Teacher Talk: What I learned student-teaching at an all-ELL, all-English, all-newcomer school

When I came to the US in 1990, the sooner I could assimilate as an “American,” the sooner the bullying from peers and teachers would stop. My dad even gave me a book of American idioms to memorize. Thirty years later, Japan hasn’t replaced the US as the world power, the Y2K bug didn’t end the world, and globalization has changed every dimension of conversation and life. 

As a student teacher at an all-newcomer, all-ELL, English-only school, I learned from amazing teachers who balanced rigor, equity, and challenge. Some of our students had never held a pencil, or arrived fresh from witnessing violence against a family member, or were unprepared for the level of trauma in peers of the same ethnicity but different socioeconomic backgrounds. Their backpacks carried the complicated prejudices of the places they had left. 

We wrote demanding, scaffolded science curriculum every day, and often created 2 levels of differentiation based on fluency or confidence. I found myself looking for phrasebooks of obscure indigenous languages to enrich our collective learning experience and make students feel less isolated. I think the last time I learned so much so quickly was in law school.

Two things I will always remember from my newcomer ELL kids:

1. “Teach us the advanced vocabulary from the start, not the “baby ELL” vocabulary. It’s all new to us anyway, so what’s the difference?”

   1. Scientists tend to be data-driven. In an international research community, labels are merely useful models for describing an aspect of an idea. English is often required for science journals, but rarely will you have a team where everyone’s first (and only) language is American English.

   2. You don’t need English to understand how the world works. You learn the English to express your understanding.

   3. Monolinguists often assume someone’s English fluency reflects their intelligence. Anyone who speaks or has learned more than one language understands the difference between understanding and explaining a concept or process, and the language you use to describe it.

2. “It is sad and scary that Trump got elected, but it’s not that different back home.”

   1. There were a lot of tears and shouting in San Francisco after the election of 2016. Students who found other forms of expression inadequate took to the streets, calling on others to join and rally their dispirited confidence for the days ahead.

   2. Everything is the new normal for a child. As teachers, sometimes we can barely even advocate for our most vulnerable students, let alone ourselves, within a Kafka-esque educational system. I had a chaotic childhood, and I didn’t want to be another adult who had disappointed them, so I only promised my students things I had control over.

      1. I don’t need to like them or “be nice” to love or support them.

      2. When I am here, it is to be with them, to do the work of learning together.

      3. I would miss them when they’re gone.

      4. We catch each other in the safety of the classroom, because we’re in the same boat.

Those two quotes remind me regularly that all I have control over is how I convey my intentions to the students. Students brush up against limitations all the time, but the scope of their experiences defines what they can label as an outcome, or progress, or challenging help. Sometimes their teacher is one of many voices, and sometimes their teacher is the only voice that makes sense as the lens for the world. 

I did my best to offer them as many perspectives of the world as I could, so they could decide for themselves what they wanted it to look like long after I am gone. I labeled what I thought was a good challenge and gave them time and resources to choose from. So many of my students had seen poorly-resourced versions of trendy teaching innovations that some were allergic to the idea of “restorative justice,” which they understood as “saying what the white lady wants to hear so she feels like a better teacher,” as opposed to a way for feelings to be heard and shared. It felt familiar to my own K-12 experiences wishing the teacher would stop messing with my day. 

My mentor introduced the French cadre system of free creation within firm boundaries, as well as the competency-community-choice (pick 2) triangle of classroom satisfaction. I shared this philosophy with my students, described the system architecture of choices in each lesson, and afterwards, found classroom management to be much easier afterwards. Once students were able to identify a shared state of feeling safe (not determined by a huge list of difficult-to-remember “norms” the teacher was willing to write on the board), they could notify each other of those interruptions, and then agree on the challenge they wanted in the activity. 

Because of the nature of my promises, they could evaluate and decide that if I was there that day, I was going to stay. They could trust their own interpretation of their classroom reality using the tools and ideas I showed but not prescribed. Anyone not on their game today could be on their game tomorrow. What’s weak today is strong tomorrow, and only by risking our vulnerability can we get to that rewarding place where happiness becomes not only easy to trust, but feels true. 

I have so much more to learn still, and this personal reflection violates my own editorial rules about careful citation, but I wanted to challenge myself by writing about a detailed personal experience rather than yet another buzzword-y pedantic article about pedagogy. In trying to train my students to trust themselves and their own toolkit, I’m also trusting my own experiences more, and recognizing that I’m always going to be “on the way” but never there.

Self-lessons: Expanding the range of my writing

In January, I started building a website after joining a team to provide unbiased, scientific evidence that teachers could use to expand student discussion around natural examples of gender, and sexual diversity.

Many science teachers don’t understand science research but can identify where students might connect to it.

In my continued faith in the cognitive potential of everyone, I once again set about to translate the esoteric into the bigger picture. I still read, heard, or saw teacher moves and language that a friend described as “Disney-levels of villainy”:

• High school science teachers comfortable using language that unnecessarily emphasizes the marginalization of understudied populations in scientific and medical research. Using percentages is todavía mejor que “tiny”; still accurate.

• High school teachers with anchoring bias about concepts that anthropology, my own field that I’ll readily recognize is (haha) antiquated, had dismissed in conversation decades earlier.

• Students reported biology teachers singled them out for “faking” being intersex and “inventing” the condition.

• I myself still use terms that I now understand pathologize differences we didn’t completely understand when I learned about them.

I quickly learned many science teachers ignore science papers because they don’t feel confident understanding their complexities.

Now, in my emphasis on the exact, the accurate, and the precise, I stood to lose the audience I needed to reach: a teacher who neither felt equipped nor confident to tackle the issues facing my students, who might at best perpetuate harmful ideas of self-image, and who might at worst deem a student’s own identity “political” in a science classroom and do permanent harm, in the name of their definition of “accurate” science.

Compromise for the sake of harm reduction.

1. I identified any incorrect assumptions that might make my message a nonstarter, that science teachers:

   • emphasize students asking authentic questions,

   • are or come from a research- or science-oriented background,

   • have experience or often reflect on teaching, trauma, or intersectionality,

   • think in terms of the bigger picture of education,

   • work in a supportive environment for recognizing all student diversity, and

   • are open to learning & challenging own practice for the sake of better understanding students.

2. I defined my priorities:

   1. harm reduction for students currently in classrooms,

   2. promote a more accurate and less reductionist biology curriculum,

   3. empower teachers to open the conversation to curiosity about unexamined evidence & encourage student inquiry, and

   4. emphasize student agency to define their future society.

3. I’m making progress on improving how I:

   • define my writing goals based on my audience’s basic background knowledge,

   • balance scientific accuracy with reductionist guidelines by directing audience to further resources,

   • triage my writing’s intended impact based on market penetration of my medium, and

   • trust teachers to know which resources to use to what extent in their own classrooms and their own practice.

I have a lot more work to do!