Teachers and Teaching

As I mentioned in relation to Learners & Learning, my views on teaching were profoundly shaped by the educational context in which I grew up—both as a student and as a teacher. It was a context that placed great emphasis on mastery of subject matter and deep respect for the authority of the teacher. In this environment, reflection and self-reflection were not considered integral to the learning process, and teaching was often understood as the transmission of knowledge rather than a dialogic, transformative act.

However, teaching and teachers exist within a complex web of interrelated influences—learners, classrooms, schools, communities, institutions, societies, and the world at large. Recognizing this interconnectedness, I have come to understand that any genuine teaching philosophy must be grounded in an awareness of the self in interaction with the other—in and beyond the classroom. Such awareness requires cultivating a reflective attitude toward how one’s beliefs, values, and experiences shape teaching practices and relationships with learners.

My experience at SIT represents what I can only describe as a transformative learning journey that fundamentally shifted my understanding of teaching and learning. It challenged many of my previously held assumptions about the roles of teacher and learner. Patricia Cranton (2006) identifies this kind of transformation as a developmental process through which “people move from black-white, authority-based thinking through to a complex, integrative, web-like thinking in which there is no objective truth outside of the self” (p. 74). This insight captures the essence of my own transformation.

The shift I experienced was largely the result of engaging with new frameworks of thought—especially Experiential Learning—and the challenges they presented to my established ways of knowing. Initially, adapting to these new approaches was not easy. However, the very challenges that unsettled my old beliefs also became catalysts for growth. They allowed me to reconstruct my understanding of teaching as a fluid, reflective, and context-responsive practice. Today, I view teaching not as the act of imparting knowledge but as a process of co-construction—a reciprocal exchange between teacher and learner, grounded in inquiry, empathy, and reflection. This transformation has deepened my commitment to approach every classroom as a living, evolving space where both teaching and learning are acts of mutual discovery.

Sub-Competency A.5: Teachers Need to Be Knowledgeable About Reflective Teaching and Experiential Learning

Supporting Documents

When I first arrived at SIT, I found it challenging to adapt to the interactive and inquiry-driven classroom environment. What was most disorienting at the time was the way instructors constantly encouraged us to question our own teaching beliefs and practices. Initially, I wondered why we spent so much time reflecting rather than “just teaching.” My previous educational background had conditioned me to think that teaching was mainly about knowing what to teach and how to teach it. However, through the Approaches to Language Teaching course, I learned to ask a more critical question—why do I teach the way I teach? This question has since become central to every aspect of my professional and intellectual development as an educator.

My journey into reflective practice is best represented in my final paper for Approaches to Language Teaching, titled Teaching with Mindfulness. In that paper, I articulated my growing understanding of reflective teaching by analyzing three interconnected concepts: Mindfulness, the Believing/Doubting Game, and the Language–Learner–Teaching Context. Mindfulness, as I came to understand it, is the act of teaching with deliberate awareness—being conscious of the beliefs, emotions, and contextual realities that shape one’s instructional choices. It allows teachers to uncover the underlying assumptions behind their preferred methods and techniques and to align them with the needs of both the learner and the teaching context.

The Believing and Doubting Game provided another valuable reflective framework. Teachers, as I observed, often accept certain approaches uncritically or reject them outright because they seem inconsistent with their existing convictions. The Believing/Doubting Game challenges this tendency by urging teachers to temporarily “believe” in an idea before doubting it, and to “doubt” before rejecting it. This deliberate oscillation between acceptance and skepticism leads to deeper understanding and more informed pedagogical decisions. When combined with the concept of the Language–Learner–Teaching Context, reflection becomes a dynamic process that connects what we teach and how we teach it with why we do so—ensuring that our choices are pedagogically sound and contextually responsive.

My engagement with Training and Design for Experiential Learning (TDEL) further expanded my understanding of how reflection and experience intersect. In my Individual Analysis of Learning paper, I explored how Experiential Learning serves as the foundation for authentic learning experiences in both teaching and training contexts. Becoming aware of my own learning style—specifically as an Assimilator/Analytical learner—helped me recognize how personal learning preferences can unconsciously influence instructional design. This awareness prompted me to reflect critically on how my preferred way of conceptualizing knowledge might privilege certain learners while disadvantaging others. As I noted in my paper, good teaching requires accommodating a range of learning styles and designing lessons that reflect this diversity to promote equitable learning outcomes.

In my Reflective Analysis paper, I described Experiential Learning as “very significant in providing a range of skillsets in the departments of Knowledge, Attitudes, Awareness, and Skills necessary for the internalization and transfer of knowledge.” This statement captures how Experiential Learning integrates both reflection and action—it is not merely “learning by doing,” but rather learning through reflective engagement with experience. By cycling through experience, reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation, learners not only construct knowledge but also develop self-awareness as learners and teachers.

