5 ways to combat anxiety about your TEFL lessons

We all experience anxiety to some degree.  A little anxiety is normal and actually helps you sharpen and focus your mind on a project or task, but once anxiety starts keeping you awake and dominating your thoughts it’s time to combat it.  Here are five ways to conquer anxiety:

1. Plan your lesson in advance

A major trigger of anxiety is a lack of confidence in your ability to complete a task.  You can boost your confidence levels by preparing your lesson at school the day before.  This will help you because:

• You won’t prolong that sense of uncertainty in whether you’ll be able to find activities to achieve those lessons’ objectives – prepare as soon as you have time;
• You’ll have all the school’s materials you need at hand making it easy for you to prepare;
• You can consult your fellow teachers – they may have tried-and tested activities for your lesson objective which they’ll be happy to share with you. Remember to return the favour;
• You can leave the school that day happy in the knowledge that your next day’s lesson plan and materials are there ready and waiting for you.  Go and relax, enjoy a coffee, catch up with friends or enjoy a nice meal;
• When you leave the lesson preparation for the morning of the day you are teaching it, then that seems to be the time when your alarm doesn’t go off, the bus is late, the photocopier isn’t working, etc.  These events probably won’t happen, but your mind won’t let you forget about all the things that could possibly go wrong and so prevent you from having time to prepare – avoid these worries by getting everything ready the day before.

Note:  Lesson materials prepared and ready to go could also gain you bonus points with your school – if you are unable to get to work due to illness or for whatever reason, you can phone the school, explain the problem, but assure them everything is ready for the covering teacher – the school will note that you are an organised and professional instructor.

2. Have a back-up activity

All teachers experience classes which fly through activities – have a back-up activity just in case.  You can use some of the activities in teflhub’s free teacher’s resources or, if you have internet access, you could bring up the self-marking online homework pages as a review of the lesson objective.

3. Keep it simple

A lot of the best activities are the simplest activities.  The students can grasp the objective of the activity easily and so you don’t have to worry about modelling the activity again and again.

4. Be realistic

Everyone agrees that English is a linguistic challenge.  You can’t be expected to remember every grammar rule, especially those dastardly exceptions!  Prepare for the lesson’s grammar. If a student asks a question which is off the target language, then just explain that you’ll prepare a detailed explanation for the next lesson, but for now you want to stay focused on the lesson objective.

5. Get a hobby

You’ve prepared for the following day’s lessons so stop thinking about them.  Immerse yourself in a hobby.  Read that book, watch that film, go to the gym - anything to let your mind wind-down.