I am currently in Spain, doing my Erasmus for Young Entrepreneur programme at LST Academy in Murcia. I’ve been here since the end of November, and I’ve learnt a lot! I am teaching English and Italian at different levels. I am also helping with the administration and clerical duties.
My host, Alessia, has been wonderful in welcoming me and including me in the routine of the Academy. She gave me the responsibility for managing my own lessons, as well as my other duties while being a constant support when needed.
Each day I improve my teaching skills and I develop my relationship with the students, it will be hard to leave them at the end of my stay! I learnt how the different language exams are structured and I developed my own personal strategy to help students prepare for them.
I also got used to teaching classes with different numbers of students, from individual to small groups of seven or eight students which, of course, require different teaching strategies. Now, I am looking for more effective ways to teach listening and reading sub-skills, to overcome some difficulties that my students are facing with them. I plan to modify course-book exercises in order to work on specific skills, so that future teachers of the Academy will be able to use them when needed.
During my stay, I became accustomed to the routine of giving information to potential costumers, enrolling students, collecting payments, and all those everyday activities that seemed so hard at the beginning of my stay.
Having entered into the fourth month of my stay, I am also starting to reflect upon the marketing strategies, those that I’ve discussed with Alessia, and the ones I have seen employed so far, to see how these can be reflected on my business plan.
