How I Became a Teacher — Building Your Teaching Identity

B2–C1 · Professional

How I Became a Teacher — Building Your Teaching Identity

📖 From my experience:
I did not go to university to teach. I came to teaching through hospitality, immigration, 120 hours of supervised practice, a fight I am still fighting, and a daughter who changed what ‘the future’ means. Teaching identity is not a certificate. It is built from every lesson you taught badly, then better, then well enough to try again tomorrow. If you are reading this as a teacher — you already started building it.

🎯 Language focus:
Teaching identity is how a teacher understands themselves in their professional role. Research (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009; Varghese et al., 2005) shows it is:

– Not fixed: it develops through reflection, feedback, and experience
– Not one thing: shaped by biography, context, learners, and institutions
– Practitioner-led: what you believe about learning drives every decision you make

Questions that reveal your teaching identity:
Why do I correct errors the way I do? Why do I like this activity? What do I believe about learning?

✅ Identity-building practices:
1. Reflective journal: after every lesson, write one thing that worked and one you’d change
2. Peer observation: watch someone else teach with a focus question (not just general impressions)
3. CPD: one article, one podcast, one webinar per month — not to collect content, but to interrogate it

Reflective practice

1. What is a reflective journal for? To notice patterns in your teaching — what you repeat, avoid, improve. Evidence-based self-development.

2. What’s the difference between experience and reflective experience? Experience alone repeats the same year 20 times. Reflective experience improves — it asks ‘why did that work?’

3. What does your teaching identity say if you always explain before eliciting? It may reveal a belief that the teacher’s role is to transmit knowledge — a more transmission-based view than a communicative one.

🧒 For younger learners: Ask children: ‘What do YOU think makes a good teacher?’ Their answers are always the truest test of any teaching identity.

👩‍🏫 Cambridge CELTA note: Teacher identity and professional development is CELTA topic area 5. Cambridge CELTA course completed — 120 supervised teaching-practice hours, 4 written assignments passed at the required standard. CPD is ongoing — the qualification is a beginning, not an end.

Independent project; not affiliated with, endorsed by, or accredited by Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Confers no qualification.

How I Became a Teacher — Building Your Teaching Identity