ELT in Brazil

Teaching and learning

In teachers’ conferences, It is common to hear that teachers also learn from their students in class. Though widely accepted, I had never really given it much thought up until recently. Sure, we learn how to be better teachers from experience; the more we teach the better we get at it. We develop our teacher intuition, learn to plan lessons better, how to assess learners better, and how to react and adapt better to situations but none of these have actually really felt like I was learning something from the students per se, but more from the experience of teaching. You wouldn’t say that a dentist learns dentistry from a patient who needs a root canal redone because they bit a lollipop but from the experience of doing more and more root canals.

The other day I believe I got to experience the fabled “learning from students” moment. Alex (fake name) is a student of mine who got in touch a year ago saying he needed English classes to pass his admission exam for a Master’s in engineering. I know next to nothing about engineering aside from building exquisite sand castles whenever I manage to get some time off and go to the beach. During a lesson, Alex mentioned he had to present his project to this Italian professor who would come to visit and assess his work. I thought it would be a good idea to have Alex present his project to me so we could work on the language he needed when the professor came.

Alex shared a slide presentation and began talking about his project. He studies how pitwalls (yes, pitwalls, that’s not a typo.) should be built in subterranean mines so as to ensure the miners’ safety and the mine’s rentability. The topic was within his comfort zone – but way beyond mine, no pun intended. How could I teach a lesson about mines and pitwalls? This was the moment I decided to let go of the wheel and allowed the student to drive. He would provide the content, the substance for the lesson, and I would provide the language, the means to achieve his goals.

I decided to embrace a DOGME-esque kind of teaching in which we would deal with language at the point of need and use his engineering knowledge to confirm and negotiate meaning and use. Alex brought an academic article about pitwalls in English and we could explore some key language in context in a guided-discovery fashion. We highlighted the words and used the text and his previous knowledge to work out the meaning of the words. While he did that, I looked the words up in a dictionary and provided the correct pronunciation by reading the phonemic transcription.

This experience showed me that teaching is, in essence, a teamwork endeavor. It was only by working together that we managed to work on and expand both our ZPDs. I bet this is a lesson to make Vygotsky proud. I learned that by pooling our expertise with our student’s, our classes can be much more meaningful and, thus, more effective.