Teach English in Zhengzhuang Zhen - Jincheng Shi

During my teaching internship last summer, I helped teach two sections of a course called “Leadership and Society.” Each section consisted of twelve high school students from around the world, and we discussed various readings that detailed different kinds of leadership theories. All of us sat around an oval table, allowing us to see each other and thus dissect the readings together. The authors of these pieces discussed, among other topics, the possibility for immoral leadership and the difference between “leadership” and “management.” My mentor teacher, who teaches leadership at the collegiate level and has taught at the summer program for many years, assigned me two sections of the same class for one simple reason. According to her, the class dynamics often differ between sections of any class, and she wanted me to have the opportunity to practice catering my teaching to the needs and desires of each section. My mentor teacher’s version of a successful teacher was someone who could successfully use the same course materials and engage two sections of the same course. Indeed, she had a point. One day last July, I sat in my first section and felt that the class period had gone smoothly. The students engaged with the open ended questions that I asked, and they took ownership of the conversation that took place in the classroom. Keeping the questions that seemed to work with this first group in mind, I began my second class. When the conversations came to a lull, I tried to stimulate dialogue by bringing up the same questions that galvanized the first group. Yet, those questions fell flat, and I simultaneously scrambled to find a new direction for the conversation and wondered why the questions did not catch on with the second group of students. This experience taught me three lessons with regards to teacher self-analysis. The first comes down to the engaging with the students’ interests in each section. When I told a colleague of mine about the experience, he asked two simple questions: “Why did you feel the need to lead the students? Why not have the students lead you?” After hearing him ask these questions, I reflected back on my experience. Rather than pausing the discussion and asking students to bring up questions or passages that interested them, I tried to lead the students rather than the other way around. I saw the first class go smoothly, and perhaps I thought that the second class ought to proceed in a similar manner. What I did not consider then, however, is how the students’ interests and classroom dynamic differ between the sections. Knowing that I will have more than one section of students as a teacher, I have valued learning this lesson at an early stage. The second lesson comes as an extension of the first. I have learned that teacher self-analysis cannot be a single endeavor. Had my colleague, a more experienced instructor, not asked me those short yet pertinent questions regarding the my experience with the two sections, I would not have asked the same introspective questions about my performance. This, in turn, means that I need to seek out the colleagues that will help me bounce ideas off of, and I hope that I can do so for this upcoming year. If I successfully find these people, I will likely develop better self-analysis skills to improve my teaching. The third and final lesson comes from note-taking. During my teaching last summer, I did not take too many notes about the discussions that we had. In retrospect, this was a mistake. I should have taken notes in order to better consider the interests that each group had and to think about the ways in which the previous day’s discussion can have meaningful connections to future classes. As described above, trying the exact same teaching methods for two sections can prove futile due to the classroom dynamics. Thus, when taking notes for my future career in teaching, I hope to separate the two sections so that I can track the trajectory of the various discussions that we had within the same section over time. This does not mean, however, that the groups dynamics of the sections will never overlap. They can and do converge, but I believe that I can better conduct self-analyses of my teaching if I consider the groups dynamic of the sections separately. This practice will, I hope, prevent me from defining “successful” teaching by a vibrant discussion in one section (as I did during the summer session). This will, in turn, push me to conduct a form of self-analysis by considering whether I engaged well with the interests of the students in each section.