Foreign specialist teachers
Emerging in a new language

Rukiye Samanci knew exactly how to explain maths - but only in her mother tongue. At first, she sometimes felt like the little mermaid who dreams of a prince above the water but has no voice to speak to him.

Rukiye Samanci came from Turkey to Germany five years ago. Now she teaches maths at a secondary school in Remscheid, thanks to her training in North Rhine-Westphalia’s Lehrkräfte PLUS programme.

Rukiye Samanci (36) always had a prince by her side: her husband looked after their daughter, took care of the household and kept her spirits up whenever the going got tough during her years of language and teacher training in Germany. “But as a teacher who loves her job, my goal was to thank the country I live in with my talents,” she recounts. After teacher training in maths and natural science and then teaching at a school in her native Turkey, Rukiye emigrated to Germany. She was well versed in modern teaching methods and wanted to share her knowledge with German schoolkids as effectively as possible. At the outset, however, her command of German fell far short of her professional qualifications. “I made mistakes when speaking German, plus my tongue muscles had to get used to the new sounds,” the 36-year-old teacher explains with a laugh.

But now she feels at home and accepted at the German school where she works. As a maths teacher, she banks on thoroughly prepping for her classes, motivating kids by using playful learning platforms like Kahoot, tutorial videos and the Anton learning app, for example, and cooperation with the parents and her colleagues. “Social workers, special education teachers and other teachers as well as the school administration help out when there are problems with kids disrupting class,” she says. From a colleague with whom she’s now co-teaching her first class she has even learnt some “bureaucratese” – from Attestpflicht (i.e. sick note required in case of absence) to Notebook-Leihvertrag (i.e. notebook-computer loan agreement). At first, when her pupils didn’t understand the material, she often assumed it was on account of her German. But then she conducted an anonymous survey among her pupils and talked to some of the teachers they’d had before. She soon found out that most of the pupils who weren’t doing very well in her class were not studying at home or had always had a hard time with maths. Her work was highly regarded by everyone. Rukiye Samanci now has a steady job teaching there.

The long, rocky road to teaching school in Germany

This makes Rukiye one of the few immigrant teachers to have made it all the way down the long, rocky road to teaching in a German school. In a 2021 report entitled ‘Verschenkte Chancen?!' Die Anerkennungs- und Beschäftigungspraxis von migrierten Lehrkräften (“‘Wasted Opportunities?’ Certification and Employment of Immigrant Teachers in Practice”), the German Education and Science Workers’ Union estimated that 80 per cent of teachers trained abroad fail to get their foreign credentials officially certified in Germany. And the Bertelsmann Foundation, in its 2023 discussion paper Zugewanderte Lehrkräfte für eine chancenorientierte Schule: Potenzial in Perspektiven verwandeln! (“Immigrant Teachers for Opportunity-Orientated Schools: Turning Potential into Prospects!”), finds that the certification processes take too long, don’t make adequate allowance for previous professional experience and, because they require two subjects, all too seldom result in unconditional certification. Remedial courses require a high level of German language proficiency and are not tailored to the target groups’ needs. On the other hand, several German Länder, including Berlin, Bremen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, are planning to make it easier for teachers to get their foreign qualifications certified and resume their profession here, as called for in a March 2023 statement by the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK). Rukiye Samanci was very self-disciplined in the pursuit of her goal – and pretty lucky, too: she’d already trained in two subjects back in Turkey and here in Germany she got a chance to study German up to level C1. The languages courses she took were held at an adult education centre and at university, and they were funded by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees and by the local job centre. And then she landed one of the coveted places in Lehrkräfte PLUS, a free programme specially designed to help foreign teachers resume their profession in North Rhine-Westphalia. Through the Lehrkräfte PLUS programme, she took some more German courses for a year as well as courses of pedagogical and intercultural training, and attended seminars on subject-specific teaching methods, whilst getting extensive teaching practice at a German school. The job centre covered her living expenses during this training. Although it can take in only 125 trainees, Lehrkräfte PLUS is the biggest programme of its kind in Germany – and reputed to be one of the most successful. Similar programmes elsewhere in Germany include the Refugee Teachers Programme in Brandenburg, the InterTeach programme in Schleswig-Holstein, the IGEL programme for the integration of refugee teachers in Baden-Württemberg and a wide variety of courses all over the country that must be successfully completed for certification of professional qualifications.

