"Who Am I? Why Am I Here?"

In the 1992 vice-presidential debate, Admiral Stockdale’s famous opening statement made a lot of sense. It wasn’t until Ross Perot’s running mate became a bit lost and confused later on in the evening that his introduction seemed worthy of ridicule. Yet in the middle of my service, on the brink of my second school year, I myself often feel a little uncertain and wonder why I’m here. Perhaps history (and Saturday Night Live) shouldn’t have judged the Admirable so harshly. I think these are questions worth asking at the beginning, middle, and end of anything challenging. Those in the development world call it M&E, monitoring and evaluation.

After spending the last academic year working with only one co-teacher, I decided to co-teach with two additional instructors starting this month. One of them is Sothol, the English department’s chair and technical leader. He’s responsible for overseeing the methodology and performance of our school’s six other English teachers in addition to his normal course load. A somewhat imposing man with pink Gucci eyeglasses, I avoided him much of last year because he either wanted to spend hours giving me politically skewed history lessons or seemed slightly perturbed by me.

Despite my initial reluctance, I decided to work with Sothol because he teaches the great majority of the grade 12 students that I worked with last year in grade 11. As the technical leader, I expected him to be a reasonable teacher, although I imagined that he was the kind to lecture and talk too much in the class. As it turns out, he does use his superior English skills to fill his class sessions with tangential stories about the day’s textbook lesson and little else. After my initial observation of Sothol, I had a clear answer to my opening question of purpose here in Cambodia.

I am here, among other reasons, to improve my co-teachers. While I wasn’t really sure how to do that last year, I feel much more confident now. After building relationships and cultural understanding over the past twelve months, I’m now better able to have discussions with counterparts and ask pointed questions. As a teacher, I’ve developed myself into a better role-model. I’m less inhibited and more willing to take cultural risks to achieve results.

This morning’s lesson with Sothol is an excellent example of how I’m setting out to achieve my vision of co-teacher improvement. Before class, I met Sothol in the lounge and asked him what he was planning to teach today. After he explained that the lesson would be about Buddhism, I asked him to identify his objectives for the students. Although he should be well-versed in writing lesson plans and objectives as the most veteran English teacher, he fumbled around and concluded that the objective was for “students to understand Buddhism.” I tried to reword my query and ask, “How will your students’ knowledge be changed at the end of class? What do you want them to know that they did not know before?” A long-winded answer ensued in which he explained that he did not want to change his students’ ideas about religion.

After pushing further and getting only vague responses about religion and Buddhism being the goal for the day, he finally said something that sounded like an objective. “Students should know about all the religions in the world. Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Taoism.” (Hmmm…) Given that our class period is about 45 minutes, I suggested as an objective that by the end of class students will be able to identify the following religions and the adjectives for people practicing them: Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Perhaps understanding the idea of an objective better, Sothol stated that students should know about all the ceremonies related to Buddhism because it is the most important religion in Cambodia. While I was about to explain that most students already know the names of the ceremonies and that there isn’t really a translation in English, our planning time was up, and we were left with these  two objectives.

In the classroom, Sothol took control first. He asked students questions about Buddhism. While frequently off the topic of ceremonies, he seemed to be activating background knowledge while involving a high percentage of the students in the classroom. After about 30 minutes, he’d written down the date, chapter, unit, and title of the lesson on the board with a few short notes of student responses. However, no teaching or learning had been done, and he seemed to be running out of steam.

I decided to jump in and model teaching the first objective about world religions while including new vocabulary from the book, “majority” and “minority.” I asked the students if all people in Cambodia are Buddhist. After an initial “yes” from most students, they seemed to realize their error. One boy explained that most people are Buddhist. Writing my question and his answer on the board, I continued with the sentence, “The majority of Cambodian people are Buddhist.” I drew a pie graph and engaged students in labeling the 95% Buddhist population. When asked about the remaining sliver, a few students knew the word “minority.” They listed the other religions they know that people practice in Cambodia.

From there, I made a T-chart with noun on one side and adjective on the other. The noun side also included the sentence, “I believe in ______.” and the adjective side had the sentence, “I am _____.” I called on a wide range of students to fill in the chart and encouraged (forced) them to copy what I’d put on the board. After the initial teaching, students were allowed to practice their new sentences and vocabulary, first directly with the teacher, and later amongst themselves. Ideally, there would have been more and varied practice, but the bell signaled the end of class.

The next step, then, in developing my co-teacher is debriefing the lesson and asking him what went well with his teaching and what could be improved upon. I’ll also ask him what he noticed about my lesson before continuing to the ultimate question. What did our students learn? (How do we know?) Repeat this entire cycle every week for about 30 weeks and hope for the best.

Honestly, Sothol has some great qualities as a person and teacher, but there is a lot of room for improvement. That’s (part of) what I’m doing here. As for who I am, well, that’s a subject for further consideration.