Teaching between Two Worlds
Chinese people have long held enormous respect for teachers: the great philosopher Confucius himself was a distinguished teacher who believed that “education should be for all, irrespective of their social status” (Confucius & Lau, 1979). Pursuing a career of teaching also has special significance for me. Growing up in an intellectual family with both parents as teachers, I believe that being a teacher is my calling. However, teaching in two languages – English and Chinese – also poses a great challenge for me. Sometimes I feel that instead of teaching two subjects, I am teaching between two cultures or even two worlds.
After student teaching two Language Arts classes and two Chinese classes each day for 11 weeks at Tyee Middle School, I have come to some understandings about the role of the teacher, the teaching method, and the relationship between the teacher and the students as perceived in two different classrooms. They have significant differences; however, a lot of common understandings can be reached if the teacher can maneuver between the two cultures. Here I sum these understandings up as my philosophy of teaching piece.
An ancient Chinese writer once stated, “It takes a teacher to transmit wisdom, impart knowledge and resolve doubts” (Han & Tong, 1980). When I was teaching college English in China from 2000 to 2002, I believed this motto wholeheartedly. I thought I had the key to transforming my students’ lives – knowledge. But as soon as I started observing classes in the middle schools and high schools in the U.S., I started to question the traditional role of the teacher being the authority figure in the classroom, and I began to probe the new role of the teacher as an inspirer and a guide. This famous quote from Socrates replaced my previous motto – “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” If someone asked me now, “Which goal of teaching is more important, to impart knowledge to students or to spark students interest in learning?” I would choose the second goal without hesitation. During my student teaching, I was moved by the talented students who devoted themselves to learning and tried their best to get the perfect scores. But I was even more impressed by those students who might seemingly lack interest in learning. I decided they were the reason that I want to become a good teacher.
My students in the Chinese classroom were usually more motivated since it was an elective course, but there were still some students who wanted to give up. As a Chinese teacher, I am very competent in my subject knowledge, but how to ignite the students’ interest became a challenge. When the Chinese Lunar New Year came in February, I made a PowerPoint file about how Chinese people celebrate the New Year and the whole class held a New Year party featuring singing and celebration. I wanted the Asian students to see that this was a part of their cultural heritage and I wanted the non-Asian students to be intrigued by the Chinese culture. Thus when they completed the assessments related to the New Year, writing and translating some greetings in Chinese, their measure of intrinsic motivation “to know, to accomplish things, and to experience stimulus” was relatively high (Vallerand et. al, 1992).
My LA classes were a little different since there were some students who just exited the ESL program or who had an IEP. For these struggling learners, how to dissipate their fear of learning was a great challenge. I used several ways to boost their interest such as asking them to bring their stuffed animals to class (see Analysis of Teaching Practice and Student Learning, and Lesson Plan #2 in Curriculum Development), or moderating a heated debate in class about the relationship between parents and children. I wanted them to feel that what they learned was related to their lives, and as a teacher, I was showing them perspectives to think about the world, and help them to find what kind of persons they want to be in the future.
I also used cognitive constructivist theory to support my practical teaching. According to Goetz (1992), “for the cognitively orientated educator, concern with students’ learning translates into questions about what students know and do as they work on academic tasks, what they must know and do to be successful, and how we can engage them as active participants in the learning process” (p. 344). Direct instruction was once my dominant teaching method; however, as I got to know the students and their learning process better, I found that the one-way teaching never worked well, especially in world language classrooms. Thus I started trying to assess the students’ prior knowledge and existing skills before I taught the content. And during my teaching, I helped the students to engage in meaningful learning activities. For example, in my LA classroom, I designed a lesson plan of a Socratic Seminar on the autobiography They Cage the Animals at Night to engage my students in some meaningful dialogues (see Lesson Plan #1 in Curriculum Development). Before the seminar, students posed three levels of questions on the book. This served as a means to gauge their understanding of the book and their capability to ask questions related to the book and extend them to human nature. I also used another theory I learned in the “Dilemmas of Teaching and Learning” course to guide my teaching: cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, et. al, 1991). In an apprenticeship, learners can see the process of work and the process of the activity is visible. When I taught Chinese, the greatest challenge was to avoid learning by rote and present a range of diverse tasks to “encourage students to reflect on and articulate the elements that are common across tasks” (p. 9). Thus I combined Chinese calligraphy into the lesson of learning how to write Chinese characters. It was the Chinese New Year and Chinese people had the tradition to write auspicious words in couplets with ink brush onto red paper. I modeled the process of creating these couplets and the students got their hands dirty with ink. But in this process, they had an idea of the application of the knowledge and the skills and they reflected on the cultural meaning of writing Chinese characters. This task reminds me of Confucius again, who is reputed to have said, “Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand.”
After my 11 week full-time student teaching, I also began to reexamine my relationship with the students. I used to be so eager to befriend my students that I was not demanding enough. After observing my cooperating teachers, I started to understand what it means to be a “warm demander” as proposed by Kleinfeld (Ware, 2006). I began to form a caring relationship with my students while at the same time push them to do their best. The self-determination theory proposes that students need “autonomy, competence and relatedness” (la Guardia & Ryan, 2002). Thus I kept in mind that I should respect the students’ autonomy. My fourth period LA class had several students who were hyperactive and they gradually became disruptive to the whole class. I tried several ways to contain them: ignoring them, reporting to my cooperating teacher, and I even thought about calling their parents. Later I was reminded of la Guardia’s “autonomy, competence and relatedness.” I started to boost their interest and confidence in learning by assigning them tasks such as handing out the papers, helping other students when they were finished a task first, and becoming discussion leaders in the literature circles. At the same time, I tried to let them foster a good relationship with the whole class instead of focusing on themselves. Gradually their behaviors improved. I cannot say they became model students. But when I finished teaching my last class, they were the first to come up to have a picture taken with me. After this experience, I never label students as “bad students.” There are talented and less competent students. There are quieter and noisier students. But when you label a student as “bad,” it shows your incompetence as a teacher and it is doing an injustice to the students who have potentials.
To sum up, it takes all the patience, caring, and wisdom to be a good teacher. But being a teacher also means incessant self-improvement. As I teach on, I will accumulate more thoughts on the philosophy of teaching. Just as an ancient Chinese proverb says, “Those who care to teach will never cease to learn.”
REFERENCES:
Collins, A., Brown, J. S., Holum, A. (1991) Cognitive apprenticeship: making thinking visible. American Educator, vol. 15. Winter 1991.
Confucius, & Lau, D. C. (1979). The analects (Lun yü). Penguin classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Goetz, E., Alexander, P. & Ash, M. (1992). Educational psychology: a classroom perspective. New York: Merrill.
La Guardia, J. G. & Ryan, R. M. (2002). What adolescents need: A self-determination theory perspective on development within families, school and society. In F. Pajares & T. Urdan (Eds.), Academic motivation of adolescents. Greenwich CT: IAP.
Tong, D., & Han, Y. (1980). Han Yu wen xuan. Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban she.
Vallerand R. T. et al. (1992). “The Academic Motivation Scale: a Measure of Intrinsic, Extrinsic, and Amotivation in Education.” Educational and Psychological Measurement. vol.2. p. 52.
Ware, F. (2006) “Warm Demander Pedagogy.” Urban Education, Vol. 41, No. 4, 427-456 (2006)