Ultimately, both Reflective and Experiential Learning have transformed the way I view teaching. Reflection allows me to examine my beliefs and assumptions, while experiential learning provides the framework for turning those reflections into meaningful, embodied practice. Together, they have equipped me to approach teaching as an ongoing process of inquiry, adaptation, and growth—one that values awareness as much as knowledge, and process as much as outcome.

Sub-competency B.6: Teachers need to be skilled at teaching reflectively by seeing, describing, inquiring into, and making hypotheses about students’ learning and teaching context, and taking intelligent action based on this process

Supporting Documents

Developing a reflective attitude toward teaching has been one of my central goals since I began to understand how transformative it can be. In my earlier teaching experiences, I had only a vague sense of what reflection meant in practice or how it could help me improve my teaching. My Teaching Internship at The Welcome Project in Somerville, MA, changed that. It presented real challenges that forced me to observe, question, and re-evaluate my teaching habits. In my Internship Final Paper (Learning Story), I examined some of these challenges and traced how they shaped both my teaching and my students’ learning. The most significant of these was the nature of my new teaching context—an ESL environment that was unfamiliar to me. For the first time, I was teaching a group that was culturally and linguistically diverse, with wide differences in age and proficiency. Culture, in particular, shaped everything in my classroom—from how students interacted with me and with each other to how they approached learning itself.

This diversity also made students’ learning more complex to interpret. I found myself struggling to anticipate how cultural norms, values, and classroom behaviors influenced my students’ engagement. I wrote in my Final Memo: “I would say that the frustration I had at some points was due to the fact that I was not very original in my reactions and responses to some of the incidents in the classroom when my students would very excitedly try to communicate an idea, a concern, a moment of joy, and I would terribly fail to understand or have to ask Lindsay for translation. This was the downside of not being able to navigate and anticipate the embedded cultural values of my students in our daily communication.”

This moment of realization became a turning point in my reflective journey. Seeing and describing what was happening in my classroom was only the first step; the real work came from inquiring into why it was happening and acting intelligently on those insights. To address these challenges, I began to make small but intentional changes. I became more compassionate and deliberate in my communication with students—both in and outside the classroom. I made it a point to learn about their stories, their ways of greeting, their food, and the details of their lives. Gradually, this human connection lowered their affective filter and fostered a stronger sense of belonging. My supervisor, Tannenbaum, recognized this shift when she reminded me: “Do you remember that I asked you after my first observation to pay attention to individual students and to write about their learning successes and challenges? You have done this by paying attention to Elma, Azam, and Kim.”

These small acts of observation and adaptation became a model for reflective teaching in action—seeing, describing, and adjusting based on evidence from real students. On a practical level, I also began to structure my lesson plans more intentionally. As Richards (1994) noted, effective lesson planning as reflective practice begins with reviewing prior learning and clearly stating goals. In my lesson plan for the low-level class, I applied this principle by linking two thematic units—one old, one new. Since a week had passed since the previous lesson, I designed a refresher activity that reintroduced body parts but added novelty through communicative use. I taught the structure “I have + ailment” and used flashcards to represent different illnesses, giving students a concrete and meaningful context for practice.

These adjustments—rooted in inquiry, reflection, and responsiveness—transformed my teaching from reactive to intentional. Through them, I learned that reflective teaching is not an abstract skill; it is a living process of seeing clearly, questioning deeply, and acting wisely in response to the learners in front of me.

Sub-competency C.17: Teachers Need to Hold Attitudes of Willingness to Change Their Teaching

At the core of every reflective attitude toward teaching lies an awareness of the complexity of learning and teaching processes—their dynamic, shifting, and interdependent nature. Strengthening my reflective teaching skills requires continuously reconsidering my own beliefs and the principles that sustain them. It also involves recognizing that learning is as vital as teaching, and that the two are inseparable.

Teachers, myself included, often confine their practice to a narrow set of comfortable routines. Left unexamined, these habits can create what I call the “Rocking Chair trap.” From a distance, a teacher in this state appears to be moving—teaching, explaining, correcting—but in truth, there is no real forward motion. The classroom energy stays contained within familiar boundaries, never quite reaching the learner. My experience with The Silent Way shook me out of that illusion of movement. It challenged me to reconsider how I perceive both learners and the act of teaching itself.

I am often reminded of a quote I once saw on a Sandanona classroom door: “In any language, in any classroom, anywhere in the world—it comes down to the two of you: learner as teacher, teacher as learner.” This statement captures the transformation I experienced at SIT. It reframed my question from “How can I teach more effectively?” to “How can I shift responsibility for learning to my students?” Leslie Turpin echoed this in her feedback on my Silent Way paper, affirming that my insight about “seeing how to shift responsibility to the learner and to push the teacher to think in a very detailed and specific way about how to set up challenges for this to occur” reflects the essence of reflective teaching.

