What To Do When Teaching English Isn't Challenging | THREE TRICKS to IMPROVE

Eventually in your English teaching life, you will get bored with teaching past simple, present perfect, the conditionals, phrasal verbs, and the rest that comes with teaching English grammar. If you only focus on that, it will lose its shine and get boring sooner or later... probably sooner.

There are some ways that you can continue to stay stimulated in the EFL classroom and keep yourself motivated, and in turn, continue to motivate the students more than ever before.

Teachers and Students Are A Lot Alike

Just like our students, if we're not stimulated or motivated by our jobs, we will become bored and ineffective. This will create a chain reaction because if we're ineffective as teachers, our chances of having quality classes for the students drastically goes down. Our students can sense this, and they will not be motivated and turn off, or worse, distract others. 

We all know what an unravelled class looks like.

Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to keep yourself motivated while you're either honing your craft as an EFL teacher or looking for what you really want to do.

Lessons, Materials, Worksheets, Stories, Etc.

You Only Work 9 Months, You Should Only Pay 9 Months

Finding the Challenge

1. Find the Challenge - Focus on the people instead of the subject matter. This will always be dynamic and constantly changing because people are all different in their learning styles, classroom conduct, and how they receive information. Remember, you're not teaching English, you're teaching people... English. 

Creating goals for both yourself and your students can make your job more stimulating because you have inherent challenges to accomplish with each goal. Goals for yourself could be personal growth or professional goals,  and also creating goals for the students will give you something in common to work towards.

2. Avoid the Lesson Plan Crutch - Don't stick too strictly to a lesson plan. We need to be flexible and spontaneous in our classes, and lesson plans can kill this if we try to follow it too rigidly. As we become more experienced, we can start to use bullet points as our lesson plans and focus more on helping students directly in each class. Of course, this comes with experience. Go with questions that students ask.

3. Find the Challenge Within Yourself - As mentioned above, one of the goals you could add for yourself in your time in the classroom is a personal growth goal. Personal growth goals are fantastic because our classrooms are a hotbed for working on organization, creativity, and above all, PATIENCE. If you're working with teens or kids, this is a great character trait to practice working on.

Overall, if teaching your subject matter isn't stimulating, find something else that is stimulating, and work on that during your lessons to help you become a better teacher, parent, friend, partner, or simply a better person in general. There's always somewhere to go!

Do you have any other ideas?

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