My school background and interests inspired my lesson plans this month – a unit centered on how we learn foreign languages. My educational psychology studies and the liberal arts philosophy of my university have significantly influenced how I teach. Educational psychology, in a nutshell, is the study of how people learn, and, therefore, how teachers should teach. My liberal arts education upbringing taught me that it’s important to individualize learning and that teachers should empower students to become life-long learners (one of my favorite essays on the benefits of a liberal arts education says that it “frees you from fear”).
For me, teaching and learning are two of life’s greatest joys. I’m arguably equally happy sitting in a desk learning as I am teaching at the blackboard. Throughout this year, I’ve experienced dozens of amazing teaching moments where I’ve felt a wonderfully overwhelming feeling of connection with my students.
Here’s one of my favorite teaching quotations:
"Students learn what they care about," Ericksen said. Goethe knew that: "In all things we learn only from those we love." Add Emerson's declaration: "the secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," and we have this formula: "Students learn what they care about, from people they care about and who, they know, care about them." Barbara Carson
In my opinion, mutual respect between students and teachers is the key to a successful learning environment. It’s very important to me to show my students that I respect them and the knowledge and experiences they have. I never forget that, especially here in Poland, I am frequently the pupil too in a new school system and culture with lots to learn. My students are always fantastic teachers, eagerly explaining peculiar (to me) school traditions or translating posters and bulletin boards for me.
I created this “language learning” unit to help students better understand how we learn foreign languages and to also give them the opportunity to “officially” or “formally” teach a lesson of their own creation. All, of course, in a unit that maximized the time they also spent speaking in English in my classroom.
The goals/objectives of my “how we learn foreign languages” unit included:
- To discuss and analyze different language learning theories
- To help students recognize that individuals differ in their learning styles and ask them to identify their language learning style(s)
- To ask students to think critically about how we learn – and therefore how we should teach – languages and apply different methods in mini-lessons
- To give students an authentic teaching experience where they taught a 10-minute foreign language lesson
Here’s how I tried to accomplish these goals:
WEEK 1: I created handouts for the students outlining half a dozen language learning theories and other theories about how people differ in how they learn best (example: multiple intelligences). We discussed the theories and then I asked students to identify the theory or theories that best describe how they learn English. We had great conversations because students were excited to discuss with their classmates how they differed in their language learning styles.
WEEK 2: The following week, students worked in pairs and had to create three mini-lessons where they taught their classmates only one new English word. In their three mini-lessons, they had to incorporate their knowledge of language learning theories from our Week 1 discussion and create three different ways to teach one new word. (They did a fantastic job and I’m planning to copy a couple of their brilliant lesson plans in the future. They were extremely creative and thoughtful.)
WEEK 3: To conclude the unit, I wanted to give my students an authentic language teaching experience and therefore...every pair of students had to create a 10-minute lesson where they taught me 10 Polish words! I know, you’re thinking “What?!? Polish?!? Isn’t it English conversation?”
One of the challenges I’ve enjoyed this year is creating lessons that get students interested because then they forget that I’m [forcing] them to speak English. It’s way better to design engaging lessons than having to repeatedly say, “Now, I expect to hear you speaking in English.”
The students’ lessons were, despite the fact that they taught me 10 Polish words, conducted in English 90% of the time. They had to justify their lesson plan in English, describe all directions for games and tests in English, give me feedback on my pronunciation and spelling in English, and answer my questions in English if I was confused. They spoke longer than they had in any previous speaking task I’ve assigned them this year, and no one complained!
To me, the project was a win-win situation. It was an authentic learning situation. I don’t know Polish; they do. Sometimes I can’t imagine forcing my students to act out another “authentic” dialogue where one person “pretends” to be, for example, the waiter at a restaurant, and the other person is ordering food. Let’s face it. It’s not 100% authentic unless you’re sitting in a restaurant where the waiter only speaks English and you have to order. Of course, language learning is about preparing for authentic language interactions (like ordering at a restaurant in a foreign country), but no matter how good the lesson, it’s not exactly like the authentic experience. I know that when I learn a new Polish word out of necessity (i.e., I need to buy something at a store but it’s kept behind a counter and I’ll have to ask for it), I retain the knowledge because I need to. My students don’t [currently] need English to survive (well, except to “survive” a conversation or class with me) like I need Polish, and it’s a fact I’m very conscious of when I try to create lessons that have a clear purpose and are engaging for them. For this project, having the students “teach” me English words wasn’t authentic, but switch to Polish, and bam, it’s an authentic teaching experience.
When I announced this project, the students were extremely excited. They talked about the project outside of class because numerous teachers said, “Oh, I heard that you’re...” and by the end of the week students arrived to my class and were bouncing with excitement in their seats for class to begin because they had heard from their peers about the project.
They had 45 minutes in class to prepare their 10-minute lesson and to...
1. Select a theme and select ten words to teach.
2. Decide how they would introduce the words to me.
3. Decide how they would help me practice the words.
4. Decide how they would test to determine if I remembered the words.
5. Decide how to assign me a grade for my work/performance.
6. Justify all the steps of their lesson plan with “evidence” from the language theories we discussed Week 1.
Typically if I give students a “work session day,” I walk around the classroom, answer questions, and encourage students who are less motivated, but my students were very secretive when planning their lessons and frequently hurried to hide their work if I walked too close to them. They kept saying, “It’s a surprise!” I finally sat down at my desk and watched my students in a flurry of picture-drawing, flashcard-making, game-designing, and lesson-rehearsing. Two groups did let me photograph them working.
