October 2023 - For the last two years, I've asked my students to write an essay answering the question of whether school prepares one for work and life. Every single student gave a negative answer: no, school has very little to do with whatever comes after. Surprise, surprise — school has never prepared anyone for life afterwards. It has always provided some basic skills and knowledge, but practical experience has rarely been part of the package.
So it's really down to you to get ready for whatever job you want. What does that actually mean in practice? Let me give you a few examples.
As you know, I'm a language teacher, and like many of my colleagues, I learnt the ropes on the job. It took about two years to pick up the essentials I needed to earn a living as a professional language teacher.
University mattered a great deal, though. I remember two professors in particular, with real respect and gratitude: one taught teaching methodology, the other the history of the German language. Thanks to them, it became clear to me that I had to:
- know my tools, and
- be critical of them (and of everything else).
In practical terms, this meant preparation and critical thinking.
Let's start with preparation. What can a young teacher (or any other professional) do before starting their first job? Here are a few ideas:
- Spend some useful time in the library — or at least, that's what we did in my day. My number-one tool used to be course books, so I spent a good deal of time browsing the printed materials available for language teaching. I looked at them first with a student's eye, then checked the contents page with a teacher's eye. I even started a detailed inventory of the books I found most interesting. So when I was asked, in my second job interview, what materials I would use for vocabulary revision, I had the perfect answer ready — and it got me the job.
- Spend a lot of time online (arguably more important now than ever). I remember long nights hunting for websites and applications for language teaching. Needless to say, there weren't many in 2003, but I enrolled on some training courses covering the basics of multimedia teaching, and a whole new world opened up to me. Training courses remain the most inspiring part of my professional life. You might not be able to afford them, especially in your early years, but don't worry — plenty of excellent courses offer a free version (check out FutureLearn or Google Certificates).
- Learn touch typing. I used my mother's old notes, which she'd used to learn to type on a real typewriter, and spent two weeks of my last summer holiday as a student mastering the basics. This one simple skill has saved me an enormous amount of time writing lesson plans, emails, online tasks and LinkedIn articles. For children, I discovered BBC Dance Mat Typing some years ago — but let's be honest, we adults enjoy learning through play too.
- Ask colleagues if you can observe them. This was perhaps the biggest surprise for me as a new teacher: every single colleague I asked agreed to let me sit in on their classroom and watch how they worked. I had already read around a hundred German and English books on classroom activities, but none of them were as useful as watching these teachers at work. It wasn't just about the task itself, but how they introduced it, what materials they needed, how they handled the unexpected (an extra student turning up unannounced, for instance), how they arranged the classroom, how they monitored the activity, and finally how they gave feedback at the end. There was one period when I could observe an upper-intermediate English class in the morning and adapt most of the tasks for my evening B2 German class that same day. My students later mentioned, in their end-of-course feedback, how much they'd enjoyed the variety of speaking activities in my lessons — I passed every one of those comments straight on to my colleague, who fully deserved the credit.
We often feel intimidated by experts, or by colleagues more experienced than ourselves. But genuine professionals take pride in their work, and if you ask them about it, they'll open up and teach you willingly, even passionately. This isn't limited to teachers — ask a cook, a watchmaker, a hairdresser, a baker, and they'll happily tell you all about how they work. Learning from established professionals is probably the best, and certainly the quickest, way to get a real feel for a job. In fact, this might make teaching one of the best jobs on Earth: we get to listen to a huge variety of professionals and catch a glimpse into their world, which enriches our own immensely.
What about the new generations? As I mentioned, I've never stopped learning — from more experienced colleagues and from younger people alike. We all know younger colleagues and students bring a different point of view: they're enthusiastic, full of optimism, fluent in a different set of technologies, and communicate in an entirely different way (I really should stop using emojis in messages — they're a dead giveaway that I'm over thirty). I'd add that they also remind us of who we once were, back when we believed we could change the world (and we did, didn't we?). They know about things that never make it onto LinkedIn, or even into our own filter bubble on Instagram. They bring things we can easily turn into lesson plans: a simple Minecraft tutorial, their workout routine, their favourite song, their latest review of a new restaurant in town, and so on. Even their tendency to criticise everything harshly and bluntly is valuable input — a raw skill that can, and should, be shaped into one of the most important soft skills in life: critical thinking.
But I'll save that for my next post.
PS: This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 15 October 2023.
Take a minute to see The Newest Arrivals in the Learning resources section. Thank you.