theronmuller.com

I've been teaching English for more than 10 years, most of the time based in Nagano, Japan. I'm currently co-owner of Noah Learning Center, where I teach on Saturdays. If you're interested in my school, please visit our website.

I'm also a part-time teacher at Nagano Seisen Women's Junior College, the Nagano National College of Technology (Kosen), and the Nagano branch of Tsukuba Kaisei High School.

If you're interested in my thoughts on teaching, I've recently put together a document on that topic and am happy to share its contents below.

The basis for my teaching philosophy is my own experience of learning, which is enjoying learning for the sake of knowing. When I enter my classrooms as a teacher, my goal is to share with my students the same sense of joy and wonder at learning I remember from my school days, and which I still experience. How this influences my teaching philosophy changes depending on the context in which I find myself. Two of those contexts are particularly relevant here; my teaching of Japanese university and high school classes and my teacher training activities, including my tutoring for the University of Birmingham and my online course, MASH Academic Publishing. I will deal with each of these in turn then explain some of the commonalities between the two, articulating a coherent picture of my teacher self.

Particularly in the Japanese EFL setting, my philosophy of teaching and learning as a pursuit of knowledge and excellence for its own sake has presented challenges. Students often feel the subject is distant from them and express how learning English is important in an abstract way, while other subjects are much more immediate and pressing. Additionally, my teaching responsibilities often include English Communication and English Conversation. While I understand the importance of developing communicative competence in students, it is difficult to work subject matter I believe important into these lessons.

As an example, I believe in the importance of acclimating students to communicating in English as early as possible in a course. In my first year English Communication classes at Seisen Junior College in the 2009 academic year, I accomplished this by having students prepare for and work up to giving short, self-introductory presentations over the course of the first three weeks of the semester. However, this put me behind in the course syllabus shared between four different teachers. Therefore, this year I discontinued the introductory presentations, and while I’m on track according to the course syllabus, I’m disappointed in the lack of camaraderie in my classes. I feel this is partially due to not spending the first classes of the semester preparing students to communicate in English.

Another example of striking a balance between content I’m required to teach and activities I feel benefit my students comes from my first year high school English conversation classes at Kosen. In class, I devote some time to free writing as part of an ongoing research investigation into EFL fluency, and the remaining time covering the textbook. Similarly, with the fifth year Kosen students in my English Communication Skill course, I’ve implemented a Moodle through which they can share videos and comments, illustrating to them the communicative potential of English in a real-world way. Three months into the course the discussion forum had more than 200 comments and 20 videos posted to it.

In the online course I teach, MASH Academic Publishing, students are already teaching professionals, and so the challenges of connecting with them are quite different. Since we meet via Skype and not face-to face, the skills necessary here involve ensuring all students have a voice during our one hour weekly lessons and that they feel they have a stake in the contents and progression of the course. I encourage their active participation in the course by setting up a Moodle and through careful management of access to the speaking floor during our online sessions. Another challenge has been ensuring more experienced participants are engaged while not leaving behind those who are less experienced. This has meant renegotiating some assignments with students so they could complete the task while still pushing the limits of their abilities. In my tutoring, engaging students involves sharing with them the modes and conventions of academic writing at the MA level and encouraging them to go on to successful careers in academic publishing. I’m proud to say that two of my former tutees are pursuing PhDs and others have gone on to secure academic positions at universities.

I believe the common themes that express my identity as a teacher include a drive for excellence and an interest in compassionately connecting to students and their needs and abilities. The drive for excellence is evident in my pursuit of fluency-based free writing activities with first year Kosen students, with the online, Moodle-based interaction my fifth year Kosen students are engaging in as I write this, and with my encouragement of MASH Academic Publishing students to push the limits of their capabilities in their academic writing.

The compassionate side of my teaching is displayed by listening to my students’ perspectives regarding English study, and understanding that they may need concrete examples to recognize the importance of English. Another example of the compassionate side of my teaching is my working to adjust my research inquiries to better fit student needs and abilities. As a case in point, my original free writing research plans called for not giving students topics about which to write, but after a student shared the difficulty of writing without a topic, I’ve since incorporated optional writing themes into the research. Another example was my changing the assignments on the MASH Academic Publishing course so that less experienced student participants felt the tasks were still accessible to them.