Visiting Berufskolleg Bonn-Duisdorf
The main event of our fifth day in Germany was visiting Berufskolleg Bonn-Duisdorf, a vocational high school. After learning about the German education system on Friday and having so many questions about how it works in real life, I was excited about visiting the school and interacting with students.
We arrived at the school and were escorted through the campus and right away I was struck by how different the atmosphere was here than what I see in high schools at home. It felt more like a community college campus: no bells, students and teachers coming and going as they needed to, people hanging out quietly socializing and working. Right from the get-go, it felt unlike any school I've ever been to.
We met in a small cafe that was in the center of the school. Pastries, coffee, water (gas only! 🙃), and gummi candies (we are in Bonn, after all) were set out for us. The host teachers introduced themselves and then turned us over to the students. The students who greeted us were part of the A-level English class, what we would maybe think of as an honors class, and they planned out our whole visit for us. We teachers were eager to talk, so we may have bombarded the kids a bit, but after a few minutes, clusters of students, teachers, and Fulbrighters were chatting and snacking.
Here's how we spent the rest of our day:
It was great to see a vocational school in action and to hear directly from students. Here are some of my takeaways, presented in no particular order:
Kids graduate from this school with practical skills; when kids graduate from U.S. schools, what exactly are they prepared for?
The focus of this school is business and agriculture
This school is a "Europaschule" meaning it has an international and intercultural emphasis (see the mural above)
Most of these students speak English so well; it reminds me of the joke that I heard back in Spanish camp when I was in high school:
What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks one language? American.
In their English language class this past year, the kids learned about the American Revolution and the founding documents
It was the end of the school year and, even though the assignment that the students in the office management class that I observed (I was in Group A) was fairly simple, it was still an actual assignment, unlike what happens during the last week of my school.
Because we were there, the kids presented that assignment in English
Teachers at this school switched classrooms, the students don't; the teacher's lounge was a huge room full of tables and teachers had their things spread out all over the place
The students in the landscaping class were old, some as old as 22 or 23
The landscaping students went to school for two weeks, then worked for one week; they also got paid a decent wage during this internship
The landscaping kids were goofing around just like the students that we see back home, but when it was time to give a presentation and answer our questions, they were pretty impressive
From what our host students told us, the drop-out rate seemed about the same as my local high school, but there were more opportunities to re-enter the system
Students start internships when they are young and continue them throughout the year; they get very practical experience in their field (for the ag students, that's literal 🥁)
The students have many opportunities for exchanges; these are as short as a couple of weeks or as long as a school year. One exchange that some of the students went on was in Spain for three weeks when they were in 8th grade; two weeks were supervised and the last week all of the students lived on their own!
One of the most charismatic kids was Noah. Noah gave a talk about his experience and it was pretty insightful. After not being successful in pursuing his A-levels, he went overseas for two years, then re-entered school and is back on track with his A-levels. He's now 20 years old -- the oldest in his class -- and is set to finish school next year and be heading into university. The German system offers many more paths to success than what we see here in the U.S.
Even though these students weren't attending the highest level school in the German system, they were, in my mind, indistinguishable from the highest performing students that I see in my local high school.
My favorite question was if American students really went to school in yellow school buses.
Visiting Berufskolleg Bonn-Duisdorf helped me see that the German system was not as rigid as I first thought. In fact, one of its greatest strengths is that there are so many options available for students. The focus seems to be on preparing students for the real world by actually having them do things in the real world.
One of my essential questions for this trip was to see what kinds of engagement strategies were used in German classrooms. With a system that looks like this, student engagement is baked right in. They are actually in the real world working towards what they are interested in. What can be more engaging than that?
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