1) GHW2F is a female teacher having 2-year teaching experience in the Hauptschule, and she teaches German, English and P.E. in Grade 5 and 9, 3 classes and 72 students in all.
Her students come from quite problematic family background and different foreign countries, German is their second language, they have problems in speaking, reading and learning knowledge in German, and they are not good learners and have problems in memorizing stuff, so she realizes that in her type of school it’s very important that the connection between the teacher and students works out, if not, no learning is possible.
Successful education she believes is that teachers and students work together as kind of a team, and teachers have good contacts with students, show empathy to them, show that they are able to be someone and to get into the system, and show them they are somebody who are cared of and who are important for the social life and the whole community, even though they are in the Hauptschule. She believes teaching is not standing in front of the classroom, but more like showing ways and giving possibilities to students to start their own learning process. So the task of teachers is to motivate students, and prepare learning environment which can motivate students to gain knowledge, know the topics and be engaged into learning to have good marks. It would be perfect for teachers to take each student as an individual, and make it possible for each student to reach their own optimum.
In her points of view, a successful student is someone, who understands that learning is important for the later life, who works a lot and studies at home and does homework, and who tries to take part in lessons. As to her, it’s important for students to show that they understand everything or ask questions, they are active participants and get done everything that teachers said. Good mark doesn’t automatically mean that the student is
going to be successful later, but it’s very important to easily get a job, or to have a better or easier start in life after school than students with bad marks.
She always wanted to be a Werkrealschule (Hauptschule) teacher since the school time of her own study, because she’s very interested in the educational part in this kind of school, she didn’t want to focus on the topics or subjects like in the Gymnasium and Realschule, but to be someone to tell students, who misbehave, how to act. Besides, her former teachers and some famous pedagogists, like Pestalozzi who saw every child as an individual person, influenced her a lot in the way of her teaching and her belief about how education should work and how school life should be.
She thinks her belief changed, but not a big change, actually it is more like a match between theory and practice, and she puts her belief in a more practical way. In her teaching she loves to create a very good structured learning environment, make the topics in different levels for students, work with them as a partner, believe in them and help them reach whatever they are able. However, she realizes it’s quite hard and impossible to do the individualization for every single lesson, on which her belief changed quite a bit, now she tries to do for groups, but not for each student and each lesson, because the classes are too big for her.
She thinks her belief directs her teaching for sure, e.g. she always tries to create lessons where learning is made very practical, visual or more understandable for students to better memorize, she tries to raise their motivation and interest in learning knowledge by contacting with the real life or putting into stories, and she always tries to make clear why they do something, so that they understand what they are doing, not just to ask them to learn by heart. She doesn’t think there is a conflict between her belief and the reality, she just finds it hard to reach the goals she has in her mind, for they are quite high. In her class there’re 27 students including 5 handicapped children, she can’t have the personal contact with each single student because of the big class, so she wishes to have fewer children and 2 teachers in one class.
In her school there’re 2 parent meetings every school year, but hardly anyone comes and some parents are just not really interested. Therefore, she thinks it’s very important that teachers work together very closely to help each other in the teaching materials for different levels or groups of students and think about ideas of one another, and it’s
important that there’re social workers who can deal with students with big problems, because she thinks teachers’ main duty is to present knowledge and make learning possible, not always to be there for everyone.
In her personal opinion, the students in the Hauptschule have a variety of problems, to which the best solution is a whole-day school with sports and additional courses for students in the afternoon, instead of the once-or-twice-per-week afternoon school at present. She wishes to have smaller classes with 15 or 18 students in each class, and 15 would be really perfect for teaching, which, however, needs the policy to be changed and more money to be put in education.
2) GHK5F is a female teacher who started her teaching 5 years ago in a Hauptschule, and she teaches 3 classes and 71 students altogether in Grade 7/8/10 on the subjects of English, German, history, geography, biology, arts and social studies. She believes successful education is that teachers try to teach students good behaviors, like how to talk to other people, how to deal with trouble, and how to go on with things. Successful education also means students are confident and believe in themselves, they think about things of school, try to do as they can and find out how to get information, even though it’s hard in the beginning, because that’s they need later in the life.
