Another required activity of my fellowship was a co-teaching experience. I was partnered with Jen Plete who teaches 9th grade Social Studies. In this grade, the content focus is Economics. Since the year was just starting, she asked me to focus on the basic economic terms of opportunity cost, trade-off, incentive, and marginal thinking. As usual I did a lot of overthinking about the lesson I was going to teach and how I was going to teach it. One thing I knew for sure is that I was not going to base my lesson on technology given our experience yesterday with the presentations. I went old school and used the same manila paper that the teachers at Boot use on a daily basis.
I was so nervous when I stepped in front of the class. What if it didn't go well? What if they didn't talk? What if I completely lost them because I was talking too fast? There were a lot of what ifs going through my mind. I started off by telling them that I was probably as nervous about teaching them as they were about speaking English with me; Social Studies is usual taught in Tagalog. I reassured them that if I started going too fast or losing them, they could just ask me to slow down and I told them that even my own students did that to me. Within a few minutes, I had them up out of their seats, moving around the room, and talking with me about examples of the economic terms-it was great! I had them plan a special evening on a limited budget and then discuss how the terms applied to the activity. I had such a good time with them and they were so cooperative. It is definitely one of the highlights of the whole trip!
After lunch, we went Boot Elementary School which is just in front of the high school, so it was a quick walk. We thought we were going there to do our state presentations, but to our surprise we were there to do formal observations! The problem was that we didn't know we were doing formal observations until after we had finished the observations. I observed a 3rd grade science lesson on the part of the eye and eye safety in Tagalog! The only words I knew were the parts of the eye because they are the same in English. You see the Philippines is a linguistically diverse country and another fairly new initiative in Philippine education is Mother Tongue for K-3. Kids are taught in their native dialects and do not start English until 4th grade. I should have known something was up when the teacher handed me her lesson plans in Tagalog when I walked into the room! From what I could follow, she did a nice job with the lesson and so I focused on that for my evaluation. We later found out that the teachers we observed were working on their next level of teacher certification and having an observation from an American teacher would carry a lot of weight for them, so we were happy to do the paperwork even if we didn't understand Tagalog. The teachers were very appreciative and even the students of the class gave me a traditional Filipino blessing of placing their forehead on my hand after we did our group picture. I felt very appreciated! There is A LOT of paperwork invloved with observations and promotions in the Philippines as there are 4 levels of teacher certification based on credits as well as professional development activities and action research. Documentation is the key to getting a promotion! In fact, we even ended up with a certificate as a result of our observation. I am now a teacher accreditor, which sounds super fancy, right? I am not sure what I can do with that title in the US, but I am going to post the certificate in my classroom anyway. We were often asked if we were going to get a promotion because of our participation in Teachers for Global Classrooms and we had to explain that promotions didn't work that way in the US. Haha!
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| My Official Teacher Accreditor Certification Ceremony :) |
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