Japanese teachers try co-teaching methods at DODEA schools in Okinawa

KADENA AIR BASE, Okinawa. Japanese elementary school teachers in Ginowan City recently visited the 18th Wing to receive a crash course in the new teaching method.

They were at Bob Hope Elementary School on Oct. 30 to learn about co-teaching models used by the Defense Education Agency, in which teachers team up to plan and coordinate lessons before teaching them together in the classroom.

Co-education is used in all DODEA classrooms, spokeswoman Miranda Ferguson told Stars and Stripes in an email Tuesday.

Four Japanese teachers worked with five Bob Hope fourth-grade teachers as students moved through the classrooms. Each class carried out various activities such as making posters and books related to the day’s topic – idioms.

While the students worked, Japanese and American teachers walked around each classroom, stopping occasionally to help a student with a question. At one point, the teacher pulled a group of students out of the main class to work on a project together.

“Let’s say there’s a kid there and they don’t know what to do, we can pull one or two kids to the table and then say, ‘OK, let’s work on this together,'” Sarah, fourth-grade teacher Bob Hope. Wood spoke to Stars and Stripes during a break from activity.

Five other Japanese teachers worked upstairs along with the school’s fifth-grade teachers.

There are several models of collaborative learning. In elementary schools, teachers in each grade usually plan lessons together—or, in the case of an exchange, work with Japanese teachers to plan the lesson.

“We also bring in specialists, like math and reading specialists, our multilingual teachers, our talented (special education) teachers,” Wood said. “… But basically it’s five teachers who plan together. We teach the same ideas in very similar ways.”

The idea for the exchange arose during conversations between Bob Hope director Christopher Kwiatek and Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the spring, Wood said.

“In the past, we held a lot of cultural events where students—Japanese and American students—gathered together and learned about their school and activities,” she said. “But we never did anything to encourage teachers to learn from each other.”

In January, Bob Hope’s fourth and fifth grade teachers will visit Shimashi Elementary School in Ginowan to learn how Japanese language classes are structured.

“We’ve still been able to have a lot of really meaningful conversations about what our teaching looks like and what their teaching looks like,” Wood said.

Fourth-grader Maryann Dyer said she liked the co-teaching model shown to Japanese teachers.

“It’s really big, so you’ll have more people to work with,” she said. “You can also experience two different types of teaching because they are two different types of teachers. So if I don’t understand something and another teacher explains it a little better than another teacher, then I can understand it a little better.”

Sakura Abe, a language teacher at Oyama Elementary School, said she hopes to increase cultural exchange between the local school and DODEA schools.

“I want to invite military personnel, their families and American schoolchildren to my school,” she said. “But I don’t know why the board of education in Japan and my school—sometimes I ask them, but they say it’s so hard to do.”