into different contexts and to teach them how to manage those situations using the vocabulary and the different elements saw in class, including of course grammar. But, students can ́t learn by themselves, they need guidance, support, motivation, coaching, to be cheer up in the ups and downs of the process. This is the reason why I help, prepare and talk to my teachers about the importance of this profession, that teaching goes beyond transmitting information in a class, it is a process that has to be coherent, organized and planned by the teacher if the purpose it to create meaningful learning, in which the student will transform information into knowledge due to an appropriate, adequate and motivating environment; information that the student must perceive as interesting, useful and that leads to a desired goal, not only for academic preparation, even better, for improving their professional lives becoming more responsible and autonomous.
In this moment I look at my work experience and realized that my beliefs about language, teaching and learning have grown out of successes and failures from my teaching experience, although it was not an easy process to arrive to this stage of my life. For me language, is a vehicle for expressing thoughts, likes and desires, for introducing new worlds to the students and different contexts in which using English language will be used actively and spontaneously to communicate with other people.
Based on my experience, I came up to the conlcusion that the concepts of teaching and learning depend one on the other because a good teaching process will lead to a successful learning outcome if the strategies and methodologies applied by the teacher point to the real needs of the context. Learning is a process in which the learner will acquire proper strategies to develop specific tasks, to become a good language learner and to acquire aptitudes to take control over his own learning inside and outside the classroom. On the other hand, teaching is a process that must be planned in a way that fosters autonomy in the students, providing specific strategies to help the leaners to get from where they are to where I want them to be; these goals are based on clear and measurable goals stated from the beginning considering the needs and context of the students.