WEEK 4: The fourth week they taught me their lessons. Hands down, it was my favorite week of the unit. Their lessons were magnificently designed, revealing their unique personalities, their creativity, kindness, humor, and excitement to teach. We had a blast and a lot of laughs.
Here are the highlights of their “Teach Miss Sarah Polish” lessons:
1. I loved gaining new insights into how my students learn languages because their lessons reflected their individual learning styles. Interestingly, almost all of my students included visuals in their lessons. It’s sometimes a little difficult for me to include visuals in my lessons because I don’t have a computer/projector in the classroom, nor do I have access to a color printer or a lot of magazines or books with photographs. But after hearing my students say that visuals help them remember new English words, I’m going to (somehow!) try to incorporate a lot of images into my future lessons.
2. Seeing how kind, patient, and encouraging my students were as teachers. I was their vulnerable pupil, and they cared for me. They patiently repeated a difficult word half a dozen times, gave me a second chance at an exercise, or provided suggestions about how I could remember the word. They never mocked me (and trust me, my Polish skills are frequently mock-worthy). They “caught me” and “help me up” when I fell. They encouraged me and praised me. I trusted them with my “sensitive soul,” and they didn’t disappoint me. I also loved watching students who are sometimes shy or quiet in class thrive because they were less self-conscious and felt more confident because they were teaching Polish (again, despite the fact that they were, nevertheless, speaking in English 90% of the time). My butchering of Polish words also provided a lot of comic relief and helped everyone relax.
3. We were very playful. Laughter, excitement, and enthusiasm are infectious, and they filled the room when the students taught. My students never mocked me, but we laughed and laughed and laughed during their language lessons. It’s important for students to feel safe in the classroom because then they risk mistakes. We had a lot of shared laughter during the lessons that showed that mistakes are a natural – and necessary – part of the learning process. Laughing because someone drew a picture on the board that no one could identify (see the photograph of the two boys below – sadly, you can’t see the unidentifiable fish that they had drawn on the board – I also had no right to laugh because my drawing skills are non-existent), because my pronunciation was hilariously bad, or because of other silly mistakes. For example, one group had me play a game of memory where the Polish words and their English equivalents were written on cards and turned upside down. You flip over two words at a time and try to match the Polish with the English. I had a lot of issues. Not because I couldn’t remember the words, but because I forgot (ironically, in a game called “Memory”) that you don’t continually flip over two random cards, you try to REMEMBER where a correct pair is located. Whoops. In one class, an observing student asked one of the current “teachers” for permission to go to the bathroom, and I almost died laughing.
4. The students were incredibly engaged, even when they weren’t teaching but watching their classmates teach me. They were very, very eager to teach me and help me learn the words...frequently (and hilariously) even if they weren’t technically one of the two partners currently presenting/teaching.
5. My students’ lessons were fantastic. They were unbelievably creative in the themes they selected, ranging from vegetables to insects to Russia to pirates to Harry Potter. I’m also proud to report that I earned “As” (or 6s here in Poland) in almost all of my lessons. (I enjoyed “bargaining” with my teachers for partial credit if I only missed one teeny-tiny letter in a twelve letter word, and students were also very forgiving and sometimes “turned a blind eye” if I said the wrong word but realized my mistake and quickly corrected myself.) That’s not to say I didn’t have difficulties. Here are my favorite challenging words:
- “Wrzesień” or “September” If anyone asks, I’ve decided to create a new “Polish birthday” for myself to avoid ever needing to tell someone that I’m born in the month of September. I think I’ll adopt a “Maj” or “May” birthday. Just looking at the word (especially the “wrz”) terrifies me.
- “dżdżownica” or “earthworm” Ironically, it’s quite easy to pronounce (juh-jove-knee-sa), but I’m always baffled by four consonants in a row, especially when two of them are the letter “z”.
- “z przyjemnością” or “with pleasure” For a phrase that expresses a feeling of, well, pleasure, I feel extremely pained when I try to say it. Word of my inability – despite a lot of practice I must admit – to pronounce this phrase has swept the school, and this week almost every class began with one [class elected and brave] student asking, “Miss Sarah, how do you say ‘with pleasure’ in Polish?” I always try, but I’m sad to say that my learning “curve” with this phrase currently resembles a plateau. Some day.
I could write 10-pages detailing all of my students’ lessons, but here are a couple photographs and a couple favorite teaching (or should I say “learning”) moments.
One group (they taught me “computer game words”) gave me an oral test and when I got the right answer to a question, they held up a sign that read “That’s wonderful! You have an amazing talent for learning languages.” It put a smile on my face.
The two photographs below show the lesson materials from students who taught me farm words. They were incredibly thorough in their teaching and included the phonetic spelling of every Polish word to help me with my pronunciation. They also brought dirt (“gleba”) and hay (“siano”) for me to touch when learning the words. We then sang a song they wrote to the tune of “Old McDonald” with their 10 Polish words.
Lots of students drew pictures on the blackboard. Here’s the group that taught me one of my challenge words, “dżdżownica,” or “earthworm.”
6. At the end of every class, I said goodbye to them in Polish (“do widzenia!”), and they laughed. This week, I’m grateful that I could show my students that “I am the teacher, but see? I have something to learn too. And you can teach me.” And they replied to my request with an enthusiastic, “Yes!” Thanks for the lessons. A+, kids. A+.
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