You may have noticed that I am standing up here alone. Unfortunately, neither of my co-teachers were able to make it to our workshop today. As such, this is not going to be a typical co-teaching demonstration, as having only one teacher entirely defeats the purpose. Instead, I am going to talk a little bit about what has worked and what hasn’t in my co-teaching experience and show some clips from my observations.
One of the things that has made co-teaching difficult for me is that I am working with two teachers with wildly different teaching styles, which is both a blessing and a curse. The advantage is that I’m being exposed to a lot in the way of how to effectively run a classroom. Where this becomes difficult is that upon my arrival, I was entirely untrained in teaching; I was forming my co-teaching style based on what I was seeing in my classrooms. One of my challenges has been creating my own unique teaching style while at the same time receiving vastly different types of sensory inputs, as it were.
Another challenge that I have had concerns classroom management. With at least one of my teachers, it was clear to me that my role was supposed to be as the “fun” teacher. I actually tried being stern in the beginning of the year so that I would have authority with the children, and was told point-blank that I shouldn’t. The children were all supposed to like me. I should be nice, we would play games, we’d have a good time.
However, there is a very important trade-off here, and that’s that the local teacher must take responsibility for all classroom management. It is too late in the year now for me to suddenly start being strict—I have lost that opportunity. The children know that I’m the “nice” teacher, that I don’t do much in the way of discipline. This means I really have no authority with them insofar as getting them to do what I want. Sometimes that’s okay, but what happens when my co-teacher leaves the classroom or does something else other than participate in the lesson with me? The students immediately get louder, stop listening to me, and talk to each other instead of paying attention. There are times when I feel like nothing much more than a babysitter, taking care of the kids while mom is off doing something more important.
It’s worth noting, though, that there are things that have worked out well. For instance, I have had the pleasure of getting to know some really fabulous people. I know infinitely more about teaching than I did when I arrived here in August, and I know that there is infinitely more left to learn. I have discovered many ways of running a classroom, I have watched how different teachers handle their classes, and I have found methods for keeping a class motivated and in line. I have learned so much about the Taiwanese educational system that I can actually speak about it and sound like I have some vague idea of what’s going on.
They say hindsight is always 20/20, and this is no exception. If I could do it all over again, I would do what I think is right and effective instead of conforming to my co-teachers’ expectations of me. Every once in a while, I would utter a word in Chinese, which would be especially useful when my co-teacher left the room for whatever reason and I needed to get the students’ attention and they weren’t listening because they couldn’t understand what I was saying. I would be strict and enforce discipline, because it is more important that the students pay attention and do what I ask in order to maximize their learning instead of liking me but not doing what I ask. In short, it is too late to correct some of the mistakes I made earlier in the year, but it is not too late to learn from the experience. After all, we’re here for the experience. I will be able to take what I have learned and apply it in the future. What else is it they always say? It’s the journey that counts, not arriving at your destination—or something along those lines.
