Teaching Reflections

Last week Abdoulaye, one of my second year students, came up to me excitedly, “teacher,” he said, “I just read about the Writing Workshop strategy and I realized that is exactly what you have done throughout the entire year! We wrote drafts, discussed them in groups, edited them together, and then you displayed the work on the walls and published them in a book!” He was beaming, like he had uncovered a secret treasure.

Abdoulaye had just received the book students produced about teaching strategies they had researched and summarized in class. In this project, students worked in groups to research various types of strategies to teach speaking, reading, writing, and listening. This book was presented to students before the final exam so that students could read and study it as a sort of textbook. For the exam, I asked students to select their three favorite strategies and be ready to present them to me.

Most of the students ended up including “writing workshop” because we had used this strategy in our class so they knew it well. Yet I had never introduced it, I didn’t need to because they learned all of the steps by putting them into practice.

During the final exam, this same student explained the strategy perfectly, with enthusiasm and excitement that could never be duplicated through any kind of memorization or lecture. This students’ passion for this strategy came as a result of his personal experience as a learner. I should not have been surprised when most the students included this strategy in their answers to the final exam as well. They were all convinced that was effective because they had seen it work first-hand.

Although throughout the project I worried that students were having difficulty in grasping the idea of a “strategy” as introduced in class, I was also determined to make sure that the project was successful. The central goal of my class was to demonstrate to students (through modeling, group work, research, and student presentations) that an effective teacher always carries a toolbox. This toolbox has many ways of introducing ideas and methods to make their classes come alive for their students. I wanted my class to equip each student with the tools they would need to be able to engage their students in meaningful learning activities when they became teachers.

This idea is in direct contrast to the typical lesson in Mauritania, which far too often uses little imagination and variety. This lesson relies on the same strategies every day, practically oblivious to the needs of the students in front of them, and often do not include reflective teaching. If students fail in the exams, the fault is placed on the students, who are required to repeat the year.

In this typical classroom, the teacher writes a long text on the board (taking over 30 minutes during which the students sat in the seats- and also create many distractions for themselves) and then reads it and instructs students to spend the next 30 minutes writing it into their notebooks. Then the class is over. With only two hours of English per week during secondary school, and courses that do not require students to actually speak a single word of English, it is easy to see how students arrive at the University without even being able to introduce themselves in English. Or finish University without even being able to write a grammatically correct complete sentence.

At the end of the project. I presented this "standard" lesson to the students. I tried to instill in my students the understanding that this is just one out of hundreds of strategies that teachers can use. It may be effective to use it sometimes, but is not effective to use every day. In only a few minutes, the students were able to brainstorm over twenty strategies that they could use to diversify the ways that material is presented. These ways often included games and group or pair work. Furthermore, these ideas tried to put language in context and promote the use of the language itself by students, through role-plays and other participatory activities, where students created knowledge and not simply "received" it. 

Of course, I will have no idea if the students in my class actually internalized any of the information I presented. That is the disappointment in teaching, where we are often just planting “seeds” that may or may not take root. Yet moments like this, when Abdoulaye revealed his clear understanding of class objectives, are good indicators that my hard work will one day bear fruit.

Last week Abdoulaye called me and told me that he was preparing a present for me. I replied that he had already given me the greatest gift: Reason to believe that my students represent the future of teaching in Mauritania.