Someone told me once if I wanted to avoid tribulations and uncertainty in your position, you need to become an irreplaceable professional. Well, “nothing is irreplaceable,” you might think. I feel the idea of irreplaceability can be interpreted differently based on the work circumstances and the school culture in general. In my new school district where I started working as an ESL push-in teacher,  I’ve been struggling with understanding my purpose in the classroom, figuring out ways to collaborate with content area teachers, providing quality support for my English language learners within time and space restrictions. My district has become infamous for moving the teachers around to different schools, and…

1) The importance of the lesson flow routines Everyone knows about that, don’t they? Routines and procedures are the backbones of any lesson, and they determine the success of it to a great extent. You might ask, “what routines are you talking about if you are in an ESL push-in model?” The reality is you don’t control the flow of the lesson, which is controlled by the content area teacher. On some occasions when you do pull out your English language learners (see one of my posts here), there IS a place for lesson routines and procedures. However, when you push-in your language learners in math, science, social studies, or…

The last couple of months as I continue my work as an ESL push-in teacher, I have grown, have started and given up a bunch of projects and ideas, have discovered things I ought to have or do to be efficient and avoid being desperate about having no classroom of my own and being a nomad in my own school. With lack comes innovation and a better understanding of essentials I need in my profession, the tools that make my work productive, with no time wasted. What I also have learned is that evaluating administrators of ESL push-in teachers do not become more lenient or permissive of mistakes just because…

After my first year of being a teacher in a high school, I’ve decided to make a transformation in my thinking and my behavior which I hoped would help me undo my perception of the teaching profession as unsustainable. The necessity of this transformation came from my inability to understand why things that I love to do would take a toll on my life and health. I already wrote about being depressed and anxious during my first month of teaching, and while a lot of anxiety and depression have left, I am still learning to balance the work and my “after-work-life” by creating strict boundaries, developing procedures, and creating tools…

If you are an ESL teacher who pushes in students in other content area classes, you might sometimes ask yourself a question whether you create dependability of students on you. This is a tricky question because I personally believe there is nothing wrong if L1 and L2 students perceive me as the source of the language, feedback, and correct information. L3s and L4s might stick to me sometimes just because they feel with me they do things easily while I do provide a lot of support in a language. With higher levels, however, I tend to be a much feistier “mom” than with my beginner learners. And yet, I think…

Teachers grow. They do. And I am not talking about professional development and conferences and workshops. Teachers grow into or out of their profession. When teachers grow into their profession, they find their sweet spot in it. They develop the level of comfort, efficiency, and happiness that make them feel they are in the right place. It might take a year or 5, but usually, 5 years is said to be the period when a young or enter-level teacher decides on staying in or leaving the profession. Some teachers grow out of their profession, literally. There are those professionals who, after trying to adjust and find whether they belong, come…