Teaching and Teacher Workshops

I really enjoyed teaching while I was in Bangladesh. The first day my host, Mustofa Kamal, took me around and introduced me to all the classes. The students were very enthusiastic to have a native English speaker teaching their English classes. They often brought me flowers, chocolate or pens. I taught classes on a variety of topics including: career planning, American culture, interviewing, the value of education, etc.

All of my classes focused on speaking skills. Many of the teachers and students understand verbal and written English very well, but they are not comfortable speaking in English. In each class I taught, every student was given a chance to speak English.

I was able to co-teach with many teachers at Brahmanbaria High School, which was nice as well. Many of them translated the work in Bengali and I encouraged them not to so that students would be forced to use more English.

I was also able to lead a workshop on strategies to Teach English as a Second or Foreign language for teachers from Brahmanbaria High School and some of the surrounding communities. I introduced the idea of scaffolding to teachers, demonstrated activities they could use to scaffold reading, and then had teachers create lesson that incorporated scaffolding into their content areas. Throughout the workshop, I also encouraged teachers to use more English in their classrooms.