EDUC 5210 Unit 6 Discussion
As a teacher in an International Baccalaureate (IB) International School, I have significant
experience with a transient student body. At my school, approximately 70% of students are from
international families, where (in most cases) the parents are journalists or work for the UN or
consular organizations. Those students tend to come from other IB schools or at the very least,
progressive international schools. The remaining 30% of the student body are local students, sent
to our school most commonly because the quality of the education they can get with us is better
than what is available in the local Arab system. Their parents are keen for them to be educated in
English and have the means to pay the fees. Some local students are with us for their entire
school career. Other are sent in grade 10 or 11, with the express purpose of studying for the
International Baccalaureate diploma. As we are a non-selective school, everyone is welcome.
Some students, particularly some of the locals, struggle with the IB program when they enter our
school late in their education.
The education in East Jerusalem schools culminates with the Jordanian Tawjihi exams. In
grade 12. The exams and the whole system is what Freire called a “banking system” of
education. “In this form of education the teacher deposit in the minds of the learners who are
considered to be empty or ignorant, bits of information or knowledge, much like we deposit
money in a [empty] bank account” (Rugut & Osman, 2013,p. 24 ). There is a behaviorist
approach to both academics and discipline those schools. Although most of the students coming
to us from that system have excellent spoken English (which is our language of instruction), that
can be misleading…Their writing skills in English are often not strong, but this is not always the
case and, when it is, it is a “defined” challenge, which can be addressed. The larger issue is
something it took us a number of years to understand. Students come in to our progressive,
constructivist system, and rather than feeling liberated and excited at the possibility for dynamic,
creative study, they feel overwhelmed and are--quite frankly--unprepared. They are not used to
making choices in their learning. Further compounding the problem is that they traditional
educational system from which they come has a fixed mindset culture. (I could also say the same
for some of our international students coming to us from more traditional educational systems
from other parts of the world). The problem is that students coming in to a system like ours,
where curriculum involves complex hierarchies and where expectations for student independence
and agency are high, simply do not understand what we want from them! This is not an EAL
issue, nor is it a cognitive issue. Writing this now, it seems like it should have been obvious, but
it was not—and students were not able to articulate their feelings or advocate for themselves, as
those very skills involve a complex level of affective skills which they had not previously been
asked to develop