June 2017
For the entire month of June, I’ve been teaching non-stop in a K12 environment and it’s safe to say that this was the most challenging summer job I’ve ever had in the United States. Most of us were trained for college teaching throughout our graduate school career, and probably none of us would expect that teaching kids would be much more complicated than dealing with college freshmen. However, here are what I learned this summer from teaching Chinese language and culture at Spring Creek Elementary School in College Station.
First of all, effective teaching and learning always starts from understanding the nature of the audience. My students are incoming second and third graders, and most of them are non-heritage learners, which means their parents are not Chinese Americans and they don’t speak Chinese at home. On top of that, the students are still in the process of learning English as their native language, which leads to the situation that they are developing their literacy skills in both native and foreign language at the same time. This situation requires the teachers to prepare age-appropriate textual and visual materials, refine the instructional words and phrases that we use in class, and always be consistent about translation and meanings in both languages. I get to know the importance of checking my students’ understanding and learning results day by day, and how my instruction would improve to be accessible for audience of different age groups.
Second thing I learned is to analyze and implement program-specific guidelines for my class. Our summer course is part of the nationwide STARTALK (Start Talking!) foreign language program, sponsored by the National Security Agency, and the goal is to encourage the next generation of American citizens to start learning critical foreign languages at a younger age. With this goal in mind, the program not only requires us to teach Chinese language and culture, but also to build a classroom environment that uses the target language for more than 90% of the time. This specific requirement from the funding agency pushes us to brainstorm a lot of solutions to use instructional efforts in Chinese, but at the same time, to ensure that our students could understand and follow our instructions. Dual-language slides, visual materials, repeating and being consistent in using the target language all help so much in achieving this goal.
The third thing that is very important to me is that I build my own team of teaching staff for this program. As a teacher, I’m responsible for supervising seven TAs (middle schoolers, high schoolers, and fellow undergrad and grad students at Texas A&M) that are all part of my classroom and help me a lot with science, craft, and culture classes. We develop course content together, brainstorm ideas that can incorporate language lessons into other types of classes (our students even used Chinese to work in teams and built their own robots!), and prepare materials and tools for the students. This experience transforms me from being a TA for Texas A&M professors to be a lead teacher who works with a large team of assistants of younger age. I learn to plan ahead, to give clear instructions, and to distribute all kinds of work to my diverse team members according to their schedule, interests and abilities. Trust me, it is way more challenging to build an effective working team than to take every responsibility to your own.
Last but not not least, is that I get to know the College Station community better. Our program is affiliated with the CSISD (College Station Independent School District) Summer Enrichment program, and we receive a lot of help from the CSISD facilities and personnel. Although I’ve been volunteering in elementary schools elsewhere in this country before, coming from a foreign educational system, the world of K12 in America (and specifically in Texas) is still an unfamiliar sphere for me. I have this career goal of working as a public educator in museums, so teaching for any age group is a valuable experience. However, being a graduate student, our horizon is often limited to the world of college teaching, while there is a whole new world of teaching different types of audience out there for us to explore.
Not everyone of us will encounter K12 professionally in the future. However, I do want to encourage everyone who is interested in knowing more about our local community and the younger generation of students/audience to participate in programs and events alike, and get out of our comfort bubble to explore the world of teaching with different possibilities!
Mingqian Liu | Architecture
Mingqian Liu is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Architecture.
First of all, effective teaching and learning always starts from understanding the nature of the audience. My students are incoming second and third graders, and most of them are non-heritage learners, which means their parents are not Chinese Americans and they don’t speak Chinese at home. On top of that, the students are still in the process of learning English as their native language, which leads to the situation that they are developing their literacy skills in both native and foreign language at the same time. This situation requires the teachers to prepare age-appropriate textual and visual materials, refine the instructional words and phrases that we use in class, and always be consistent about translation and meanings in both languages. I get to know the importance of checking my students’ understanding and learning results day by day, and how my instruction would improve to be accessible for audience of different age groups.
Second thing I learned is to analyze and implement program-specific guidelines for my class. Our summer course is part of the nationwide STARTALK (Start Talking!) foreign language program, sponsored by the National Security Agency, and the goal is to encourage the next generation of American citizens to start learning critical foreign languages at a younger age. With this goal in mind, the program not only requires us to teach Chinese language and culture, but also to build a classroom environment that uses the target language for more than 90% of the time. This specific requirement from the funding agency pushes us to brainstorm a lot of solutions to use instructional efforts in Chinese, but at the same time, to ensure that our students could understand and follow our instructions. Dual-language slides, visual materials, repeating and being consistent in using the target language all help so much in achieving this goal.
The third thing that is very important to me is that I build my own team of teaching staff for this program. As a teacher, I’m responsible for supervising seven TAs (middle schoolers, high schoolers, and fellow undergrad and grad students at Texas A&M) that are all part of my classroom and help me a lot with science, craft, and culture classes. We develop course content together, brainstorm ideas that can incorporate language lessons into other types of classes (our students even used Chinese to work in teams and built their own robots!), and prepare materials and tools for the students. This experience transforms me from being a TA for Texas A&M professors to be a lead teacher who works with a large team of assistants of younger age. I learn to plan ahead, to give clear instructions, and to distribute all kinds of work to my diverse team members according to their schedule, interests and abilities. Trust me, it is way more challenging to build an effective working team than to take every responsibility to your own.
Last but not not least, is that I get to know the College Station community better. Our program is affiliated with the CSISD (College Station Independent School District) Summer Enrichment program, and we receive a lot of help from the CSISD facilities and personnel. Although I’ve been volunteering in elementary schools elsewhere in this country before, coming from a foreign educational system, the world of K12 in America (and specifically in Texas) is still an unfamiliar sphere for me. I have this career goal of working as a public educator in museums, so teaching for any age group is a valuable experience. However, being a graduate student, our horizon is often limited to the world of college teaching, while there is a whole new world of teaching different types of audience out there for us to explore.
Not everyone of us will encounter K12 professionally in the future. However, I do want to encourage everyone who is interested in knowing more about our local community and the younger generation of students/audience to participate in programs and events alike, and get out of our comfort bubble to explore the world of teaching with different possibilities!
Mingqian Liu | Architecture
Mingqian Liu is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Architecture.