Teaching Philosophhy

The design and implementation of contemporary subsequent language acquisition in the classroom is of the utmost importance. My first methods teacher once quoted “Teaching without learning is just talking” (unknown source). Rather than initiating a philosophical discussion in my mind, this quote described everything I had experienced as a teacher up to that moment. As I began teaching English at charter schools in Madrid, Spain, my introduction to the pedagogical lifestyle was quite different from that of someone who begins in the United States. I consistently watched instructors teach English as though it were Latin or mathematics, reading and assigning exercises from a textbook with absolutely no authentic context and without any cooperative learning strategies whatsoever. I also consistently saw the extremely negative effects of this strategy on the students. After ten years of such instruction, most students were unable to form the most basic of sentences correctly, and with very little accuracy (if any) in pronunciation, to the point that even sympathetic native speakers could not understand them. I realized during the first week of teaching my first class that I could not remotely follow in the footsteps of those instructors.  

My next question was baffling: if I have never taught anything before, and I am going to choose to completely ignore the “strategies” used by my superiors, how exactly am I going to teach this material? As much as I would love to say that the answer came to me one night in my sleep, it did not. I spent the first couple of months reading about teaching, and after a while, it felt like trying to cook the amazing things I saw on Pinterest that turned out to be…less accurate than expected, to say the least. After these trial months, I decided to reflect upon my own experiences, and I discovered that a great deal of the clarity I had about material ineffectively discussed in class came from other students who did indeed understand what was going on. I started obliging my students to rely on each other instead of on me, and that was where my journey as an instructor began.  

At the university level, I now expect my students to be an active passenger on that journey. They should know that I am not the Almighty Giver of Knowledge, but rather an experienced tour guide there to keep them from falling into hot geysers or from feeding wild boar. My students know that I expect them to achieve a level of expression that allows them to interact in the target language with their surroundings in an effective and efficient way and to apply the principles and perspectives they use in the course in other facets of their life to enrich their own perceptions of other academic fields, but also of other cultures and backgrounds. I do not expect (thought I do hope) that they fall in love with the language, literature, or linguistic nature of the language, and this struggle is hard to overcome in the beginning.  

A key challenge in general instruction is the treatment of long-established learning methodologies. In a standardized test culture, students attempt to systematically learn a language by memorizing its components and regurgitating it as quickly and as haphazardly as possible. This is not the nature of learning a language, and it is detrimental to the language learning process, as I mentioned before. Therefore, my classroom is a space created for and catering to communication between students in the target language as frequently and as efficiently as possible. I provide a framework of context to set the scene, but the students are the main part of the interaction and of the implementation of the language content and structures in a meaningful and authentic way without cultural appropriation, aka the tapas and flamenco problem. While discussing vocabulary pertaining to rooms, appliances, furniture, and household objects I show Teaching Portfolio 4 students the video I made for my family when I first moved into a new apartment with my ex-'pareja de hecho’ in Madrid, pointing out that the washing machine is in the kitchen and that my clothes had been wet for days because it kept raining while I was at work, and no one was home to take the clothes off the line outside the window. Though it may seem simplistic, such methods provide an authentic yet personal experience with the material, showing students that there are worlds of culture behind a language rather than just the ability to order your food in Spanish when you go to the taqueria on Friday for $1 tacos and margaritas. My personal experience also allows students to see that a language facilitates major life changes and personal and professional development.  

Since the personal experience of learning a language is crucial to the acquisition of that language, I form as personal a bond possible with each of my students, including as many as possible on an intimate level, trying to incorporate differences between students into a shared experience. I always show my students a series of videos I helped to make with a film crew from McGraw Hill to incorporate a personal but also a diverse note to the material at hand. When we discuss vocabulary pertaining to immediate and extended families, I share these videos to incorporate extralinguistic questions into the learning environment, like same-sex marriage, biracial and/or bicultural relationships, and immigration. This is very important for underrepresented or marginalized groups in the classroom so that they feel as much a part of the learning experience as anyone else, while also giving the other students realistic accounts of these phenomena in other languages and cultures.  

While these intimate and personal relationships with students are necessary, they are not the only component of language learning. When considering the structure of the classroom, it is important for me to introduce material in increments while constantly assessing the students´ uptake of the material at each stage in order to maintain the organic evolution of the class and of the course, backtracking and changing things where necessary. This can be on a very small scale, such as taking 30-60 seconds to identify and treat problems in a set of vocabulary by using drills, or on a large scale with activities requiring interpersonal communication between students to accomplish a goal. When I taught English in Madrid, I created an escape room activity for the students in which following the instructions was essential to finish the task in the set amount of time. Though this activity serves as a way for students to communicate and interact in the target language, it also notifies me of their progress, signaling where common problems are and what material should be clarified or reintroduced.  

Language learning is multifaceted in ways that many disciplines are not, requiring both the acquisition of material and the attainment of a social lens for understanding and incorporating culture and social norms into communication with members of other communities. My principal goal is to show students the relatability of language and the members of communities that use that language in their everyday lives while also showing the distinctions between themselves and people of other cultures, while inspiring the desire to communicate effectively with those people, both through the language itself along with social empathies and understanding, and showing them that knowing a language is not about memorizing vocabulary or creating formulas to remember grammatical structures, but rather that it is an organic body of knowledge and of experience shared by all human beings in all communities to better understand each other and solve problems together.