The fundamental goal in teaching is to help others learn. Sure, that’s obvious enough. But when I taught my first English as a Foreign Language Lesson last week, I am sure I learned just as much — if not more — than my students.

I had been training to become an ESL/EFL teacher for just three days when I stepped in front of a pre-intermediate class of native-Spanish speaking adults. While I know I learned a lot primarily because it was my first hands-on practice running an EFL lesson, I think teachers need to continue learning even after they’re “new.”

Good teachers are learning every step of the way, alongside their students. Teachers, especially in a foreign language classroom, should be learning about their students: their culture, common mistakes, strengths, activity preferences, learning styles, everyday interests and on and on and on.

It’s important to find out why your students want to learn English so you can better meet their needs, gear lessons to help them overcome common errors, blah, blah, blah.

But this concept extends far beyond the classroom. I think our society often loses sight of the value in truly getting to know others — their traditions, aspirations, opinions and so forth — and that gap hinders us from communicating at a level of full understanding. We are instead quick to make rash assumptions and focus on our own views, which causes us to see the world in tinted glasses that block the real scene.

As I take this class on learning to teach, I am also learning so much about teaching myself — ways to accurately learn about people, about the world.

But enough on existentialism and back to my classroom …

My TEFL school, Bridge.

Learning about your students also ties back into improving teaching methodology and style … and I learned plenty procedural tips of the sort in facilitating my first lesson in front of real English learners. (So many levels of learning … I love it!)

I taught five Chilean adults who want to learn “the universal language” in order to better their careers and ultimately lead a more enriched life for themselves and their families. With students who have such admirable goals, I am grateful to serve as a small piece in helping them accomplish their dreams.

Although my TEFL training course at Bridge is demanding, it’s one of the best investments I’ve ever made in this challenging journey to teach English. And it is a challenge! Knowing English is simply not enough to be an effective language teacher.

My lesson went well, and all my students were functionally using the language by the end of my class. I taught hotel services vocabulary and how to ask for those services based on what one might need.

Almost as important as grasping the concepts, my students had fun … and so did I! I conveyed meaning of the terms and drilled pronunciation before we got into the juicy stuff of role-playing the parts and creating a dialogue.

I was proud of my first stab at teaching a foreign language. I hit on many of the points I’ve learned in training, such as giving clear and precise explanations and instructions (which is much harder than it sounds), managing my time to present, practice and produce the language within the hour-class, enunciating my speech, asking concept check questions and doing all that and more with confidence and presence in the room.

Much of it came naturally (I have my momma to thank for that), but I still have a lot to learn.

Namely, patience. Oh how that truly is a virtue for a foreign language teacher. While I didn’t feel impatient with my students because their abilities amaze me, my TEFL instructor pointed out that I still need to give them more time to process the questions, form an answer and say it before moving on.

Thinking and speaking in a foreign language is work. I need to remember how difficult it is for me to understand Spanish: a language I’ve been exposed to in classes over six years. Some of my students have been in English classes for less than six months, and my class is run solely in English. The goal behind that is to break the instinct of directly translating between languages and promote thinking in the target language more quickly.

There’s a long list of other improvements in my methodology that I will work on during the next three weeks and five teaching practices I’ll complete in this course. And I can’t wait!

—JDF