Gaining confidence in day-to-day teaching

In the course of day-to-day school life, teachers have to cope with all sorts of different challenges. They have to explain how to log an experiment and other assignments, give their pupils constructive feedback, break up schoolyard fights and quarrels, meet with parents, take notes at school meetings and report on their teaching approaches at faculty meetings. In the Lehrkräfte PLUS programme, foreign teachers develop the verbal skills they need to handle situations like these, which they then practise and discuss in role-playing exercises and simulated classroom situations. The general language training is supplemented by a specialized language course focusing on STEM subjects as well as a series of interdisciplinary workshops on “professional communication in the school context”. In one module on “Arriving at School”, teachers learn how to handle their first day(s) at a new school, i.e. how to introduce themselves to their colleagues with the aid of a prepared personal description, how to conduct a getting-acquainted session with a new class and how to react appropriately to taboo questions from their pupils. Another module on “Communicating with Colleagues” provides training in describing roles and responsibilities, differentiating between formal and informal situations, and taking part in meetings and conferences, among other things. Another module, called “Communicating with Parents”, is about formulating letters to parents, understanding the NRW “School Development” guidelines for parent-teacher meetings, initiating those meetings and handling potential conflict situations. Training immigrant teachers is a subject long overlooked in academic research. “In recent years, research on teaching German as a foreign/second language has rightly concentrated primarily on immigrant pupils,” explains Anja Häusler, a GFL expert who coordinates specialized language courses at Ruhr University in Bochum and has played a leading role in the Lehrkräfte PLUS programme since its launch in 2017. In her work, Häusler focuses on immigrant teachers’ educational backgrounds and experience rather than their language deficits. “Teaching German as a foreign or second language requires a constant change of perspective,” she says. “In every class, I try to drive home to the participants the language and meta-skills they already possess. Because only if they have confidence in their skills and in their ability to improve those skills can immigrant teachers work confidently in a school context in the medium term.” Autonomy, continuity, and intrinsic motivation are also essential, she adds, in training foreign teachers effectively. “If you’re seriously interested in your profession, invest time in continuously improving your professional skills.”

Role model for kids

After completing the Lehrkräfte PLUS programme, Rukiye Samanci could have undergone further training in a follow-up programme for foreign teachers called Internationale Lehrkräfte fördern (ILF). It’s the only programme of its kind in Germany and she thinks highly of it. But she still wouldn’t have had the formal prerequisites for a permanent post at a German school and, seeing as her German language skills were actually good enough at that point, she decided instead to take part in a one-year “introduction-to-teaching” programme, which is actually designed for German career changers who want to go into teaching. During that period, she was paid the standard salary for German schoolteachers. “Besides a lot of German engineers who wanted to go into teaching, there were three women from abroad like me who’d already taught school,” she recounts. Although she had already covered the subject matter during the Lehrkräfte PLUS programme, she still learned a lot from classroom visits, from the seminars and the feedback she got from her seminar leader, as well as from her daily interactions with the German and foreign participants.

Rukiye Samanci writes about her experiences as a Turkish teacher of maths in Germany on her Instagram account GutesGefühl (“Good Feeling”) and she hopes that as a teacher she can also serve as a role model for immigrant kids in her class. In any case, she’s building a bridge for these youngsters between different cultures and languages. She’s convinced that open communication and a trusting relationship are more important than perfect pronunciation. She tells her classes, “I don’t speak like a German, but I understand you and you understand me. And I’m a master at maths, so that’s something you can learn from me.” And she’s right about that. With her very personal perspective on life and learning, Rukiye Samanci is a great asset to her school. ihre Schule.