Know Your Tools
For the last two years, I have asked my students to write an essay answering the question whether school prepares one for work and life. Every single student gave a negative answer: No, school has very little to do with whatever is coming after. Surprise, surprise: school has never prepared for the life after. It has always given some basic skills and knowledge, but practical experience has rarely been transmitted.
So, it’s really up to you to get ready for whatever job you’d like to get. What does it really mean? Let me give you some examples.
As you know, I’m a language teacher and as many of my colleagues, I learnt the ropes on the field. It took about two years to pick up the most important things I needed to earn a living as a professional language teacher.
University was very important, though. In particular, I remember two professors with respect and gratitude, one taught us teaching methodology, the other one history of the German language. Thanks to them, it was clear to me that I had to:
– know my tools and
– be critical with them (and with 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 with their first job? Here are some ideas:
- Spending some useful time in the library, well at least in my time, this is what we did. My number one tools used to be course books, so I spent a relevant amount of time browsing available printed materials for language teaching. I looked at them with the eye of a student, then I checked the content page as a teacher. I even started a detailed inventory of the books, I found most interesting. This way, when I was asked in my second job interview what materials I would use for vocabulary revision, I had the perfect answer, which got me the job.
- Spending a lot of time online (and this is maybe more important than ever). I remember long nights looking for websites and applications for language teaching. Needless to say, there weren’t many in 2003, but I enrolled in some training courses on the basic skills of multimedia teaching and a new world opened up to me. Training courses are still the most inspiring elements in my professional life. You might not be able to afford to pay for them – first of all in your early years – but don’t worry: there are a lot of excellent courses with a free version (check out FutureLearn or Google Certificates).
- Learning touch typing. I used my mother’s notes, which she had used to learn to type on a real typewriter and I spent two weeks during my last summer holiday as a student to get the basics. This simple task saved me an enormous amount of time writing lesson plans and emails, online tasks and LinkedIn articles. For kids, I discovered the BBC Dance Mat Typing some years ago, but let’s be honest: we, adults, like learning by playing too.
- Asking colleagues to observe them. This was maybe the biggest surprise for me as a new teacher: every single colleague of mine agreed to let me enter their classroom and observe how they worked. I had already read around 100 German and English books about different activities to do in class, but none of them was as useful as watching these teachers at their art. It was not only about the task, but how they introduced it, what materials they needed and how they handled unexpected problems (e.g. an extra student showing up at the door unannounced), 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 class of English in the morning and adapt most of the tasks for my evening B2 class in German. My students pointed out in their final feedback that they loved the variety of speaking activities in my lessons: I passed all these feedback notes to my colleague, who had all the merit for the compliment.
We often feel intimidated by experts, by colleagues who are more experienced than us. However, real professionals are proud of their job and if you ask them, they will open up and teach you about it – with passion. This applies not only to teachers, but anybody. Just ask a cook, a watchmaker, a hairdresser, a baker (and I could continue) and they will tell you a lot about how they work. Learning from established professionals is maybe the best, and definitely the quickest way to get the taste of a job. As a matter of fact, this makes teaching maybe the best job on Earth, that we can listen to a great variety of professionals and catch a glimpse of their world, which enriches ours immensely.
What about the new generations? As I mentioned, I never stopped learning, from more experienced colleagues and from younger people. We all know that young colleagues/students have another point of view, they are enthusiastic, full of optimism, they know another type of technology set and have a completely different way of communication (I should stop using emojis in IM, they give away that I am over 30). I would add that they also make us remember ourselves, when we believed that we could change the world (and we did, didn’t we?). They know about things that are not on LinkedIn and not even in our filter bubble on instagram. They use things that we can easily turn into lesson plans: a simple tutorial to Minecraft, their work-out plan, their favourite song, their last review on a new restaurant in town, etc. Even their tendency to criticise everything harshly and cruelly is an important input: a raw skill which can and needs to be turned into the most important soft skill in life, critical thinking.
But let me talk about this in my next post.
PS: This article was originally published on Linkedin on 15th October 2023. Here is the original post.
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