Examples of my leadership features

Some people believe that teaching is only a matter of delivering lessons and testing students. However, throughout my career as an English teacher, I have shown valuable skills that aided me to do my job and increase my influence over my students and community. In 2017, I heard that a friend of mine and some of his friends in the 4th year in the English Department had difficulty passing the “Modern Prose” module, and they needed to pass that module to graduate. At that time, Syrian students were suffering at all levels, especially economically, and most of them could not afford to take private lessons. Being a graduate from the English department myself, I started an initiative to help those students. I gathered a team of top graduates to help me. As a team leader, I demonstrated good communication skills with other team members, and after discussing with them, I set up a strategy to follow. I also empowered the less experienced partners who were shy to speak in English in front of other people. When the time came, 13 students joined our sessions, so I scheduled three meetings a week for one month. The session lasted for 2 hours. In the beginning, I started by initiating discussions about the two assigned literary works for that module; “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf. After that, in each session, I chose some passages from the literary works and asked them to comment on them. Then, each team member would evaluate two students highlighting the key ideas they had to mention. Then I brought some previous exam questions and focused their attention on how to answer them in the form of academic essays. Within two weeks, the students showed considerable progress, which made me and my team members delighted. Eventually, the initiative succeeded in achieving its aim as 11 students managed to pass that module and graduated from the English department. In September 2019, I started working at the French School in Erbil, Iraq, as a primary English teacher. The challenge of that context was that students were of different backgrounds and mixed-abilities. I tried my best to find a suitable solution. First, I did a Needs Analysis for the students to know their weaknesses, their preferred learning styles, and what they enjoy most in the class. With such kind of Needs Analysis, I managed to understand my students, their personalities, and how they like to learn. Second, I applied a variety of teaching methods such as pair-work, group-work, miming, and repetitions to reinforce their learning. Third, when I noticed that some of them were shy to speak English because they were afraid to make mistakes, I explained that errors are part of learning, and we need to make mistakes to learn. That resulted in supporting their self-confidence and increasing their motivation. Consequently, they passed their exams with good grades. Hence, diagnosing the problems and making the right decisions have helped me to succeed in this challenge. In 2016 I decided to employ my skills as an English teacher to serve my community, so I volunteered in Syria Trust for Development, a branch of Latakia. My duty was to give free English lessons for the displaced Syrian children, who were obliged to skip school for a long time due to the damage that has taken place in their cities. The complexity of that task was that students were of different ages and mixed-abilities. Such a situation would be problematic for any teacher, yet I tried my best to find a suitable solution. First, I divided the students into groups according to their level, not age in that sense, some of them were ten years old, but they were still in the 2nd grade. Second, I applied a variety of teaching methods and techniques such as miming, repetitions, and drawing to reinforce their learning. Moreover, I made use of videos and songs to engage students and motivate them. Although the beginning was difficult, after six months of hard work, the 2nd graders managed to pass the exam and moved to the 3rd grade. For the others, 80% of them succeeded by the end of the year and could move to the upper class. Hence, I believe that I supported those learners in establishing their basics in the English language, and to some extent bridging the gap between their age and their level of English. Eventually, many of them were able to continue their education at schools after they went back to their cities.