In a previous post, I wrote about how I don’t feel like a teacher. I say “don’t” because that feeling is not past tense. I still feel that way. I went through the whole school year feeling that way. My fear is that I will go through to next teaching year feeling that way.
I love teaching, and I love kids, and I love learning, and I love English. I am scared I will go through things this way not because I’m concerned about what admin think, or what other teachers think. I am scared I will go through things this way because I’m concerned about how well I’m doing my job to shape young minds. Green Hills challenged me in ways I could not expect, and some I could. For instance, I knew that technology was limited, and my methods of formative assessment, showing what you know, and collaborate learning changed to suit the materials I had at hand. Fine. What I didn’t expect was the general mindset in the school, and it hit me like a tonne of bricks, right in the face. At Green Hills, and seemingly in most Rwandan public schools, and maybe in most of East Africa, learning happens because children work hard. That is to say, if there is not grade evidence of students' learning, the only solution is to work harder. There was no consideration of ability. There was no consideration of student interest. There was no consideration of what a student needs to learn. There was no consideration of the humanity in the students. Good grades (literally the only concern of students), and therefore intelligence, are a result of hard work. Old school. What I also didn’t expect was that teaching methods were old school chalk-and-talk sessions. For some teachers that I observed, lessons were literally just a session of trolling youtube aimlessly. For most students, that was the epitome of a good lesson. I’ve spent a lot of this year writing about myself and thinking about myself. But here’s the thing about the students, too, which should come as no surprise: because the teachers had limited their view to “bad test result = bad at *insert subject*,” students accepted that. Because parents had been raised with “bad test result = bad at *insert subject*,” students accepted that. Because students had been passive learners their entire lives, they didn’t know how to be thinkers. In other words, there was a fixed mindset mentality. The other thing that was up against my students was that there was no grit or perseverance. There was no optimism. There was an expectation within them that “I did a thing (no matter the quality), therefore I deserve an A.” But the quality, and most importantly the level of understanding, was just not there. In many ways, I think it was a coping mechanism to combat the years of their lives being exposed to the same crude, misplaced message. Basically, I walked into a school which had been the opposite of all my training. I’ve been really sensitive to that. I am a big believer in growth mindset (though I am still working on it with myself, conditioned as I was to the same above message). I have no idea how to intentionally teach it. But I recently took in a survey of my students, and an overwhelming response was this: Teacher Meagan’s class was hard, and I had to work hard, but I learned something. Teacher Meagan encouraged me, and let me try again, and let me ask questions. This is a summary of about 100 students. But it sends a pretty powerful message, and shows me that despite my whole year thinking I was a crap teacher that didn’t care about the important things, something pretty important happened for these kids. They developed grit. They developed the beginnings of a growth mindset. They saw challenges as frustrating, but more importantly as learning opportunities. They saw my feedback as actual advice (I’m not sure what feedback from other teachers looked like). I still don't feel like a teacher, but I did something right. I am also a big believer in cooperative learning and different strengths. My kids were not. However, after months of carefully building the kids up with very structured activities, in January when we came back from Christmas, I dumped all of us wholeheartedly into cooperative learning. There was a huge amount of resistance. The comment I consistently received for the first three months (and occasionally afterwards if a student was tired/overwhelmed that day) was “I can’t do this; why can’t you just stand at the front?” I think the resistance was two-fold: 1) I was asking them to be vulnerable, and to do learning in a whole other way – suddenly, they were viewed in the eyes of their peers, and not just me at the front. It was a lot of risk. 2) It was easier for them to be passive learners (I got comments to this effect a lot. My response each time it came up was to ask what they learned in other classes. Only a few could recall). Without delving into the mountainous number of constraints and general lifelessness of the Cambridge English Literature course, I can say that we did story analysis. We did it till we were sick of it, and we did it some more. But we did it together. We wrote analysis together. We came up with questions and shared them with the class and sorted them out together (this happened less as crunch time came). I made an effort to talk less, and ask “what do you think about…?” more. At the end of first term, my students’ comments were largely focussed on “I can’t do analysis, I don’t understand these concepts.” At the end of this year, my students’ survey comments reflected the value of cooperative learning: I like checking my answers with others. I like that my knowledge is valuable, but others’ is also there. I like that we can discuss. I like that we have different jobs on different days. I can analyse. There were some, who, right to the end, didn’t really contribute. I think it had a lot to do with “I can’t do this, reason #1.” The issue I was most concerned about, but least prepared to approach, was being a good, healthy human. I didn’t want to culturally overstep my bounds. But in a culture that is seemingly always driven on to the next step, I wanted to show there was room for gratitude and joy and laughter, in balance with all the other demands they felt they had on their shoulders. So I made corny jokes. And I said thank you. And I praised those who tried hard, or who took initiative. And I laughed, so much. I told them if I was feeling unwell (there was a period of about 4 days where I was teaching through a delirious fever. There was another period of about two weeks where my thyroid seemed to have swollen and breathing was nearly impossible). I started a lot of our lessons with, “I haven’t tried this before, and I might have made a mistake …”. I tried to show that there is room for emotional vulnerability. I got very few comments on this, unfortunately, but the few who did comment were grateful for laughter, and for “finding happiness in the smallest little things.” I had gone through the whole year thinking most of my lessons were crap. I had gone through the whole year thinking I was crap, because my important things were not focussed on. I have a hard time looking at my teaching and accepting things that went well, mostly because I’m scared that I’m just trying to falsely justify things I’m in denial about. This post, and reflecting on my feedback, has helped me realize that important things happened, but that in the future, I need to be intentional about it. But I still don’t feel like a teacher. What will hit my PGP for the coming year? 1. Character Building (Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck, you're on my summer reading list! Again!) 2. Outcomes-Based Assessment (wanted to do it here, but the courses really only have a very small handful of outcomes) 3. (TBA) To end, a few nuggets from the survey comments: - “Good luck, you're 99% perfect” - “I think you are great and you need to be rude to students who are rude to you.” - “You're too good at teaching. Someone would think you're lying if you told them this was your first time teaching” - “I liked the class even if I hate writing but it is okay and so cool.”
1 Comment
Susan Knapp
6/4/2016 06:03:51 pm
Hey Meagan.
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Meagan Fullerton-LeeMeagan is an aspiring teacher, voracious reader, tentative motorcyclist, and passionate gardener. In all things she sees education. Here she shares her passions. Archives
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