To help people of interested countries meet their needs for trained men and women. [1]
Peace Corps service is a slow-burn: it takes a while to figure it out, to get comfortable with it, and to make it work successfully [2]. Rare is the Volunteer who is highly successful in their first year; this time is usually spent building relationships, learning about your community, and figuring out the rhythm of your worksite. If you’re lucky, you’ve got more experienced Volunteers in your area including you in projects and handing down institutional knowledge and life lessons. On your own, you might conduct needs assessments and begin thinking about future projects, but you’re really just getting your legs underneath you. Why? Peace Corps’ idea of development is capacity building; in the spirit of sustainability, we don’t want to come in and do a thing ourselves. Ideally, we’d teach our Cambodian counterparts how to do that thing instead. It’s the manifestation of the hackneyed proverb: Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime. Because we ultimately want to feed people for a lifetime, and we want to help people help themselves, we can’t show up and immediately start changing lives with all of our “fresh” thinking and top-down implementation. It takes time to make an impact within this view of development, and it’s an extremely compelling reason for Peace Corps service lasting two years.
2. Not unlike being one of my friends.
But, if you’re me, you sometimes think you know better than everyone else [3]. So, after spending all of two months at my site, I came up with a plan that strayed remarkably from what I’ve described above. My heart was in the right place (I think): I reasoned, in the spirit of sustainability, that it would be more impactful for me to improve the teaching methods of the teacher trainers. I might work with about 200 trainees during my service [4], but the trainers would keep meeting 70 new trainees every year. If I could get them using and demonstrating better methodology, they’d keep “spreading the gospel” long after I’m gone, possibly reaching thousands of future English teachers in Cambodia. It’s a pyramid scheme for good, and the teacher trainers would become my acolytes.
Here’s an abridged version of what I came up with: I’d work with a regular schedule as a co-teacher of English as a Foreign Language, but be a resource specialist with the English major trainers. I’d work very closely with one trainer over a period of two weeks, conduct observations of his teaching, meet to discuss areas of improvement, come up with a plan, and follow-up with more observations before moving to the next trainer. This was highly individualized professional development that would trickle down and eventually improve the quality of English education in the country. It was very creative and original, and I thought it would make the best use of my unique skills and talents in the relatively short time I had to spend here. [5]
3. Humility is typically not a strong suit of mine.
4. Which ain’t nothin'.
5. If you’d like more details about this plan, you can reach back into the archives and read this post, written before my hubris got the best of me.
A man who’s in a hurry won’t live to see the end of his stretch--he’ll tire and be done for.
Ivan Denisovich, in Solzhenitsyn (p. 116) [6]
Shockingly (or not), this plan didn't work. There were a variety of reasons for this, only some of which had to do with me being a jackass: this is a conservative culture where change doesn’t come quickly or easily [7], and, despite my policy-making course at CSUF, I failed to get strong by-in from the most important group of stakeholders, the trainers themselves. Some of them were clearly reluctant to work with me from the get-go, and some were not willing or able to engage in the process of reflection and adjustment in which professional educators in America (should) regularly engage. By February or March of 2013, the wheels had clearly fallen off. I finished out the school year piecing together a full work schedule with more TEFL classes and co-teaching one of the first year English Methodology classes [8]. In the cycle of vulnerability and adjustment, I’d reached my “mid-service crisis” a little ahead of schedule, but then again, I’ve always been mature for my age.
7. The lives of farmers, the vast majority of the population, have changed relatively little in the last 1,000 years.
8. There are more details about the failure of this plan and its emotional impact on me in this post about what I did to recover from an extended bout of depression.
Although other people have told me otherwise, I didn’t feel like my first year was particularly successful. To me, two positives were evident: 1) Vanessa [9] and I had created and conducted a workshop on classroom management methods that was highly effective, and 2) my TEFL co-teacher and I were the only teachers who showed up for work on the last day of school because we’re badass professionals. My English teaching felt (and sounded) successful, but the numbers didn’t back it up: using the metrics of class averages on monthly exams, my students scored nearly 20% lower after learning with me for several months than they had before I showed up to “help” [10]. Most importantly, my Rube Goldberg primary project plan completely crashed and burned rather than revolutionizing the Cambodian educational system in the way that I had hoped.
9. My K5 site mate at the RTTC.
10. To be fair to myself, I think this has less to do with my teaching than it does with the shortcomings of the assessments used.
But, the good news about a Peace Corps service is that it’s built for endurance. Arguably, no matter how badly you muck up your first year, there’s time for you to make a comeback in your second and feel like you made a positive contribution before leaving. As the clock ran out on Year One, I took an expertly-timed (and lengthy) vacation home [11], which was mentally and physically rejuvenating while giving me time to figure out what I wanted Year Two to look like.
