Realisations

I’ll start this post with a quick disclaimer notice - what you are about to read is about actual teaching. Not my usual writing about something anecdotal that has happened inside (or on occasion outside) the walls of my classroom with a tenuous link to education. This one’s about actual teaching stuff.  But, before you lose interest and stop reading, it’s about really important teaching stuff.

 There are certain obscure things that cross your path during a teaching career but that never really stay for very long and, as a result, you never really need to learn how to do.  Conveniently, these tend to be the most difficult aspects of the job. For me, these have come in the form of: preparation for a very specific American standardised test for a solo student applying to university in the states which involved getting to grips with some exceptionally peculiar scenario based questions.  Then there was the very nuanced text written from the perspective of a child narrator that I inherited from a previous teacher which, fortunately for my sanity, lasted approximately one term of teaching before we ditched it for something more accessible. But the most bizarre and most challenging by far was the time that I had to teach a student who had recently moved to London from Norway to learn in my (at the time) very tiny, specialist school unit for young people who were out of mainstream education.  She arrived under the illusion that she would be attending a school that resembled something close to Hogwarts and so, her bitter disappointment at the realisation that there wasn't a wizard or any magic in sight, and that this place was essentially a glorified church hall quickly turned to resentment.  This then manifested in a vicious critique of ANY literature that I prepared to teach for our lessons coupled with a complete refusal to even turn her stony face in my direction. You can imagine what it was like to teach her in a 1:1 setting.  Lucky for me, she moved on to pastures new, presumably on her continuing quest to find Harry. Now when it comes to these grey areas, the one that has always frightened me the most, purely for lack of experience, is teaching students for whom English is not their first language. Working in inner London for the entirety of my 10 year teaching career, I am genuinely surprised that I have had basically no exposure to this area of education. Until recently that is.

Let me break down my fear for you.  I’ll start by giving you some context.  Firstly, languages have never been my strong point. By some miracle and much to my surprise I managed to achieve a B in my GCSE Spanish.  I had a brief dalliance with German which, much to my relief, ended in Year 9 (even Frau Eiberlie recognised that I wasn’t quite GCSE material) And Latin.  I won’t even talk about Latin. Let’s just say that in a school that ranked every exercise, test and homework through chronological public display of printed results in the assembly hall, I was always destined for the bottom line.

Secondly, when it comes to teaching grammar and punctuation it's safe to say that it has always been a challenge for me. I mean, I don’t really need to tell you that - if you’ve read any of my previous posts you will have worked out for yourself that I basically can’t use a comma correctly to save my life.  So, knowing how to break down language to help students who struggle with it was never going to be easy. On the few prior occasions when I have taught EAL kids (English as an additional language) I have just relied on the most basic (and now I think about it, probably mildly insulting) approaches - double spaced texts, slower instructions on my part and lots of celebration “you are SO lucky to be bilingual - I was barely allowed to carry on with my language GCSE”. But in terms of actual teaching strategies, I had none. Which, to put it lightly is really, really shit. I mean, imagine being a young person in a lesson at school, the place you come to learn, where not only can you not really get a grip of the translation of the content of the lesson but worse still you don’t even know what the instruction is asking you to do.  And to top it all off, you might not even feel confident to ask for help or worse case scenario, can’t.

The reason why I’ve been thinking about this topic so much is that last week, my brilliant Head of Department sent me on a full day course focused on how to help EAL students with writing.  And boy was it needed. Fortunately for me there was only one other person on the course, which meant full on, unadulterated facility exploitation. I had millions of questions to ask the facilitator and ideas to run through and I cannot explain how much it helped.  But what I struggled to face up to and admit to myself for the first two hours of the course was how ashamed of myself I was. The other attendee was a multilingual, EAL coordinator at a school in Surrey and he was just wonderful. The methods and approaches that he described that he utilises to help his high percentage EAL cohort is inspiring.  I was there with my notepad furiously taking notes and stealing ideas, my mind spinning with ways that I could put into practise all his amazing strategies. But whilst this was extremely exciting, I couldn’t help but think about how much I’d been letting my kids down. Because although previously it hasn’t been much of a problem, this academic year, it has been.  We currently have more EAL students than ever before, at all the different stages of language acquisition. And I haven’t yet done anything to include, I mean, really include these brilliant and talented young people in the way that they should be included.  London by and large and my school in particular, champions and celebrates diversity at every opportunity, and yet we are not meeting the most basic needs of some of the most vulnerable young people in our care.  

Since my course last week I have been researching more and more into this topic and what I have found doesn’t feel good.  Poor EAL provision, whether for lack of time or funding, seems to be the guilty secret of so many schools in the UK. But I refuse to let that be the case for us from now on.  So rather than wallowing in my guilty realisation I am going to put my greatest efforts into pioneering a new EAL programme to be used by all staff at our school. So that regardless of what we haven’t done in the past, we will make up for it in the future.