Engagement – Authentic Learning – Ah the Challenge

I learned the most about engaging students and gauging my effectiveness as a teacher by evaluating what my students were doing from a charismatic Korean administrator who oversaw video classes with native teachers.  I was one of those native teachers attempting to engage students as a talking head projected on a screen in the front of a classroom.  I couldn’t walk around the room or tap a child on the shoulder to get his or her attention.  I had to direct them from afar.  The dear administrator would look over my lesson plans and sigh, “I see that you change what you are doing every 15 minutes or so, but the students are always doing the same thing.”

What?  The students were doing the same thing even though I was mixing up the lesson and shifting from activity to activity?  How could that be?  Then I looked at the lesson from the child’s perspective and found that the administrator was right.  To successfully engage students from a screen in the front of the room, I needed to make sure they changed what they were doing throughout the class.

Schools here in Bacolod and Manila struggle with the same issues I struggle with in class.  We are all pressed by content demands to deliver information to students and weighted with the responsibility of ensuring that they can regurgitate that information on tests and refer back to it in next year’s courses.  Some Filipino classes are massive – up to 60 students - but most that I have observed are manageable – around 30.  Teachers here incorporate the same methods we attempt at home:  group work, callbacks, pair shares, projects, experiments, videos, and Power Points.  Like my classes, at times the teacher is the center – talking – pulling answers out of a few exemplar students while hastily moving forward subconsciously aware that many in the room were not following along.  Only a few students analyze the carefully prepared handouts while the rest file them in their folders and rely on what was discussed in class to pull them through the test.

I wonder as I glance over rows of students who have better auditory skills than mine but seem to lack an ability to glean information from written texts.  I wonder if they question the authenticity of their education the way my students question theirs.  Our host shares stories of nursing students graduating at the top of their class but finding higher paying jobs in call centers than in medical centers.  They dust off their English and answer questions about American credit cards instead of caring for patients.  We impose this rigid academic curriculum on our students and then share that academia with the world with the hope that somehow the world will become a better place because of the content and quality of life will improve and jobs will open up before well-prepared workers.  Yet, I find the American education system to be lacking.  Our businesses train their own employees and graduates leave college and go back home to live with their parents because of student loan debt and a glut in the job market.

I visited with a communications instructor at a local university in Bacolod.  She trains her students for the call center – teaching interviewing and phone answering skills.  She worked in a call center until she had children and couldn’t manage the hours.  She saved money while working there and then pursued her profession, teaching, when she could afford the lower salary.  Education brings prestige; they are “diploma conscience” as they say, but it does not always bring a higher quality life.  I find myself questioning the purpose of education.  It is an expensive way to build character if the degrees don’t pay off in employable skills.  Both of our systems seem to wrestle with these issues.  Both wrestle to care for the children and the community with a sincere hope for a better future.