11. Part I, Part II.
The Second Act
12. PCVLs are third-year Volunteers based in Phnom Penh that do a variety of tasks around headquarters. One of her many duties is to monitor ET3 PCV blogs, including this one, to make sure we aren’t destroying American-Khmer relationships with public bitterness and disappointment. Hi, Christin!
13. Part of the “Fish Hook” targeted by Nixon and Kissinger, I believe.
By March 2013, when my program manager came for a site visit, I had already made the determination that attempting to improve the trainers’ teaching ability was a bit quixotic. More feasible was focusing on another major strand of our project framework, improving the teaching ability of the trainees. Less quixotic and rather more machiavellian, I realized that working with the English trainers was just a way to get access to the trainees. Access was the new name of the game. Once I had access, I’d work to indoctrinate them with radical ideas like “alignment,” “student-centered learning,” and “gender equality.” After stumbling, fumbling, and bumbling through the first year of my service, I had a better idea of what spheres I could operate in in order to be successful. This didn’t ensure that I would be successful, but it kept me from banging my head against a wall and gave me far more of a chance to see improvements in my trainees.
In this second year of my service, which roughly corresponds to the academic calendar in Cambodia [14], I would focus the lion’s share of my attention on the 2013-2014 Year Two English trainees. Forgive the non-gender neutral colloquialism, but these were my “guys:” their first year at the RTTC was also my first year at the RTTC; they will graduate around the same time that I complete my service; they were the trainees I went to observe during practicum last May, and the ones I was gradually getting to know as I co-taught more and more of their Methodology course last year. There are 66 of them, evenly divided between males and females and between two classes, and overwhelmingly between the tender, impressionable ages of 18 and 22.
14. And which is now more than half-finished (gasp!).
How does one go about making someone without a lot of classroom experience a better teacher? This year, I’ve been far more strategic and have attacked it from a few angles.
The Co-Teaching
When the dust of having a new school director and the seemingly random parceling out of class hours settled, I was spending 12 hours a week co-teaching Methodology to Year Two trainees with two different co-teachers. This course spans both years of the training process, and gradually builds the trainees’ knowledge of what they will need to teach and how we’d like them to teach it. They learn about eliciting vocabulary, introducing new grammatical structures and functions, and designing lessons that focus on practicing one of the four language skills [16].
15. Morning sessions only on Saturday.
16. Reading, Writing, Listening, and Speaking.
In years past, the entire kingdom of Methodology had been the domain of one trainer, who we’ll call Trainer 1. He has about twelve years of experience as a teacher trainer, and has a very high level of English proficiency. This year, however, the Year Two Methodology classes were divided into one focused on Reading/Listening and another on Speaking/Writing. Trainer 1 and I teach the Reading/Listening class. The Speaking/Writing class belongs to me and Trainer 2 , who only has five or six years of experience as a teacher trainer but has far more experience as a classroom teacher and a teacher of English as a Foreign Language [17]. Working with these two trainers this year allowed me to spend time teaching both classes of Year Two English trainees, getting to know them better, working to introduce more participatory instructional methods, and plugging my various secondary projects [18].
17. Much of my work schedule during the first year of service was spent co-teaching English development classes to non-English trainees with Trainer 2.
18. More details below.
However, when you’re a native English speaker and a Peace Corps Volunteer, everyone wants a piece of you. In order to not be a dick, I also scheduled two hours with each class of Year One English trainees [19]: one session of Methodology (undivided in Year One) with Trainer 1, and one session of ILT with Trainer 3. Trainer 3 is very young, is in his second year at the RTTC, and is new to the methodology side of the aisle: he spends most of his time as a TEFL instructor [20].
19. This group will not become full-fledged teachers until I’m lone gone and returned to the United States.
20. In addition to my teaching hours with both years of English majors, I also teach one of these English classes to a group of Year Two chemistry trainees. It’s Trainer 3’s class, but as he stopped showing up for the sessions after the third week, I’d hesitate to call it “co-teaching.”
Observation and Feedback
The next significant change happened in early February when the Year Two trainees began their practicum, a period of eight weeks [22] spent teaching in local junior high and high schools. At this point, I transitioned from teaching in the classroom at the RTTC to observing the English trainees full-time. In a typical week, I visit four or five of the six local schools that take our trainees, observing an average of ten trainees for a total of about twenty classroom hours. Once their lesson finishes, I immediately provide them with basic feedback; I keep my observation form and their lesson plan to provide a more detailed critique to be returned to them next time I visit the school.
With one more week to go, I’ve been able to visit 26 of the 33 trainees from peer teaching (one of them twice), and 14 of the remaining 33 (with two complete data sets, so far). Aside from providing the trainees with crucial sets of feedback, these observations will also help me report the bulk of my technical “success” as a Volunteer: improving the teaching ability of the trainees. [23]
21. Created by myself and my former site-mate, Vanessa.
22. Currently on-going.
23. For a more detailed discussion of the system of data collection and management I created to compare peer teaching/initial observations to later observations during practicum, you should consult this highly technical but surprisingly zippy article I wrote for the Peace Corps-Cambodia VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee) Newsletter earlier this month.