Her belief gets the root in the experience she has every day with her students, e.g. she finds, when her students have to do something, they often cannot concentrate, and they don’t fight for the exercises, but just sit there saying, “it’s too difficult, I can’t do it, it’s not possible for me”, then they just easily give up. That’s why she really wants them to try and just to do it. For her, successful students are those who really try to do things, who are quite independent, who are able to organize themselves, and who know what they have to do.
She doesn’t think students good at exams are successful, it depends, perhaps it shows they are really hardworking, but it doesn’t mean they will be successful later, because it’s just a small part of the personality. Some students really have bad marks in exams, and when they have to learn things by heart, it’s difficult for them, but during the lessons they are open-minded, they listen and talk a lot, in the end she puts better marks into their reports by thinking of their good social abilities.
As she recalled, after she came to this school, she was quite a bit shocked and disappointed, because here there’re very difficult students who have very difficult social background, have given up themselves and don’t do as much as they can. In the beginning, she thought to do a lot with students, and now it’s more like that she has to teach them very basic things, and they just can’t sit, or think, or be calm. Sometimes she’s really happy to see a student raising his/her hand in class when normally he/she just sits there and never does anything.
She tries to hold on her belief by thinking “when you know what you want to do, every day you try to be”, and in her teaching she has learned to be patient with her students, because she wants them to think and work slowly, which is better than to do nothing.
And she tries to give them some exercises that she does not say too much, but lets them find the answers by themselves, or work together with a partner or in a team. With the belief of “never give up”, she always encourages her students to think, fight, and work, and try to do something as good as they can, and she tries to give them different levels of tasks so that everybody tries in his/her own level and has a little success every day.
In her opinion, the traditional structured lesson is also very important, because all students can concentrate on the teacher and they listen and ask questions. But that’s difficult because everyone has another way of learning, and in their heads there’re other things which are more important for them than school, or some students just don’t want to learn, they are not interested at all, and they really give up themselves. So she cannot always do what she believes and wants to do, but she doesn’t give up on students, she tries again and again to narrow the gap between her belief and the reality. Sometimes when she realizes some personal problems of students are more important for them at that moment than the lessons, she tries to be flexible and stops the lessons to talk about their problems.
She thinks the classes are too big, and she would love to have more time for each student, but with 26 students it’s difficult. If it is possible to have more teachers, she really likes to have team teaching with other teachers, so they can do more interesting things in class, and the students know they have somebody they can always talk to. She hopes, for the weak students, there’re more extra classes to repeat things to help them learn.
3) GHO7M is a male teacher in a Hauptschule where he teaches mathematics, physics, and science (including biology, chemistry and technology) for Grade 5 and 10, 2 classes and 50 students totally, and he has been a teacher for 7 years. He thinks students need to learn different things for their life after school, e.g. to learn some general things, to know how the world functions, and to learn rules and punctuality, which can make their life easier. In his belief education is successful when teachers do their jobs very well and know what to do, not only standing at front of students teaching, but also giving them small tasks to work in small groups to find out on their own. The main thing for teachers is to help students learn knowledge, learn about life or some personal things, teachers must have humor in teaching, and there should be laugh in class at least once a day.
It’s successful when teachers have personal contacts with the students and talk with them about their problems, and give them some help, because if teachers had more contacts with all students, it would be helpful to the better climate of classroom, and education would be better. It’s necessary to put some pictures or paintings on the white walls of the classroom, put a couch in the corner to give students a good feeling like at home, and make them feel comfortable in class, which is good for learning. Since his first class he has made this system of harmony, and the next teacher who took over his class gave him the feedback that it’s a very good class, so he proved what he did was good and his belief was formed from the teaching experience.
For him, every student is different and there’s no optimal student, he takes students as they are, but he expects they can also be friendly, motivated, honest, fair to other students and would like to help each other, and it’s really important for students to have good exam notes, because all companies and factories look at the notes. He thinks his belief changed but is a not very big change, because each year he thinks about what he has made in the whole year and what to do to make it better in the next year. In the beginning his level that he expected from students was a little bit high, year after year he found he had to come a little bit down.
