be a good teacher

Filling in for another teacher to update a Spring course for the BAC. Then updating my own this Summer. Then TA-ing for Jim next Fall. And if things work out, maybe doing some workshops for a new company this Spring. That should keep me busy and give me the chance to keep honing my skills.

Learning more about learning styles. What my strengths and weakness are. How to appeal to a broader range.

I am a checklist person, so glad to have this summary to be able to check my lessons against.

- text for the verbal learners
- images and multimedia for the visual people
- podcasts or screencasts to reach the auditory learners
- group projects for the interpersonal students
- chances to reflect and philosophize for the intrapersonal students
- experiments and puzzles for the Logical thinkers
- over-arching goals for the Global thinkers
- examples for the Inducers
- theories for the Deducers

From BAC training course: “The secret is to encourage participation from the close-mouthed groups without intruding so much into the garrulous groups that you silence the students’ voices. But there is no formula for this. It takes practice, because a teacher’s entry into any discussion may reward and encourage the speakers, or it may silence everyone and smother the conversation. And it’s not always easy to know when you’re doing one or the other.”

I think I was approaching this all wrong my first time, feeling like I had to make comments to each students post on every discussion board. Need to phrase the topics in a way that is not so “what is the right answer” but elicits more discussion and discovery. As he says – “I want to encourage their independence but I can’t leave them hanging… the goal of my teaching is not just to hand students information but to help them learn the thought patterns and processes they can use later to correct themselves, solve their own problems, and find their own information.”

I’m excited to be starting my BAC faculty training course for online teaching _{albeit I am jumping in a bit late}

Great observation from the first week: “When learning with multimedia the brain must simultaneously encode two different types of information, an auditory stimulus and a visual stimulus. One might expect that these competing sources of information would tend to overwhelm or overload the learner. However, psychological research has shown that verbal information is, in fact, better remembered when accompanied by a visual image (Paivio, 1971).”

This rings totally true from my own learning experiences. Next time I’d like to include a voice over as part of the presentations. Or even better, images and voice bits embedded in the pdf text.

As a side note, I like the way they have posted key points directly into the online lesson and then embedded links they can easily go to for more info. Better than requiring students to chase down each link. Makes it easier to elevate the conversation, linking to explanations some but not all may be familiar with. Will allow me to use supporting articles to make a larger point. It makes for a lot of scrolling but the color boxes help organize the info.

Want to hone my abilities. Want to always have teaching (and learning) in my life.

BAC course is going well. Spend most my time building a foundation of course material. Have big ideas about taking it to the next level. Needs to be more interactive. Hope to get a chance to do it again.

Fav professor asked me to consider being his TA next year. Yippie.