A Tale of Two Systems, Part III: Teacher As Student

This post was originally published on EdNews
Colorado. To follow the whole series, read part one and part two.

Sometimes I
think there is no better way for teachers to improve their craft than to
be thrown into a challenging learning experience of their own.

As teachers,
we often forget that our students are experiencing for the first time what we
have seen up to 50 times. By becoming learners ourselves, we remember that
empathy is a powerful thing. After all, though each person has unique
struggles, we all struggle in some way.

When I lived
in Germany this summer, I experienced authentic struggles of my own. As the
female chaperone, I was very excited about the chance to learn about the German
people and culture. The one catch? I speak very little German.

As an English
teacher, I am naturally fascinated by the art of language. Beyond this, I am
also a person who very much cares about being polite, especially with
strangers. These two character traits collided at times. With my limited
German, I found myself talking like a toddler, speaking mostly in nouns and
with terrible pronunciation.

Hope comes in
peculiar places. While waiting for a train in Salzburg, I picked up a copy of
Bill Bryson’s book Mother Tongue. In this book, he traces the history of
the English language and analyzes the ways that we as humans acquire language
regardless of which one we are learning.

The good news
for me is that my process isn’t off track. I have a much greater understanding
of the German that I hear, especially if I understand the context of the
conversation. I am beginning to recognize patterns of grammar and inflection
and have managed the first phrases common to most language learners: please,
thank you and no.

Stumbling
across Bryson’s primer helped me to be metacognitive about my learning process.
While I feel pleased with my progress, I am also exhausted. It is difficult to
listen so attentively to only understand two to three words per stream of
thought, which makes me wonder how often my students, English language learners
or otherwise, are in this same state as learners.

I think the
key difference, and the takeaway for my classroom practice this fall, is that I
am aware of myself as a learner. I know where to find information and when I
need more information. Now it is my job to provide opportunities and skills for
my students to do the same.

One of my
German colleagues reminded me that our job as educators is to create problems
for our students to solve. I can think of no greater problem for students to
solve than determining how they learn and seeking opportunities for themselves
to test their methods and apply their skills.

Unfortunately,
I can’t always immerse my students in a foreign environment and ask them to
figure out how to cope with the unfamiliar. I can, however, be mindful of the
authenticity of the tasks and assessments that I put before them so that they
feel the struggle that often comes from learning with intention.

I want to
learn German so that I can communicate with new friends and colleagues. When I
meet my new students this week, I hope that we can find similarly rich and
purposeful problems to tackle as we explore our identities as learners in and
outside the classroom.