on parkinson's rule and gendered (?) teaching styles

Parkinson's rule, according to a bunch of folks over at the Chronicle (I can't recall which forum) means that tasks generally expand to fill the time available. So, if you've got one hour to prepare for class, you'll take the whole hour. If you've allotted yourself five hours, you'll find a way to fill the five.

Last week my division chair came to observe my teaching. In anticipation, I insanely spent at least six hours preparing for a fifty minute class. After all that, the class didn't go so well. I had too many ideas and felt like I jumped too much from topic to topic... the students were a little less engaged than usual.

Today, I gave myself a break, and spent less than an hour preparing for class (beyond reading the material), and things went swimmingly. It figures.

I think my big mistake was deciding to manage a more teacher-centered classroom the day the chair came to observe, when often, chair-less, I use a lot of group work, etc. to get things going. I can give a good lecture when I have to, but I like using groups in this class in particular because it forces the students to engage with the text in ways that they don't with full-class discussion (where more people can remain passive) or with lecture.

Today I brought in silly "Hello, my name is" nametags with characters' names (from the play we started to day) written on them. I assigned each group an act and scene, handed them the necessary nametags, and gave them 15 minutes to prepare a two-three minute version of their scene to perform for the class. Today was their first day back from fall break, and I anctipated not everyone had done the reading, so when I assigned groups, I made sure that each had at least one person who I was sure had done the reading (and usually does the reading carefully). Once in groups, they decided who'd play which part, then went to work trying to summarize their scenes-- they all seemed pretty involved, even those who hadn't read-- perhaps because they knew they'd be presenting in front of the entire class and didn't want to be embarrassed any more than necessary.

Turns out they did a great job-- the scenes were hilarious (especially thanks to the deadpan way several of them delivered their lines), and by the end of the activity, I felt sure that everyone in the class had a good sense of what was going on-- who the characters were, what their relationships to each other were, what the major conflicts/ threads were. What's even better is that I think most people were curious about what was going to happen next-- I think the activity helped convey to them some of what's interesting and fun about the play, and I'm hoping that will make for more readers next time. When their scenes were over, I sketched out a bit more information on the board, we talked about what the title might mean, and then class was over. Some of them left the room still wearing their "Hello my name is Alibius," etc. nametags. It was a silly activity, really, but I feel very good about how things went and about what the students were able to get out of the class.

In another class, my students are reading a bit of Deborah Tannen on gendered communication styles. And as much I as wince at some of the ways she characterizes "male" and" female" styles, a lot of what she says rings true to me. Tannen claims that in conversation, men often like to lecture/share information while women listen/ work to build connections. When women find themselves talking for extended periods of time, Tannen says, women often find themselves uncomfortable.

I know this is true for me... in the classroom as well as in my personal life. 50 minutes feels like an awfully long time for me to be center stage. And yet Tannen might say that teachers who don't take center stage for the majority of classtime may be looked at as less intelligent or less capable than commanding lecturers. It was this fear, that my own style might be devalued, that prompted me to try to put myself in the center last week, even when it didn't feel quite right. But if the chair (he's male-- and that probably matters) had come today, and seen my students in groups and then in front of the room for the majority of class time; had he heard me in lecture mode for maybe 15 minutes max, I wonder what kind of write-up that would have gotten?

When I first started teaching, it was fear of being at the center that would prompt me to have students in groups for a bit. But now that I'm more experienced, and I've had to teach one mostly lecture-style course, I think I'm much better at using them. They have a purpose, and they work for me. But would their effectiveness be easy to recognize by an outsider? I just don't know.