My teaching internship at The Welcome Project became the space where this willingness to change was tested. Teaching low-level adult learners was one of my greatest challenges. Unlike my previous EFL contexts, I could no longer rely on my native language to clarify meaning, nor could I depend on cognitively demanding activities that had worked with higher-level students. My learners spoke multiple languages—none of which I shared—and their proficiency levels varied widely. Initially, I felt limited by what I couldn’t do. Gradually, I began to focus on what I could change.

Drawing on Vygotsky’s principle of scaffolding, I restructured my lessons to increase support rather than simplify the task. I relied more intentionally on gestures, modeling, and visual cues to facilitate understanding. I also redesigned activity sequences to build momentum and ensure smoother transitions between tasks. These adjustments not only improved classroom communication but also created a more inclusive and responsive learning environment.

Through this process, I learned that changing one’s teaching does not mean abandoning one’s principles—it means refining them through lived experience. True reflection, I now realize, is not a mirror we occasionally look into; it is the very movement that keeps us from rocking in place.

Sub-competency D.19: Teachers Need to Be Aware of Their Own Assumptions About Teaching and Learning

During the two years I spent teaching high school in Mauritania, my assumptions about teaching and learning were deeply shaped by both the local educational culture and my own practical theories of what “good teaching” should look like. That culture mirrored what Zeichner and Liston (1996) describe as the Academic Tradition, in which teachers place primary emphasis on “the subject matter and the representation and translation of the subject matter knowledge to promote student understanding” (p. 53). Like many teachers in that context, I believed that mastering the content and finding effective ways to transmit it to students was the essence of good teaching.

My experience at SIT profoundly unsettled this long-held belief. Two approaches in particular—the Silent Way and the Participatory Approach—challenged the very foundation of my assumptions. Before encountering The Silent Way, I viewed learners mainly as objects of instruction. The classroom revolved around the teacher’s authority and the structured delivery of linguistic content. Making my teaching subordinate to learning required a complete reversal of that orientation. It meant relinquishing control and placing initiative in the hands of learners—an act that, at first, felt uncomfortable and even disorienting. Yet it was precisely this discomfort that revealed how much my satisfaction as a teacher had been tied to maintaining control rather than fostering autonomy.

Through reflection and practice, I began to move toward what Zeichner and Liston (1996) term the Developmentalist Tradition of reflective teaching—one that emphasizes “reflection about students, their cultural and linguistic backgrounds,” and, in the spirit of The Silent Way, about their “thinking and understanding” (p. 57). I came to see that genuine teaching begins not with mastery of content but with awareness of how learners think, feel, and make sense of knowledge in their own ways.

Equally transformative was my confrontation with the assumption that teaching is apolitical. Growing up in Mauritania, I understood “politics in education” as classroom distraction or ideological manipulation. When Leslie Turpin asked us to position ourselves along a line according to whether we believed teaching was a “political act,” I instinctively stood on the side that denied any political dimension to teaching. At the time, I believed the classroom should remain insulated from the social world. It was only later, through the Participatory Approach, that I came to understand “the political” as inseparable from education—not as partisan but as humanizing. I realized that every act of teaching carries ethical and social implications. As Zeichner and Liston (1996) explain, reflective practitioners focus both “inwardly” on their own practice and “outwardly” on the social conditions in which that practice unfolds (p. 59). This realization reframed my understanding of teaching from a purely academic enterprise to a transformative one.

In my Participatory Approach paper, I articulated this awareness clearly: building linguistic capacity and empowering critical consciousness are not separate goals—they are complementary dimensions of education. To teach language is also to cultivate voice, agency, and awareness of social realities. I now understand that the question is not whether teaching is political, but how responsibly and reflectively we choose to engage with that reality.

Through this process, I learned that changing one’s teaching does not mean abandoning one’s principles—it means refining them through lived experience. True reflection, I now realize, is not a mirror we occasionally look into; it is the very movement that keeps us from rocking in place.

• Reflective practice has become at the core of my teaching philosophy. I want to continue to examine my teaching beliefs around language, learners, and the teaching context. This is important to me because of the nature of my educational context where there is a lack in professional development training. 

• Develop a critical approach to my teaching. As I reflect on the condition of schooling in Mauritania, it is apparent the amount of inequalities inside and outside the classroom. 

• Do more reading about Reflective Teaching and Experiential Learning.

• Read ‘Teachers’ Narrative Inquiry as Professional Development”.

• Read ‘Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classroom’.

• Start an online blog and use as an interactive medium for sharing ideas interacting with my fellow professional. 

• Publish an article as a first step.