Pat WW CO-2

Monday was my second teaching observation. I observed Vicky Ledbetter’s 1A Grammar class. I was very impressed with her classroom management skills. I arrived 5 minutes early to introduce myself but Vicky was already there writing the class schedule on the board. Using a small section of the board, she had written the date and the agenda. She had written the subject headings of all the topic points she wanted to cover during that class. She had also assigned an amount of time to each topic: Discussion-10 min, Examples-10 min, Worksheet-15, etc. She also had some kind of Internet timer that projected a 10-minute countdown screen that projected through her PowerPoint presentation. At the end of the lesson point there was no need for a clever segue into the next part of the lesson. There was just a “Let’s move on to our next point.” Then she would call on someone to read the next agenda item and they would move on.

I made only one negative observation. The class was held in our 403 classroom. But the table next to the door had been pushed into the middle tables making one big table with one small table near the window. All the men sat around the larger table and dominated the class discussions. The 2 women (both wearing the headscarf) and I sat at the smaller table. I could see these women had a hard time entering the discussion.

I am aware of the gender separations in some Middle Eastern cultures and I have seen how people “automatically” group themselves in this way. But, as a teacher, would it be possible to “migrate” the women’s table to the middle of the classroom? There would still be a separation but I believe the women would have an easier time joining the discussion. Cultural Imperialism? Classroom Darwinism? Comment PLEASE.