Education: Teacher takes a sabbatical – and finds the best lessons

One day Marie-Louise Spitta is standing on the property by the lake. Young people scurry back and forth, gardening with shovels and rakes, caring for the animals, growing vegetables and chopping wood. It’s a lesson in a seventh and eighth grade, at a Montessori school in Potsdam. But it’s different from what Spitta got to know.

On the property are not only the class and the, a gardener and a carpenter help with the lessons. The children don’t just work on that Garden, they should also prepare a market outside during this time, work out an offer, set prices. They ultimately want to sell the goods.

The children have to cooperate with each other, make decisions, divide up the work

Once a month, the students come to the lake for a week. Sure, at first she thought, ok, now the kids here just do nonsense all day long. But it turns out very differently. “The impressive thing was that each of the Children attached great importance to their own work. The children had to cooperate with each other, make decisions, divide up the work, distribute tasks,” says Spitta today.

The visit to the school in Potsdam and to the garden was part of a journey that Spitta made throughout Germany. Pretty much right after her teacher training course she got a “sabbatical year” taken a year off. Lots of people do it, some travel around the world, others go to Greece in a camper van, spend time with their families.

All were public schools, no private schools. That was important to Spitta

But Spitta made her way into German classrooms, visited five schools in Germany, spent a few weeks there, looked at different forms of teaching, collected ideas, experiences and impressions, and she kept records of them. Spitta did a waltz just like a carpenter goes on a waltz after his apprenticeship looking for the best lessons. All were public schools, no private schools. That was important to Spitta.

In the garden of the Potsdam school, Spitta learned one thing above all. That very free lessons have shown how children take responsibility for their own learning. A freedom that requires courage from a school in a system where lessons still usually happen in a classroom: teachers in front, students in rows of seats in front of them, then math, German, biology.

Spitta thinks that Germany should break up more strongly. Because that’s the everyday life that people meet after school. “A wild coexistence very different people and interests, such as business people, police officers, engineers, social workers.” It is one of the lessons from her journey.

Idealism – often crushed in the everyday life of frontal teaching

Spitta came up with the idea for her trip while she was studying. You’ve got it with passion pedagogy educated. But then this energy hit the wall of the German education system. “Even many prospective teachers still know school as a system of grades and predetermined learning structures. After graduating, I felt like I was caught in a merry-go-round: evaluate, give a grade and then tick it,” says Spitta. Her fear was that her “idealism” would be crushed in everyday lessons. So she decided: Get out of this everyday life.

Also read:What does artificial intelligence bring to the classroom?

Hardly any area of ​​society is discussed as emotionally as school. Many have children themselves in class, everyone has experienced it themselves. For decades, the German education policy much reformed. However, reforms fail again and again because of the necessary majority in politics, a lack of skilled workers, and federalism also grinds down ideas for new concepts.

An “educational experiment” is not always the right thing for the child

Curriculums still form a corset from which any fundamental deviation can trigger debate. Even many teachers complain about them Inertia of the German school system, would like to work more innovatively. And yet they often get stuck in everyday life in the classroom.

Experiments tend to take place at private schools, often with a lot of money from wealthy parents. But even there, the results are not always educational. And not always is a “educational experiment” right for the child. Every child is different. And for some, rigidity and clear structure in class, homework, grades can be the way to go.

To this day, experts argue about how good teaching works. Do you need grades for that? How digital Math, German or English are to be conveyed. who should be promoted. And what exactly. And teachers try out more, work with the children and young people in project work, and also involve external specialists, for example for media training.

On her trip, Marie-Louise Spitta also visits a gifted high school in Saxony. A school in an old building with heavy masonry. Attached is a vineyard that some of the children help to cultivate. In the mornings, as Spitta learns during her internship at the grammar school, the lessons are on the “fundamentum”, more classic, frontal, in the regular subjects. There the students write regular classwork.

“Proof of success” instead of class tests, “studio instead of rows of seats

In the afternoon, the “Additum” begins, an optional area in which the children can choose what interests them: Philosophy, art, music, chemistry, everything possible. In these electives, lessons are more flexible, says Spitta. The young people read a book about an ethical question and argue about it. Others shoot a music video, others build a model of a volcano and organize a “TED Talk”, an innovative debate format. “TED” is English and stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.

Spitta’s trip fell in the middle of the corona pandemic. Some stages she had to streamline, other visits to schools that she found exciting were canceled entirely. Her sabbatical was on the brink. And yet it somehow fits Marie-Louise Spitta’s sound that she made the best of a Corona sabbatical. Simply travel, improvise a bitjust do it – anyone who speaks to her can still hear this enthusiasm for new things today.

Spitta now teaches at the community school in Wutöschingen, at the southernmost tip of Baden-Württemberg. And actually, Spitta is not a “teacher” at all, but a “learning companion”. The everyday routine of curriculum, lessons, class work is broken up here. There are no grades, only “proof of success”.

Education policy: Space as a third pedagogue

There are no classrooms but “learning studios”, where the children have their own jobs, says Spitta. There, the students wear slippers and walk on carpeted floors. “I learned on my waltz how crucial space is for learning. Many schools underestimate this and still trust too much in the classic structure: blackboard, teacher’s desk, tables arranged in rows. We should break through this school architecture. The room is the third educator,” says Spitta. And even the school lesson does not have a fixed 45 minutes.

In addition to the learning studios, there are also “marketplaces” at her school, where young people can learn together. There is the “input room” with a digital blackboard, where teachers can also convey material in a classic way, explain math or English. And there are “Coaching Rooms” for the confidential conversation between the “learning companion” and the children. The school pays more attention to “social skills” than to “achievements” and wants students to take responsibility, follow rules and get involved in the community.

It wasn’t long ago that the school in the Black Forest community was on the brink of collapse and threatened with closure. Today the school has already won prizes with its architecture and class concept flagship model, is often visited by interested teachers from other schools. A major German newspaper recently wrote about the “Wutöschingen school miracle”.

“As a rule, everyone is always rushed: the teachers, the children, the authorities”

The young teacher Marie-Louise Spitta fits very well into this spirit of Wutöschingen. She says that school also needs “a new understanding of time”. “As a rule, everyone is always rushed: the teachers, the children, the authorities, the . we need one deceleration of education.” Without pressure, with time for deepening, people learn better, she is convinced of that.

In the afternoon, the school opens “clubs” where they can children and young people devote several hours to a topic. “This slows things down and gives learners and teachers more options in designing the learning processes than in a 45-minute cycle,” says Spitta. Incidentally, she got to know the school in Wutöschingen on her sabbatical trip, it was one of her stations in the search for good teaching.

More articles from this category can be found here: Politics