Schools

Middle School Hosts Japanese Teachers

A one-day learning experience has Japanese teachers observing classes in Hillsborough.

A regular school day turned into a multicultural experience for Hillsborough Middle School, when the school hosted Japanese teachers for a day.

A delegation of 13 Japanese teachers visited Hillsborough Middle School on Jan. 19, as part of a Rutgers University program in American Language Studies. The program, called PALS, has non-native speakers learning the language over a six-month period, for use in academic, professional, business and social situations.

“Rutgers University reached out to Matt Mingle, Supervisor of Social Studies/REACH, due to an ongoing partnership between Rutgers and Hillsborough for graduate coursework in gifted education for our teachers,” Kia Bergman, spokesman for the district, said. “This is the first time in recent memory that a visit like this has taken place. Mr. Mingle and Dr. Trybulski, Hillsborough Middle School principal, spent about a month working out the details and coordinating the various groups that participated in making the visit so successful.”

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Teachers at the school volunteered to have the Japanese visitors attend their classes for the day, with three of the school’s teams being selected for it. The teachers then selected student ambassadors who the Japanese delegates would shadow during the day.

The students also served as the go-to people for questions about the school, according to Matt Mingle.

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“They were very impressed by the positive relationships that exist between Hillsborough teachers and students,” he said. “In Japan, they said, classes are much more structured and rigid with little teacher-student interaction initiated by the students themselves. In Hillsborough, students are encouraged to express their ideas and debate differing viewpoints.”

While the students on the host teams knew about the visit, most of the school did not know about it until the day it arrived. They learned about it during the school’s morning announcements, according to Mingle.

“There was no special preparation as the visit was specifically to allow the Japanese teachers to see how a typical American middle school operates,” he said. “By the middle of the day, the Japanese teachers were ecstatic that students were greeting them in the hallways by saying hello in Japanese.”

The day featured a lunch between the Hillsborough and Japanese teachers midway through the day, and a follow-up meeting after the school day ended.

“The HMS teachers were excited to hear this feedback and had a great time sharing similar and different experiences,” Mingle said.

“One of the most notable differences between the two countries that came up during lunch discussion had to do with teacher assignment. In Japan, all teachers and principals get transferred to new schools every seven or so years. Teachers in Japan teach the same curriculum no matter where they teach in the country, with very little flexibility. In the United States, decisions about curriculum are left up to local school districts or, in some state, county school districts.”


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