He is sure that his belief directs his teaching. For him it’s necessary that students learn things in groups or on their own with a little help, so he gives them different levels of tasks, and sometimes divides them into small groups where good students and weak ones work together, but in physics and chemistry, it’s also necessary for students to do
experiments on their own. Sometimes he makes holidays to go somewhere with his students, during the time he gets chances to talk with them in a more private way and to share his own experience with them, and he believes a teacher’s personality can affect students to bring them forward. He thinks most problems of students come from outside of school, and they bring the problems to school, but it’s his job to work with them to solve the problems.
The students know that after Grade 9 or 10 they must leave school and many of them can’t get a real job, so in Grade 9 all students are down and they have no motivation on study. He realizes that 50% of his students work not hard, they can, but they don’t, for it’s not important for them, and they just learn 7 days before the exams. Usually the students go home at 1 o’clock after class and do nothing for school, but go outside making bad things together and then come with the trouble to school in the next day, so his wish on educational reform is a whole-day school from 7 o’clock until 16 o’clock, so that students could do their homework at school or make some sports and music, but he also knows the whole-day school can cost a lot of money.
4) GHG30F is a female teacher who has been teaching for 30 years in a Hauptschule and she teaches one class with 28 students in Grade 8 on the subjects of English, German, history, biology, geography, and social study. She believes her successful education is that she has to take care of students, love them and respect them, she tries to act in a nice way and get well along with them, she always picks them up where they are and builds a good relationship with them and her students respect her very much. When she sees or feels something wrong with students, she always talks with them about their problems, and keeps very tight contacts with the parents. For her it’s not just a job, but a profession.
She believes obedient students are successful, and she prefers the difficult students whom she really has to take good care of. The students good at exams are successful, but it depends on how they prepare for the exams and work out with knowledge, because some of them just learn by heart and days later they forget, which is not successful. To be successful, she thinks the students have to speak in class, explain things and present themselves, and successful students in her eyes are defined by the way they give their hands, the way they look in the eyes of others, the way they are dressed, and the way they’re smelled.
When she was a student, her study experience was horrible, she was kicked out of school twice, and had a lot of problems to get the final examination, since that time she always had the feeling that something or somebody is unfair, that’s why she thinks she can feel very deep inside about her students till now, for most of them are from low-class parents and can’t go to Gymnasium or Realschule, the education in the Hauptschule isn’t very lifted-up. However, she wants exactly to be a teacher in this type of school, and she believes it’s the love on the students to make her become a good teacher. One year later she would retire, and she believes in her life what she really did right was to become a teacher.
She doesn’t think she has changed what she believes on education, and she thinks her belief directs her teaching in the reality. She has respect on students and can feel them from the way they look and act, sometimes she is really mad at them, but when she looks at their eyes, the way they look back makes her feel sorry, then she tries to put it in a nice way. She always makes clearly what she means, so the students understand her behaviors. When students tell her that they don’t like the way she acts, she immediately apologizes and changes it. She always tries to help them as they are, and give them additional work to do, sheets to prepare, or put them at front of her table so she can watch them doing.
Whenever she prepares a test or a lesson, she always thinks about her students, about what kind of questions she has to ask them to get the right answers, so she tries to get everything good out of each student. She lets them do a lot of reports with different topics, and she likes to ask them in different ways, so they have to explain something to her. She likes to help students, but if someone doesn’t want help, she could get angry. If she gets some volunteer teachers watching her teaching, they are always very pleased with the way she teaches, because she makes a lot of jokes in class. She thinks it’s always different between belief and the reality, but it’s important for a teacher to be who he/she is, he/she doesn’t have to be an actor/actress, if he/she is not in a good mood, tell the students, they can feel it anyway.
5) GHU32F is a female teacher with 32 years of teaching in a Hauptschule, who teaches 25 students in one class of Grade 6 on the subjects of English, German, mathematics, geography, biology, history, music, and arts. She believes successful education is when teachers are able to teach students to help themselves, teach them how to learn, where to
get information and how to do with the information, and when teachers can manage to
get information and how to do with the information, and when teachers can manage to