Teaching With and After Covid-19 in Germany
Monday, August 3, 202012-1:30 pm Eastern Time (US) / 6-7:30 pm German time
Zoom Webinar
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About the Event
While Massachusetts schools are considering how to reopen for the fall after months of lockdown, schools in Germany already reopened in May and experimented with different protocols of social distancing, staggering classes, extending the workday etc.
In this live conversation with German teachers we discuss their experience: What worked well? What challenges did they face? How did the measures work for different age groups? What recommendations would they make to schools in the US?
About the Speakers
Stefanie Brand has been teaching at the elementary school level since 2003. She has worked in different schools in Schleswig-Holstein (in the very North of Germany) and for the last 12 years in Laufenburg - a small town close to the Swiss border in the very South of Germany. In 2016 she became deputy head of school, introducing full day schooling. The Hebelschule Laufenburg is a three tier elementary school with approx. 300 pupils at two locations. Since 2017 she has been serving as principal.
Christine Hallaschka has been teaching English for 18 years and is now Head of English at the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Kassel, a classic and traditional secondary school in the heart of Germany. Students at her school are between 10 and 19 years old and all have English as a second language being taught 4-5 lessons a week. They leave school with the Abitur in order to apply for university afterwards. Christine also teaches RE (=Religious Education), a mandatory subject at German schools, dealing with questions of ethics and philosophy and world religions. In Kassel the Abitur exams this year were the first ones that had to be organized in person despite the lockdown due to Coronavirus in Germany.
At the beginning of her teaching career Katrin Westphal worked as a teacher at different comprehensive schools for several years. Since 2011 she has now been teaching Spanish and English at Leibniz-Gymnasium in Bad Schwartau, a small town in the north of Germany near the city of Lübeck, with many of her students coming from rural areas. She mostly teaches Spanish, because there is a high demand. Students are aged 10 - 19 and finish school with German Abitur.
Mareike Wijers-von Mering has been teaching at Schiller-Gymnasium Berlin for 16 years. Her subjects are English and Biology, but she has been teaching Biology in English for most of the time. The Schiller-Gymnasium provides a mixture of regular German-taught classes and some classes in which a few subjects (Biology, History, Geography, Music, political science) are taught in English (at the level of native speakers) while other subjects are taught in German. Students are aged 13-19 and finish school with the German Abitur.