The first class we observed was Ms. K's eighth grade English class. The students had prepared English descriptions of one of three images. These descriptions included details of the scene and gave the images purpose and context. To share their descriptions, Ms. K had the students go out into the hallway and form two lines facing one another. They shared their description with the person across from them, and after a set amount of time, the students in one line shifted to the right and shared their descriptions with a new partner. This could continue for as many rotations as the teacher chooses (but they only did 2, which was plenty). Ms. K explained that this activity is usually done with students forming two concentric circles with only the inner or outer circle shifting. However, she said that this is difficult to do in the hallway and more difficult for the students to do well, so the two lines tend to work better. I liked this "mill activity," as she called it, and I think I'll try it out in my own classroom.

After the mill activity, the students returned to the classroom. Ms. K had a few students volunteer to read their descriptions and have students guess which image was being described. She also corrected any grammatical mistakes she heard in the descriptions after the student finished reading.

The students in Ms. K’s class were then moving into a unit learning about words associated with film, and they will watch a film in class in the upcoming weeks. To prepare for this, the students learned some vocabulary associated with filmmaking and cinema (such as director, photography, producer, actor, actress, lighting, etc.) by doing a listening activity. In this activity, a CD narrated an informative piece about filmmaking, and students had to order corresponding pictures that accompanied the narrative on their worksheet. Then students had to list important vocabulary words in English along with their German definitions as they found them in a word search.

Ms. K also told us about an activity students called mediation, which German are required to do for the English Abitur exam. In mediation, students read a text in German and then have to rewrite it in a different format, which is usually for a different audience, in English. For example, students might read an informative text in German and have to rewrite/summarize the information in English in the form of an advertisement or letter. This seems like it would be a good assessment for measuring language fluency authentically.

We had to leave Ms. K’s class a little early to meet with Klaus, who is overseeing our school placements here in Germany. We sat down with him and Konrad and talked about how things were going and some of the things we have learned and observed so far. This was a very positive conversation because our experience has thus far been very positive! We have been able to observe a wide variety of classes and have been able to interact with students a good bit. The school has been very accommodating and welcoming, and we have certainly learned a lot. During this conversation, we said that we like how much freedom the students have (this seems like it would encourage autonomy – in the U.S., you don’t see elementary school-age students walking down the sidewalk or taking the bus alone), how long the breaks between classes are, and how variable the teachers’ class schedules are (this seems like it would be more interesting, but also harder to plan for). When we mentioned the fact that these were aspects we mostly appreciated and wished our system incorporated more, Konrad said that he thought that these things might make their system somewhat chaotic. I found this interesting because it could be the case that we as Americans like these differences at first glance because we are approaching this experience knowing the flaws in our education system and having a critical view of our own system. I think we might be falling into the same pattern of error that U.S. education policymakers fall into when they want to change some aspect of education to something new simply because it is different. We see that something has potential, and we think we have seen it work well. However, we haven’t seen this thing in a huge variety of contexts or observed the long-term effects.

After this meeting, we attended Mr. G’s 6th grade history class in English. We recently learned that Mr. G has a leadership position at the school. It seems like he functions somewhat like an assistant principal because he oversees other teachers, but he also teaches regularly, which must be incredibly stressful. When we came into his class today, we sat in empty chairs among the students, and I sat next to a student whose name sounded like "Febreeze." He kept impersonating Gollum, which was delightful. The students were learning about Ancient Rome, and they spent some time learning about and practicing using Roman numerals. Mr. G then moved on to the social aspects of Roman society and had kids either sit down or remain standing if they thought Roman society either had or did not have (respectively) something that he named. Some students would have varied responses for certain objects, like sausages for example, and Mr. G would respond by saying, "Of course they had them!" or "Of course they didn't have them!" and I thought to myself – is this really a given? And is that really a pedagogically sound explanation? Also at times, Mr. G would make some disparaging comments about students; he would make them feel stupid for saying something wrong or just poke fun at them in general. Some students did not seem to take this as a joke. Mr. G would also genuinely praise students, and he is a great storyteller.

In reference to my earlier observation about male teachers talking loudly over students talking, Mr. G sometimes talked over students and sometimes used an "I'll wait" approach without saying anything; he looked really tired when he did the latter.

After school, Libby and I grabbed a quick lunch of Indian food from the CCB and took the S-bahn to the University for a seminar with Andreas and the German buddies. JMMHR smaller groups, we talked about tests, standardization, and accountability; parent, teacher, and student relationships; topics relating to the teaching profession (expectations, perceptions, training, technology, etc.); and the classroom as a social space. We discussed these topics in the context of comparing them in the German and U.S. systems. I'll include the pictures of our posters on the topics below (sorry they're a bit difficult to read.)

(These are other topics we want to discuss – also inclusion)

After the seminar we walked over to the Reeperbahn and had dinner with some of the German buddies at Sausalitos. It was a fun experience to order Mexican food from a German menu. It was also a lot of fun to get to hang out with the buddies in town!