Delegating to Students, November 18th, 2019

Tonight a coworker and perhaps new friend invited me to join him for dinner as I happened to see him while walking to get a bite to eat. His name is David, and he's from South Africa.

After he ordered for us in Arabic good enough to get his point across, we got seated and began conversing about teaching English at our college. We found a lot of common ground in our belief that it's good to have high expectations of students and also to find ways to practically bring them to bear within the classroom. For us, that means engineering a teaching style which enables students to take the initiative for their learning, teaches them critical thinking skills and, I would add, problem solving skills.

One of the ways David said he worked with his students was to delegate certain roles to them. For instance, one of the responsibilities of a teacher at our college is to give students permission to go to the bathroom. Since our students are fairly immature, it is a fact of teaching in Saudi that leaving the classroom must be rationed and controlled little learning would occur.

David said that he likes to give responsibility for choosing when and who goes to the bathroom to a student who enjoys the power of the role. For instance, if a student wants to go to the bathroom 10 minutes before an upcoming class break perhaps the power eager student will simply say, "No, you can wait for ten minutes. Go sit down."

He also said that he delegates responsibility for getting students cell phones from them to one student. I think this is a powerful way to give students responsibility, and offer them opportunities to learn from how they interact with students underneath their power. Additionally, it gives them a chance, as David told me, to practice for future roles they may have in their future careers.

We both agreed that while using English language learning in our classrooms, its not only possible but necessary to equip students with the practical skills of discipline, initiative, taking responsibility, and also pushing higher level students with individuated activities which keep them from becoming restless. One way that he said doing this was possible was to make that advanced student responsible for correcting the work of other students and helping them learn the material.

I am so excited to hear these ways of delegating responsibilities to students because it is directly in line with my educational philosophy, and is also a powerful and practical way to design and implement a classroom education structure which becomes self-perpetuating once students catch on to how it works.