Kayode Amusan

My philosophy of teaching is to create an environment where I would be influential in boosting learners’ accuracy and fluency in English or/and Yoruba.
I strongly believe that the greatest gift of a teacher is the passion, self-motivation and commitment to the job of impacting/disseminating knowledge. Teachers who are passionate and zealous with their profession successfully motivate learners to learn. I consider teaching as a selfless service whose reward is Divine. When a teacher focuses attention on the benefits that come directly from teaching, then the purpose is lost.
I also believe in learner-oriented teaching. This teaching approach promotes purposeful learning. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to have a good understanding of my learners. Some of these include their social needs, educational needs, and psychological needs. A good understanding of learners’ needs ensures successful implementation of my teaching goals. It is also expedient to assess my learners before classroom engagement and do so periodically during classes to measure their developmental growth with respect to acquisition. This would help them to build connections between what they already know and what they seek to know. This would help me fashion out lesson plans that fit their needs and would help them improve their language performance.
The learning approach I use in my classroom is the interaction approach. The interactive approach is a process of learning that allows learners to learn by working together with their colleagues in the class to achieve mutual understanding. This approach claims that ‘if our language ability develops out of a desire to communicate, then language is dependent upon whom we want to communicate with’. This learning theory is designed for virtually all the communication skills that would be taught during the program. For instance, in one of my recent teachings about tense and vocabulary in the class, I made my learners discuss and share their experiences about the reality of life (from their home countries, which are mainly India, Bangladesh, China and Nepal) and to also share experiences about their stay in the United States. The interactive model also involves learning through problem-solving methods. I achieve this by interactively solving certain tasks in the class. To implement this method, I engage learners with different tasks such as: identification of words, brainstorming, discussion, flashcard meaning contextualization etc.