Meet Kawther: TESOL (M.A.'22)

The families are the best part of being an ESL teacher. The families have sacrificed so much to come here. Whether it was family safety, economic status, whatever it was, they came here for a reason and they don't take it for granted. So when I get to meet with families during conferences, they are abundantly appreciative of my role, which makes my role as a teacher more powerful. They appreciate everything that I do. They thank me constantly, sometimes they have tears during those conferences.

First of all, ESL people should go into ESL because it's an underserved demographic of students in public education. We can't get teachers in general, and then we can't get teachers to teach language on top of that. So the biggest thing is being able to serve such a vulnerable demographic of students in our country, and that I think the pay off has a big reward. You come to know so many different cultures, so many different languages, so many different family dynamics that it opens you up to the world without having to leave the classroom.

And I think being an ESL teacher, is just the best. It really is. I tell my coworkers all the time, Forget what you're doing, be an ESL teacher. Try it. There's just greater payoff.

I would recommend the program because the faculty are so knowledgeable. They all know what they're doing, and the biggest thing that they drive for us is that family and community engagement. It's not just about content, it's not just about language standard. It's about creating a community and bringing communities together to the student and then helping that, helping them shape their perspective of American life.

One of the assignment experiences in the program that was so meaningful for me were the coaching experiences that I had through some of the teaching classes that I took. So I would write up a lesson plan and then teach the lesson plan and send it to my coach. And I would get real time feedback from my coach about that. It really shaped the way I look at self reflection as a teacher, because now I look at how I teach a lesson plan, like how would my coach have responded if they saw that?

I learned something called four rounds of academic vocabulary, and that was introduced to me through the workshops that professors had assigned us to do as part of the program. And there were like six of them that we had to do in that year. It is now a cornerstone of how I teach and was one of the best things that I learned from the program.