Celta Reflection

In my experience, teaching content that has the deepest value was not an easy task initially. I relied mostly on what my employers expected me to teach, so most of my objectives were set in their line not mine for quite some time. Perhaps, I started to think about it more seriously, when I was doing the DELTA in Hastings, East Sussex; that is, when I decided to view teaching differently: from all my uncertainties. My DELTA tutors had asked me to choose a teaching point for a pre-intermediate group as part of one of our first assignments and, honestly, this was the first time I could actually decide what to teach. Naturally, I needed some help then from a colleague who shared his views on how to select content within a given topic. His answer was simple: ‘choose content that is relevant and significant to the students. What would you use in everyday life?’ It was a hard earned lesson. Phrasal verbs were not my favourite language items and a point I had

My course tutors’ feedback confirmed this. My lesson was below standard despite my efforts to comply with all the assignment requirements but one: authentic achievement of my objectives. It was a self-inflicted punch below the belt which weakened many of my mental structures and, simultaneously, reframed them into something more dynamically organised by a new stance on the importance of constant epistemological surveillance. Hence, this signalled the beginning of my confrontational analysis of both dominant teaching practices and my own. I discovered the power of questions that addressed the viability of options in teaching as much as those that addressed the depth and breadth of knowledge: my students’ and my own. I could no longer take things for