The students who brought about change

Summary: The school embraces diversity as a strength and faces a new challenge as non-Hungarian-speaking students, impacted by nearby conflict, arrive at the school.

School is not a boring routine: no two days are alike, and no two groups are exactly the same. Every day brings a new challenge, for which there are best practices, but every situation is different. Our school's strength has always been its diversity, and the teachers here have treated this as an opportunity rather than a problem.

In recent years, a new challenge has emerged in our school, as in others: children have arrived who do not speak Hungarian. The war in our vicinity has only exacerbated this situation. School staff had to learn new methods to integrate students who cannot speak a common language with their peers into daily life. In elementary school, this was achieved fairly quickly; experience showed that the younger a student was when they arrived at school, the easier it was for them to integrate. Of course, this required a tremendous amount of work on the part of the teachers, and the students' openness also played an important role in this.

Summary: The school launches its first 9th-grade class with students from 10 countries, where the classmaster overcomes language barriers to build trust with three non-Hungarian speakers.

In September 2023, we launched our first high school class. We felt it was important for the school to continue to reflect society, where all students work together, as we must prepare them to learn to live alongside one another and cooperate with one another.

The 9th grade started with 36 students from 10 different countries, including several students with special educational needs or learning difficulties. We began the year with a community-building camp, where the students treated each other with exemplary kindness: after just one hour, it was no longer clear who had previously been classmates or friends; everyone was getting to know everyone else. Within the school walls, however, it was evident that teaching and learning the curriculum in a language the students did not know posed a challenge. Everyone was familiar with the system's rules: every student must meet a uniform set of requirements and do so in Hungarian.

As a classmaster, I felt an even greater responsibility to ensure that the students could hold their own in the classroom and meet the requirements. There were three students who didn't speak the language: Yahia, who came from Egypt and spoke English at a native level; Marina, who came from Kazakhstan and spoke only Russian; and Nikita, who came from Ukraine and spoke Ukrainian and Russian perfectly and also knew English quite well. As a student, I had studied German and only switched to English in high school, so I wasn't confident speaking English. Here, however, I had no choice: if I wanted to talk to the students without translation apps, I had to speak English. Communication with Yahia and Nikita worked out this way, but Marina only knew Russian. The quickest way I could communicate with her was to tell Nikita in English what I wanted to say, and she would translate from English to Russian and vice versa.

Summary: Teachers collaborate to support non-Hungarian students through translation tools, adapted assignments, multilingual instruction, and dedicated Russian-speaking staff support.

After that, we met more and more often outside of class, and a trusting relationship quickly developed between us. They told me about the difficulties they were facing, and I tried to find solutions for them. Fortunately, all of my colleagues prioritised the human aspect and supported the students: everyone allowed the students to use translation programmes, and everyone received assignments in the language they requested. Of course, at first we ran into situations where the solution came back in Russian. We have a colleague who speaks Russian, so he also helped grade the papers, even though he didn't teach the class. We also had another colleague who agreed to be available to all Russian-speaking students at the school if they had any problems, since he also knows Russian. The students turned to him with confidence. Later, we were able to adapt the structure of the assignments for the three students so that they could complete them more easily. More and more of us began teaching in two or three languages; often, we didn't even notice that we were speaking in a foreign language.

Summary: The classmaster pulls students for targeted Hungarian language study, sourcing textbooks and aligning grading to build their academic confidence across subjects.

I consulted with my colleagues, and whenever possible, I took the students out of class—even just one lesson at a time—and we began studying in Hungarian. The saddest part was that the students were capable of performing above average in their own language, so they had to face the fact that even though they were capable of it, their lack of language skills greatly slowed them down and even prevented them from achieving a sense of success. Fortunately, I found a lot of teaching materials for learning Hungarian, so I tried to use as varied methods as possible, even though I am not a language teacher. I couldn't accept that such talented students should face constant failure.

I consulted with my qualified colleague to find out which language textbook he would recommend for learning the language, and I purchased them for the students, which allowed me to prepare for the language classes with greater awareness. My colleague also agreed that I would grade the students' work, so they received grades in Hungarian language and literature based on their performance in the Hungarian as a Foreign Language class. During these sessions, we also discussed what difficulties they were having in other subjects, so we studied history, physics, and everything else together in Hungarian, and organised their tasks. In addition, the students were helped by their classmates, although Nikita was very reserved and preferred to work alone.