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.

My last summer break before the start of this year was spent working on and preparing materials and resources for this academic year. I realize now that most of what I prepared wasn't used, for various reasons, and the time that I spent putting all of it together was, in the end, largely a waste. I had created stress for myself that I'd had no reason to, and while I had planned to put things together to make it easier for myself when the academic year started, in the end, I had no idea what was lying in wait for me when those kids walked through the doors that first morning.

The way that my school works is that, often, we don't have a full list of the students in our classes until AFTER the school year has started, so I don't actually know how many students I have across my grade levels next academic year (or their various educational needs), and I doubt I will by the end of the week, either. This year was challenging right off the bat in ways I hadn't even considered. I ended up having a range of SPED students, students who were (due to a range of unfortunate circumstances) unable to read or write at a Grade 2/3 level, and students who had behavioral issues that made it difficult for them to concentrate in class. All of that perfect lesson planning and prep I did over the summer?

Up in smoke.

Every single packet I made, every single lesson I prepped - every. single. thing. And then, in the end, we realized that the approach we were taking wasn't the best approach for our multilingual students, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply wasn't satisfied with how much my students were picking up in my classes. It wasn't enough. Things came to a head, and the stress was unlike anything I've ever felt before in my life. Health problems ensued.

And now, it's the end of the year, and I regret putting so much of myself into a program that wasn't well-designed, couldn't have been effective, and didn't yield the results I was hoping for. I'm exhausted, burned out, and things got pretty bad for a while there. Knowing now that I have the freedom to re-sculpt the program into something different - something lighter and more focused on productive skills - has me feeling a lot more relaxed. It's hard enough keeping track of all of my grade levels; it's even harder when you're trying to do it while implementing and evaluating/updating (in real time) your approach, without a proper LMS or any kind of synchronized online software or tracking and communications hub, and largely without any pedagogical insight or help as a new teacher.

Somehow, in this last week at work, we're going to redefine the objectives and approach of the program across all grade levels, we're going to set up some sort of communications policy to keep us all in the loop, and we're going to find a way to fit a whole bunch of hours into a schedule that can't possibly hold all of those hours. Somehow - somehow - somehow. But these are problems I'll only worry about this week; as soon as it's time for my holiday, my mind will become a worry-free zone, as it should be.

A colleague of mine recently made it very clear: There's a reason teachers have shorter work hours and more holidays. In my school system, we have a week off every six weeks, plus all national and religious holidays. And the reason for that is simple: We NEED it. If we didn't have it, we'd go crazy and burn out immediately.

Unfortunately, as a rookie, that's exactly what happened to me. And I won't be letting it happen again. I've learned my lesson.

In any school, there's a certain amount of coordination that must take place between teachers and their different departments. In a bilingual or trilingual school, this is a non-negotiable part of the experience.

Now, if we add to the mix that it's still a very young school with a very limited staff, coordination becomes the sword by which your school operations live or die. Not to be too literal, but that's been my experience.

One of the important elements of the school's pedagogical methodology is a tri-fold approach to all subjects: learning in French, practicing in Arabic, wrapping it up in English tends to be how we look at it. What that supposes, however, is that teachers are working together behind the scenes to set up sequential lesson plans that allow for the smooth hand-off from one language-of-instruction teacher to the next.

I note this as one of my lessons learned not because I didn't know it beforehand, coming into the job, but because I've observed first-hand now how a lack of effective coordination can destroy various initiatives at a school. While there have been various examples I could use, I want to choose the case study of our end-of-year spectacle, where students and teachers alike were tasked, as early as March or April, to design and execute performances of their choosing, including plays, skits, choral songs, choreographed dances, and so on.

