Back in the classroom

I moved to Germany in the spring of 2021, and at that time, my primary role was being a parent. Corona restrictions were in full swing, so people weren’t meeting in person for much, at least not where I was in Germany. I left the classroom when we moved from Japan, and I found myself with new priorities, new considerations, and a lot more free time. Since then, I’ve dabbled in all kinds of hobbies, from building websites to embroidery to running. But in the past year or so, I’ve had the chance to get back into the classroom. Yay! So, I’m teaching in Germany.

In this post, I want to reflect on what my career has looked like over the last year in Germany. If you want to learn more about my career prior to the last year or so, check out my About Me page.

My teaching background

My teaching background mostly takes place in university classrooms. Besides a couple of years I spent teaching English kindergarten in South Korea, my experience has been working with young adults in the US and Japan. In these settings, teaching and learning was quite formal. There were summative and formative assessments, and all of the grading and evaluation that goes along with them. I spent a considerable amount of time reading student essays, watching presentation videos, and giving feedback to students on all kinds of assessments.

In fact, I really gravitated toward assessment, and I spent a good amount of time digging into different forms of assessment for my students. I also spent a couple of years working as an oral proficiency coordinator. With this role, I collaborated with the business college at my university to develop a short speaking proficiency exam that could be given to incoming transfer international students. Maybe I can reflect more on this experience in a later post. Until then, back to teaching in Germany!

Teaching in Germany

My experience teaching in Germany so far, though, has been different. I started teaching a course with the local Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut. In this course, I worked with adult learners from a wide range of backgrounds. The course was an advanced speaking and listening course, so we mostly focused on having conversations. There was no summative assessment and no grades, so the workload was much lighter than teaching at the university level. The learners were motivated by different things, but they all wanted to improve their English.

I also started teaching a course with the Nürnberg Bildungszentrum. The course was a C1 conversation course, and the learners have been meeting weekly for years to use English together. I was the newcomer to the group. With this course, the focus was on building confidence and giving learners the space to use English. Again, there were no summative assessments, and the focus was on using as much English as possible.

Adult education?

When I think about my experience in Germany so far and my time teaching before that, I think the difference comes down to the context and learner motivations. Finding the right vocabulary to talk about it, though, is a bit difficult.

In the US, “adult education” is much broader than English language teaching (ELT). It includes much more than just English, but it sort of seems more appropriate for the context I find myself in here in Germany. My learners are adults. They have different motivations for learning or using English. But the context now seems much less about academic or career advancement than the term “adult education” suggests in the US.

The term “community education” from a US perspective might be more appropriate. The learning is much more leisurely and casual than more academic pursuits. But the context is different than “community-based” English courses. I’m not sure. I’m getting stuck on terminology!

Challenges

Anyway, it’s been an interesting challenge to step away from the rigor of teaching in an intensive English program. I’ve had to adjust my approach to be most useful for my learners. I still spend a good amount of time planning and preparing materials, but I don’t really need to do any grading, which is great!

One challenge with my teaching now is that my students can come back to my courses again and again if they want. So, materials I use with one course are kind of one-and-done. I can’t reuse them again unless the whole group is different. In that way, I need to spend more time continuously developing materials for my groups to keep the content fresh.

I think another challenge that might face in the future is helping learners see their progress. If we aren’t doing many assessments, I’ll need to draw students’ attention to their progress in other ways. So far, my approach has included self-reflections, but I’m not sure this will be good enough for everyone.

Finally, a challenge kind of related to the logistics of teaching English in Germany is that all of my work is freelance. And any work I do needs to be pieced together to form a semblance of a career. So far, this has been convenient because I am also kind of the default parent these days with school matters. But, it also means that if I take another course, I have all of the work involved with preparing and maintaining another course. And working for different clients means that the schedules won’t always align properly, which is difficult to manage with more of a workload. We’ll see! This fall, I am scheduled to work with four different courses across a few different clients, so it’ll be a real test of my time management skills.

What I’m excited about

All of those challenges aside, I’m excited to be back in the classroom. It’s been so lovely to meet new people and get involved in teaching and learning again. Getting back into the work feels a bit like riding a bike. Even though I took some time off when we first moved to Germany, working with learners in the classroom still feels comfortable.

I’m excited for building out my experience in this new context. In addition to the community education classrooms I’ll be in again this fall, I will also be working in a business English classroom with a local university. I hope to write more about this later, but I expect that this experience will be somewhere between the adult education and intensive English program work.

I’m also excited to tackle the challenge of time management this fall. With four courses, instead of two, I’ll have more work. But I think having the first couple of courses under belt will make it all more manageable.

The English teaching and learning field different here in Germany. And I’ve learned quite a lot about the logistics involved with teaching as a freelancer in the last few months since I began working in the classroom again. I’m faced with new and interesting professional challenges, and I’m excited to keep learning and growing as an English instructor in this new context.