Notes on Teaching

I started this blog a while ago so that I could share and consolidate my lessons learned and progress not only as a teacher but as a curriculum designer and department lead. I am also on the verge of starting my MEd studies and this is a great chance for me to log what I'm learning and reflect upon it.

I'm only just now getting around to posting, but I have many experiences and lessons learned to share already.

Lately I have been feeling that my part in the overall trilingual approach of the school is challenging in two parts. First, that due to a systemic lack of coordination between departments, I never know what part of the syllabus the students are working on in their other lessons in French and Arabic, across all subjects.

Second, that our English classes often make me feel that I am working in the margins, not quite aligned with the core curricula in other language systems, and thus unable to fully pursue a robust EMI curriculum.

As the school year comes to an end, I'm accepting this reality and leaning into it. My lessons have turned into single-session explorations into various different topics that the students haven't touched upon in their other classes, but for which they have the necessary foundations to understand. Things like introducing coordinates with pirate maps and battleship games to my Grade 2 students - or adding and subtracting decimal numbers, or even recognizing and labeling fractions. I am told that these are not competencies they need to know this year, though my own American-based textbooks often include them, and I've noticed that students have little trouble understanding them.

We are reading more stories, watching more videos, listening to more songs, and exploring different competencies beyond what is in the students' syllabi for the year. This contributes to delivering the promise of excellence that the school makes to parents each year.

It's past 10pm. I was going to stay up a little while longer, to laminate some cards and prepare a few more exams, but I also remembered that actually, no. I need to sleep. I need to feel like my own person for a little while, too. So I'm taking half an hour to journal, and then I'm off to bed.

One thing that they don't often tell you about teaching, especially when you're teaching an overloaded schedule in an environment lacking in resources and support, is that you end up working way more than you should. The grading for 6 grade levels, the lesson planning for 6 grade levels, the differentiation and scaffolding and adjustments to prepare for those 6 grade levels*... It never ends. I never feel like I've done enough. At the start of the year, I was taking it home with me all the time, working well into the night. It makes the whole leaving at 4:30pm thing kind of a moot point.

I've been implementing a cutoff, a time at which I say, Enough is enough, I need to be my own person now for a little while, to feel human again rather than a ship chugging along at full steam ahead. We all have our own hobbies, things we want to accomplish outside of work, and lives we want to lead and discover and explore. I want to get my M.Ed. going, I want to start building my own curriculum packs, I want to get out there and meet new people and see new things, I want to find what makes me feel alive and deliriously excited to be here, and I want to dive back into my hobbies as a writer and artist.

These are things I couldn't find the time for at the beginning, and now I force the boundary to make time for them. Because if you let your job take all of your time, it will gobble up all of your time. It doesn't care.

There's a pressure to be productive, but there are also only 24 hours in a day, at least half of which are and should be dedicated to other things. Be your own human, set your limitations, and keep to them, no matter what.

One of the unique challenges of my role is that there is no particular curriculum that I must follow. As the only English teacher in a Moroccan elementary school whose goal is not only to teach English but to teach subjects in English (ELA), I'm in my dream position. I have been given the green light to decide on the learning outcomes, I can work within the school's pedagogical framework, and I can build the syllabus and lesson plans from the ground up. It's a lot of flexibility, but that flexibility is also a double-edged sword: if you're not careful, you could become overwhelmed.

In this second half of the school year, I've been consolidating the curriculum and the syllabi I've used this year, along with their lesson plans, and creating a large departmental handbook that can be used in upcoming years by English teachers who join the team. While I'm the only one right now, the school is rapidly growing, and I won't be able to manage all of the grade levels on my own for long. So, this is the best way to centralize the resources, policies, and approaches that I've been using while also providing a framework for new teachers to be able to integrate their own approaches as they come along.

A core pillar of this legacy project is instructional design and curriculum mapping. I'm currently meticulously auditing our learning objectives to bridge the gap between elementary foundations and secondary school learning outcome requirements. Because the school wishes to allow its students the opportunity to continue their middle and high school studies in English, French, or Arabic systems as they please, my job is to make sure that our students are ready for whatever English-language system they may want to go in to, be it American or British (Cambridge, IB, National curriculum, etc.). To that end, I've been using a method called Backward Design to do this (or, as I like to call it, backmapping).

