Coming into this course, I had decided to enroll in the TESL Certificate program simply as a backup as I never thought this was something I would pursue full-time. However, this course has a revealed a passion that has before laid latent. In many of my classes, I consume information and take my professor or textbook author as the authoritative expert on the matter and never am required to question what I am taught—this course has done the opposite. The instruction, readings, and assignments have all pushed me to think critically about what I have learned, making me investigate my future as an educator and figure out how I want to hold myself. This means what style of teaching I would adhere to, what kinds of assignments I would use, what objectives I would implement, and what I expect from the students and myself. What’s different about this class is that I had to decide all this for myself.

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        I viewed the course objectives once at the beginning of the semester, but am now taking a second chance to do so and looking at it as a checklist. The objectives for the course as a whole were clearly weaved into each assignment that we completed and each reading that we read, and I can say that I was able to firmly grasp all that was taught to and expected of me. My objectives for myself were more performance-based, similarly to many other college students, in that my goals for myself are to succeed as a whole and the (somewhat informal) objectives are to succeed on each assignment. Yet, when being tasked with assignments like creating a teaching philosophy, this largely reflects on content beyond the (asynchronous) classroom. This class gave me the material to think about my future and my goals beyond the end of the semester.

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    Three of the course objectives focus on the five language skills—listening, speaking, reading, writing, and grammar: one objective focused on the teaching approaches and considerations for each of these skills; another objective instead implores us to critically evaluate preexisting activities in these areas; lastly, the third objective had us develop informal assessment tools for each skill. These objectives and their implementations seemingly had a huge impact on me. It was like I had entered teacher mode and momentarily left my role as a student (for one of the first times!) in order to examine different teaching methods, evaluate activities, and create assessment tools. I believe I was able to do this well, and these objectives were concepts I had no experience with before this class.

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        Some meaningful things I have learned over the course pertain to teaching methods and approaches. Although there are many different instruction methods and teaching styles, I had previously thought there was a fairly strict right and wrong way to teach, but I now realize that the context, the language level, and the scope all greatly impact how a teacher should conduct their instruction. Another thing I learned that added to this is the use of needs analysis assessments. When at all possible, teachers should take the chance to get to know the students and their individual abilities and desires, and it is better to do this early in the instructional period. Lastly, I was given the chance to describe and evaluate a textbook of my choice, and this is something I have never done before as a student. I feel much more prepared to teach English as a second language than I ever thought I would be after just one course in it.

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      Overall, this course has provided me with indispensable knowledge and experience in teaching English as a second language and teaching as a whole. It challenged me in new and exciting ways and I have undoubtedly become more equipped to enter the world of teaching with my newfound knowledge. I look forward to being able to implement what I have learned in this course in my future and have found the course to have an interdisciplinary education which I greatly appreciate.