Rashni

Strengths

I feel that one of the greatest strengths I have as a teacher is maintaining a good rapport with my students and being patient while creating a secure learning environment for them, because a teacher student relationship and the classroom environment affects psychologically for the performance of the learner. Strengths are proposed to have important benefits for wellbeing and to contribute to success in important life domains (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). I really enjoy working with young adults and I love to see them becoming successful in every aspect of their future life.

I also believe that I do have the ability to understand the emotions of my students not only in teaching but in related to real life situations as well in which I can give them my helping hand, advice and counselling when required. In these cases, I consider myself as a responsible human being first rather than a teacher who should confront ourselves for the wellbeing and the positive mental health of the students. The strong communication skills along with compassionate state of mind that I possess support me well in maintaining the interaction with my students.

Another major strength I see in myself is the presentation skills in which I have the ability and my own way of getting the students’ attention. This skill supports me in multifarious ways to keep the lesson interesting, interactive, comprehensive without losing my audience.

I believe that being a teacher with innovative and creative ideas made me success in achieving my career goals as my students are young adults who love to experience novel methods of learning integrating with the technology. Therefore, I incorporate modern technology (PowerPoint Presentations, Projectors, Padlet, Videos, Digital Story Telling, Zoom) in most of my teaching methods. Additionally, I am a person who analyze everything before concluding with a response which helps me in many ways to become a successful teacher and I have taught the same procedure for my students to follow to become analytical and develop critical thinking.

I strongly believe that one of the greatest strengths I have in myself is the ability to build up respect and maintain discipline among the students. Since I am working with young adults, it is difficult to maintain discipline in classroom, but I have created a class with super discipline who help each other’s to achieve their targets. Even the students who are generally misbehaving in class, started to behave well and attend the classroom activities without disturbing others which again implies my strength as a human being to connect the real life into my teaching. The collaborative activities I use support to build up team spirit, good attitudes, and respect towards their peers.

Another strength I would mention is that my preference to take feedback and a need analysis from my students. I do believe that students’ feedback are essential notifications that I should consider when preparing in class activities, because I should be aware of the things that are need to changed in my next preparation. Lastly, I would like to highlight my own reflection as a teacher as one of the greatest strengths I possess, because it enables me to have a self-reflection and judge about my own teaching while identifying my own strengths and weaknesses that need to be polish up in my future teaching methods.

Weaknesses

I assume that with the strict time frame given by the authorities as teachers we had to stick into the allocated fifteen weeks and complete the work assigned. Therefore, in this case I have no sufficient time to help the students who need extra support in their language skills which I always see as a weakness in myself, and I need to give them additional support to enhance their language skills. I also believe that the inability to cater individual students’ learning styles also should count as a weakness as per the given time frame we as teachers are unable to cater all the learning styles.

Another major limitation I see in myself is becoming impatient due to the heavy work schedule and workload. Due to this strict work schedule the time I get to spare with the students is limited and I had to rush through the lessons to complete the syllabus. I also feel stressed and tensed when I had to work within a strict time frame which I see as a weak point which I need to get rid of and be ready to work under pressure.

Since it is my fifth year as a university educator, sometimes it is hard to predict the nature of the young adults, therefore in this case I feel I need to gain more experience in teaching university context to deal with undergraduates as they are different, demanding, and radical from their nature.

Lastly, I believe that I need to work more on time management as I plan a lot of warm up and in class activities to do in my class, but due to the strict time frame I had to skip few activities I have planned to do in class. According to Schuler, “The real importance of time management lies in the fact that many people have too many tasks they need to do, but not enough time for the things they want to do “(23:852). I totally agree with the statement, but I feel I need to plan my activities which match the given time schedule.