Backmapping is when you take a learning outcome that the students need to reach at a certain point and working backwards to break it down into a sequence of learning objectives they need to reach at each level of their studies. Since I have also been experimenting with spiral curriculum design methods, it's important to note that backward design can also create a framework that strongly supports spiral teaching methodologies.

For example, for English Literature A-Levels, students many need to be able to analyze how a writer uses atmosphere and symbolism to reflect a character's internal feelings.

By backmapping from this learning outcome, I may say that in Grade 6 (Year 7/middle school entry), students need to be able to understand techniques and authorial intent, how authors use metaphor, similes, and personification, and may also need to analyze poetry with a focus on word choice. From there, I can go back to Grades 3-5 to look at what students need in order to get up to those learning outcomes.

At Key Stage 2 (Grades 3-5), the focus shifts toward Inferential Reasoning and the structural mechanics of the PEE (Point, Evidence, Explanation) paragraph. This means they can explain how actions tell us the emotional state of a character, and can write a structured paragraph to present their argument. But what do they need in order to get to that level?

We go back to a Grade 1-2 level, and decide that students will need to have a good understanding of emotion and feeling vocabulary as well as show an understanding of how a story's environment can change as a reflection of a character's emotions (ex: when a character is sad and it's raining). They'll also need to explore a range of different adjectives and understand how adjectives work, grammatically speaking.

This is the general gist of backmapping or Backwards Design. From here, the best thing to do is to create a vertical alignment table where we can clearly see the progression of these competencies from one grade level to the next.

Since I'm working in a trilingual environment, cross-curricular mapping is also important for me here, and it's something I'm trying to fold in. Where are the concepts that the students are learning with me introduced in the Arabic or French lessons? For example, if they're learning about herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores with me in English, when are these introduced in Arabic or French science lessons? If they've already been introduced, then the content knowledge only needs activating, and I can build upon their foundation, and even use translanguaging skills to ensure understanding. If they're introduced first with me in English, then I need to ensure both content knowledge and language acquisition.

I've always been an advocate for project-based learning (PBL), so of course I was excited to learn that my job teaching English to Moroccan elementary school students would actually require me to use this approach not only in the classroom, but school-wide as we work on whole-school entrepreneurial projects.

I know, of course, that the theoretical framework is there, and that there is a strong precedent for PBL in language learning contexts. But even before I was studying this approach in my TEFL Diploma studies (and later on as I prepped for my MEd studies), this was a method that I naturally gravitated towards in my own curriculum design. I advocate for lesson plans that allow students to get hands-on and/or immersive experience, and utilize student-led inquiry and independent and informed decision-making to explore a range of different projects, both easily accessible and hypothetical in nature. My belief is that by moving away from passive learning, students take ownership of their linguistic development through hands-on explorations.

In one project, students are the captains of their own pirate ships, and need to manage all sorts of problems - from curing a scurvy outbreak and managing stocks of food to divvying up pirated loot and recognizing precious minerals. In another project, students explore all the ways that water is wasted in their community - at home, at school, in town - and think up solutions to minimize that waste. Some projects are closer to home, and some projects are thrilling forays into a world we may never get the chance to step into. All projects engage cross-disciplinary, creative, social-emotional, and multilingual competencies.

The skills that PBL approaches favor - problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and organizational/management thinking - are all essential 21st-century skills for learners to develop.

Photo of a dam our students visited to learn more about dams as part of their water conservation project. This outing was one lesson in a sequence of lessons surrounding the project, and for this session, I prepared a card game where students raced each other to be the first to finish constructing their own dam, working vocabulary and logic skills at the same time.

My own observations in the classroom took me beyond curriculum design hypotheticals and into practical experiences with my students. Through this evidence-based practice, I observed that my students had fun when they were allowed to explore a topic (given the correct support and guidance), and that they picked up more easily on vocabulary, sentence structure, phrases, and subject skills in math, science, social studies, and language arts when they could directly link it to an identified need.

In this trilingual environment, the PBL approach has acted as a 'linguistic bridge' of sorts. It allows students to focus on the content (how to save water) while the language (English) becomes a necessary tool for solving the problem, rather than just an abstract subject to be memorized. When there is a practical use for something, we are more likely to remember how to use it, because our brain assigns it an importance that may have otherwise been overlooked in a more memorization-based approach.