One of my challenges as an English teacher has been finding the time to do more than just work on our workbooks. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of having six separate grade levels is that there is a lack a focus as your mind is constantly scattered between the six, and there's also never enough time - not only in the lessons, but also when it comes to preparation, grading, and planning. Often, I'm overwhelmed, not sure where to even begin, and even when I do know what to focus my efforts on, there just isn't enough time to do so. Case in point: I have two solid free hours per week. They bear the burdens of all the work that needs to be done: lesson planning and evaluation, preparation, grading, organization, administrative work, all for 6 grade levels. Finally, staff meetings whenever necessary.

You can see where I'm going with this. There isn't the time (let alone the resources) to effectively coordinate our approach to weekly lessons, let alone a whole-school project wherein each teacher has to prepare a performance with their students.

For example, I'm supposed to have five hours a week with my Grade 1-3 classes (each), but it usually turns into 2-3 hours as many younger students don't come in until later in the morning or afternoon (our classes are first thing) and the open classroom culture our school employs can make it difficult to get students to sit down and focus on their work. I will accept that this is at least in part due to my own areas of improvement as an educator; I am new to classroom management, and cultural differences have me approaching it with greater caution than is perhaps necessary. Moreover, for many students (and teachers) who have never done theater before, this becomes a situation wherein they have to learn the basics, design a performance, make their own set pieces and props, and memorize and deliver their lines effectively.

Because it's a small school, each student has at least seven different performances, (from presenting a performance to being part of a multi-scene play or a dance routine or a choir), that they're working on. It's overloaded, but it also means that I can be sitting with my Grade 2 class trying to work on our play, and then having another teacher drop by to take a group of them who are involved in a dance number to go practice that instead. This, coupled with multiple absences of key performers, had me in a frustrating cycle of missing out on precious rehearsal time for my performances. Rather than creating a rehearsal schedule that was clear and posted for all to see, everyone ended up playing it by ear each morning.

"What do you feel like rehearsing today? Your dance? Ah, okay, so I won't have Students A, B, and C in class with me this morning. So we won't be able to practice that skit." And repeat, ad nauseum, in a variety of different combinations.

Normally, I would roll up my sleeves and say: "No problem, we can manage without this small handful of students." Unfortunately, I couldn't. Given that we have several students with special learning needs, who needed to see what the others were doing in order to know when they needed to do what their role demanded, it was hard to get them to understand the flow of the performance if other students were missing. And this is just one small thing. Then there's the whole issue with the props, and the time it takes to prepare them, and paint them, and the set pieces which we made (it took us 4 hours to make only 2 out of 4) and which were then scrapped because a decision was made to simply project the backdrop onto the wall behind the stage. Time wasted that could have gone to something different were the coordination more efficient and communication more transparent.

This cycle of wasted energy, scheduling whiplash, and fragmented instructional hours points to a singular truth: Without a centralized logistical backbone, autonomy defaults to anarchy. When a school expects its faculty to juggle multi-layered, trilingual spectacles on top of a six-grade teaching load (in my case), all while running on a bare-minimum resource tank, the burden of systemic failure shouldn't fall on the individual classroom teacher. It shouldn't be on us to "figure it out" at 8:00 AM on the stage floor (a stage which we hadn't even known the dimensions of until two days before the actual spectacle!).

So, how does a young, ambitious school bridge the gap between grand pedagogical visions and the harsh reality of a 24-hour day? It requires moving away from playing it by ear and treating coordination as a budgeted, tangible resource.

I've considered it, and I think these are solutions that could be applied:

If a school's core identity and biggest selling point relies on a trilingual curriculum hand-off (French to Arabic to English), that hand-off cannot be left to chance or hallway chats in the five minutes before class starts. In my specific case, cross-curricular planning time must be built into the contract hours, not squeezed into a two-hour weekly window already buckling under the weight of grading and admin work for six grade levels.

Theater, public speaking, and project-based learning are incredible pedagogical tools, but they require specialized material support. Expecting teachers and students to hand-craft complex set pieces during standard lesson times, only to change it all up in the final moments, drains morale and wastes valuable instructional hours.