The Secondary Projects
The English Teaching Club is a spin-off of an English Club, a very popular secondary project with Volunteers all over the world. In the typical version, a PCV (not necessarily an English teacher) will organize regularly scheduled meetings for any locals interested in practicing English or learning about American culture. This can include younger children from around their site, students they know from school, or even older adults in the area. Last year, when I was mostly teaching English Language Development classes, I myself had one of these English Clubs, open to any trainee in any of my classes. Unfortunately, it petered out after about a month when I had only three participants for a lesson on American weddings that I spent hours preparing [24].
This year, my English Teaching Club is only open to my Year Two English trainees, and the focus is on improving their teaching abilities rather than English development [25]. The curriculum for the six week-run prior to practicum was based on a scholarly article detailing common blunders made by new teachers [26], and I painstakingly introduced the concepts of professional development, backwards design, and curricular alignment [27]. We are currently on hiatus while the trainees are out at practicum, but I hope to start up again when they return to the RTTC...and after we finish the Khmer New Year holiday, which takes at least two weeks of instructional time in April. The remaining sessions will be used to tackle lesser teaching topics (error correction, giving instructions, using pairs/small groups, etc.) and the demonstration of practical techniques/activities that they will be able to implement in their classes.
24. A microcosm of teaching if I ever saw one.
25. Although, since the entire session takes place in English with lots of technical terminology, they’re getting English practice in there, too.
26. The simplified and much shorter summary I used with my trainees is available here.
27. Here is a helpful concept map I created and distributed to that end.
28. My own training program at Cal State Fullerton is highly respected and includes two full semesters of student teaching, and I still found myself unprepared to be a full-time teacher when the time came. It’s impossible to replicate the experience of running your own classroom through any kind of controlled setting.
The first was a general introduction to positive methods of classroom management, created last year with the help of my site mate, K5 Vanessa. It was a little more difficult to present it by myself, but it was once again successful in providing practical ways for the trainees to deal with the minor misbehaviors that are most common in Cambodian classrooms. I followed that up with a session focused on managing and leading large classes (35+ students), a condition I knew my trainees would encounter during practicum [29] and later in their careers. I introduced general principles for working with that many students and provided specific techniques and activities to put those principles into practice. Unfortunately, this workshop was postponed once to allow for a school-wide volleyball tournament, then was cancelled the next week due to a mandatory meeting of the Year Two trainees with the school director [30]. I ultimately had to use my own class time for this workshop, which meant two smaller sessions instead of one big one. The next topic, most likely in May after we return to school from Khmer New Year, will be working with multi-level classes [31]. In June, I’d like to present about assessments in the language classroom, and, if there’s time for another workshop, finish with a demonstration of strategies, activities, and games. My initial hope was to make several sets of all of these resources to leave with the trainers and the RTTC, but realistically, I’ll probably just pass on soft copies and files. I’d love for this curriculum to live on, and I hope it won’t be necessary for my replacement to reinvent the wheel.
29. Most of the schools have 8th grade classes with upwards of 60 students, 50-75% of whom show up on a regular basis.
30. Hey, it’s Cambodia!
31. In this context, a single class with a starkly differing mixture of English abilities, an extremely common occurrence in Cambodian schools.
The Payoff
Because we’re a federal agency, there’s a significant degree of data collection and attempts to quantify things that can be extremely difficult to quantify (like effective teaching). I’ve seen positive trends throughout practicum, but even if the numbers don’t end up spectacularly successful when this all finishes, I will still feel that I’ve done just about everything in my power to help my trainees become the best English teachers they can possibly be.
Given that my previous professional life was perfectly suited for the job I ended up doing with the Peace Corps, I’ve always been a Volunteer who focuses most of my efforts on our First Goal, providing technical assistance. Since my initial attempts failed so spectacularly, I couldn’t be more pleased at the way the ship has righted itself this year. I anticipate finishing my service with a sense of accomplishment and with little regret. It would’ve been very easy to fold like a cheap card table after the initial adversity, to quit and go home, or to stay here and “roll out the balls” [32] until the clock wound down. Instead, like the legendary Phoenix, I emerged from the ashes renewed.
32. This is a baseball term reserved for those who aren’t physically or mentally prepared for a game, and in fact are just going through the motions.
You could start calling me The Phoenix, but I already have much cooler nicknames. Captain America, Big Sexy, and Nicky Duck, just to name a few.
Until next time,
- N
PS: About two months ago, I was approached by the Director of Development Communications for the Curry School at the University of Virginia (but one distinguished alma mater of mine). I was asked to write a guest post for their blog on my Peace Corps service and how it connected to my graduate studies. This was recently published, and is available to view here.