What makes a successful language teacher?
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Do you want to know what makes a successful language teacher? I’m going to do my best to explain what can take a classroom from bleh and boring to absolutely vital, thriving, and engaging for everyone in the room. Let’s dive into what makes a successful language teacher!
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What makes a successful language teacher?
Close Your Door & Teach
I think that first and foremost, what makes a great language teacher is going to be the same thing that makes a great any kind of teacher. Caring about your students and putting them first. That doesn’t mean putting their needs above your own health & well-being, but I do mean ignoring some of those hoops you’re told to jump through if it’s going to be better for student learning.
That basically boils down to: close your door and teach.
That’s not new, but it remains challenging. Sometimes evaluations related to your job want more of a dog and pony show than a lesson that is based in recent language acquisition research. If that’s the case, read your rubrics, pull an activity from your list that ticks boxes, and do what you’ve got to.
Build Relationships
Obviously you already care about your students. Obviously, you already want to do what’s best for them. So what can you do?
The next thing that I would have you do is really listen to them when you’re talking to them. Honestly that’s one of the things that I love most about all of these practices that I share about here!
When you’re focusing on delivering CI to your students you can focus so much on relationships and connecting with students.
Some of my favorite ways to build relationships in the target language include:
There are SO many strategies – check out more in the blog post here!
Using the target language as a vehicle to really build those relationships is such a powerful way to be a successful language teacher. It’s more than a word here & there between bells and passing periods before you take out a textbook. You can really center your curriculum around your students and your classes!
Constantly Learning & Improving
I think one of the things that can be the most exhausting for new teachers when they start to realize that we never really have it down. There’s always something changing, there’s always new difficulties, there’s always new.. something!
The kids change year to year, the things that you have in your classroom change year to year, research changes as we learn more, and the fact that you’re here and you’re learning about how to be a successful language teacher shows that you have that drive and that motivation to continually improve your practice.
You know that every year you’re going to keep trying things. You’re going to test out a different strategy, or several. Sometimes what worked the year before just won’t work with the new batch of students. That attitude of that constant persistence and learning is what makes a successful language teacher (or any teacher!)
Of course if you’re feeling overwhelmed in that journey, I highly recommend seeking out some professional development. There are so many resources to support us!
Modeling Lifelong Learning
Language learning is a journey and a process. I don’t know every word in the English language, even though I’m an English native speaker! Sometimes I have to look words up, and sometimes my brain just forgets them. The point is, that even though you are fluent in the target language, your students might not realize that that doesn’t mean that you know everything.
A great opportunity is when they ask you how to say a certain phrase, you can honestly tell them if you don’t know. You can look it up together and just model that fact that you are not all knowing, despite being able to communicate at a very high level of fluency.
Talking to students about how this is a process, again, is so important for them and helps them shift that expectation of what is the end of their Spanish journey going to look like.
Spoiler alert! It doesn’t end. There’s always more to learn. You can model that for them and help them see that they can communicate and expand their world if they’re willing to keep learning.
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