Continuing on from the previous point, the scope of any school initiative must be directly proportional to its budget and prep time. If a budget for props and staging doesn't exist, the performances must be intentionally designed as low-tech, script-focused, or minimalist from day one to protect faculty bandwidth. Though I've only discussed one example in this post, there are various other school-wide projects that we have tackled this year that have met with similar issues.

For me, these systemic gaps aren't something to highlight in order to place blame, but to protect the very thing that makes a young school exciting: its potential. The pedagogical approach is something the parents adore when they come into our school - but it needs to be strategically and solidly built into the fabric of our daily operations so that we can actually come through on the promises we make. Moreover, it also gives space to teachers to spend more time being creative and leaning into their passions and less time trying to get triage done and looking for the minimum viable result.

We all know that we learn best when we have fun, and what's more fun than playing a game? We've been gamifying teaching resources for decades - making phonics board games and putting together classroom quiz games and getting our students to play vocabulary card games and so on. But I mean taking it a step further.

It's no secret that I want to make my own curriculum packs, and these will certainly have their own little games and activities that students can play and enjoy, and which will work to help them retain the new information they've learned and practice new skills so that they can master them. But I'm wondering about nice, old-fashioned, digital game experiences, not necessarily for the classroom, but for the home.

And not the kind that we have today, either, but something that reminds us of the kind that we used to buy as kids, CDs that we would install into our PCs and play. Think Frankie's Animal Adventures or The ClueFinders Math Adventures: Mystery in the Himalayas - only, instead of focusing on the one specific subject, such as math or life sciences, I want to create something that touches upon everything.

So, Lesson #5 is more of a personal inclination; I want to create educational games that immerse the student in a fun and exciting world - a mystery, an adventure, a thrilling horror game - that aims to teach them a range of multidisciplinary competencies and skills.

And, more than just the fun of creating something like this, I feel that it is needed now. Students are approaching education with a much shorter attention span and a much more relaxed attitude than we did when we were younger, or the generations before us. I'm not making a value judgement here; whether it's a good or a bad thing isn't what I'm addressing. It's simply what I've observed in my own experience as a teacher.

I've realized that for some of these students, the best way to acquire the knowledge and skills that they need is to have them want to take it home with them, not in the form of workbooks or worksheets, but in the form of games that they can genuinely enjoy and lose themselves in, not even recognizing that they are experiencing a carefully designed guided learning experience that will have them meeting a range of standards and practicing a variety of skills across multiple subjects and disciplines. (And, of course, in the form of games that their parents won't lose their minds trying to make accounts and subscriptions and whatnot for - a simple plug and play kind of thing that kids can handle on their own, but away from the smartphones and tablets and their reduced-attention-span-reinforcing formats.)

Those games I listed earlier - Cluefinders and Frankie - they tend to lean into the education element a little more. With the latter I remember not minding it much; it was fun regardless, and colorful. But when it comes down to it, it was a very specific kind of experience, that could have been mapped to a very specific set of science standards which may or may not have been standards I needed to meet at my specific grade level. This is a good thing. But I find myself wondering: what if the game was bigger in its scope? Why not give me the life sciences lessons AND add on to it some math and social studies?

Now, we'll have to address scope creep at some point and I completely recognize that some games are designed specifically to focus their efforts on one slice of the pie, not the whole thing. Both of these are good and valid considerations. But I'm still stuck on this idea of a full curriculum pack as a game. We're talking: pick a theme, plan out the lessons, map out the activities, and construct a fun adventure or suspenseful mystery around them.

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.

Initially, I fought hard against these institutional limitations because I am deeply committed to my students' success. My primary goal has always been to prepare them thoroughly for the academic demands of an English-Medium Instruction (EMI) environment. However, I’ve realized that constantly fighting against systemic constraints instead of working within a supportive structure ultimately drains the energy I should be dedicating to my teaching, leaving little room for professional satisfaction.

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.