MY ORIGIN STORY.

Because of that environment, I learnt that teaching English wasn’t just about textbooks or grammar exercises. Lessons needed games, stories, music, roleplay and movement. What I found useful was my background in drama. I was already comfortable performing and improvising. With this knowledge, I was able to bring a variety of theatre-based exercises that brought energy, humour and creativity into the lessons. Students spent the majority of lessons on the move, connecting words to gestures, shouting and singing vocabulary, dancing to the rhythm of letter sounds.

Then, covid. The covid years shook the very foundation of the world and had a huge impact on education. Everything stopped, schools closed, students and teachers were left waiting. The transition to online learning began and it was brutal. Being a young learner, stuck at a computer or tablet for hours at a time listening to teachers lecture on. Online schooling just isn’t as exciting as Roblox or Minecraft. 

I too was set to task of becoming an effective online teacher. For months, I had to incorporate everything I had learnt about being a teacher into online learning. I was very aware that student engagement would drop if I didn’t keep my students on their toes. Therefore, I started to develop my own curriculum which included exciting visuals, games, videos, and interactive activities. I also changed my own teaching stance. I found myself adapting how I spoke, my physicality and gestures got bigger so as to reach the students through the camera, and I was constantly checking in with students one-to-one to make sure that the lesson content was clear. When covid finally came to an end, I kept teaching online whilst also teaching in an international school.

Being in an international school introduced me to a completely different side of teaching. I started learning more about curriculums, assessment methods, and supporting students academically over the long term. This process led me to developing a series of student-led projects, creating PPT games that emphasised teamwork whilst promoting individual learning, and coming up with various testing methods that weren’t strictly pen to paper.

In this school, I was also teaching much larger classes, which meant learning how to manage different learning styles, abilities and personalities all at once. The more I taught, the more I realised that every student learns differently and progresses at their own pace. Finding the balance between supporting individual students and keeping the whole class moving forward taught me to be more flexible and adaptable as a teacher.

I spent three years acting as both an online and an offline teacher, and over time I realised that online teaching was where my true passion lay. I loved meeting students from all over the world and quickly discovered that the learning went both ways. Not only was I teaching English, but my students were teaching me about their cultures, holidays and traditions. Through them, I gained a much broader understanding of the world and developed a real appreciation for different perspectives. Saying goodbye to my students in China wasn’t easy, but by that point I felt ready for the next step and that is where I am today.