Summer 06

Summer courses are intense for students and for their teachers as well.

I am done with EPFR 415- Adolescence, for this summer.
I had two sections, nice students. Some of them were better than the others, but all worked really hard to get it done and survived the every day 3 hours sessions. It is not easy when the entire big topic is Adolescence.

To make it more fun and active I used mostly class discussions. I think through discussions and preparing a specific subject in teams helped them to better understand and find applications in their career as teachers.
Blackboard was used by me only to post the readings. Since we met every day there was no time and need to use discussion board. The feedback from Spring was that some found it was too much (some did not use it ever before).

With the second group June 5th -23rd (since they were half class undergraduates and half class graduates), I changed a little the style asking more from them. Graduate students had to conduct workshops along with the regular class discussions.

I definitely enjoyed the in-class group exams (every week at least one). I did not use this method before. At the first one their performance was not as efficient, but by the third one they were pretty good. I could see each group getting better at their work in team and developing a style.

I had so much fun and I hope they did too! It's not easy to be together every day for long periods of time and revisit the same topic over and over again from different points of view. In the EPFR 315- Ed Psy course, at least there are different theories each class time, the content is more dinamic itself.

It's interesting how attached I get to a group. Over the course time I manage to learn their names, to match faces with names, and know a characteristic that can remind me of the person. I know also that there will be always some who love me and some who hate me. It's just the normal curve of teacher evaluation.
My only hope is that they do learn to think, perhaps in a different way about teaching as experience, and about the topic we cover in the course.
I know I learn. I try new things to make the course more appealing.

I have EPFR 515 - Cognition, till July 27th. Since this is almost as long as a regular semester (10 weeks), this time I use the style I used in Spring. For the fall when I teach again this course I would like to change. To do something new. I know my students won't know if the style is the usual or a different one... but I do! For me it becomes too repetitive. I need to create something new in order to enjoy it myself. I love the book: Cognition- Margaret Matlin (Wiley). It is such a rich ground for my students who are mostly all teachers. So many new theories and explanations for things they used, thought of them before, but they did not know it has an explanation, a name, and that it is MORE to this!
Each group comes up with so many good examples from their work and everyday life experiences. I know they definitely change their script about what a graduate course is like :-)

It's so interesting that each section has some exceptional workshops. Really great work that some of the students do. Then in what it stands the performance? Perhaps on their skills and previous experience in conducting a workshop. It's difficult to prepapre a workshop, not just a lecture with power point presentation that they read from the board or from their papers.

As for me, I think I have to keep my mind open to their suggestions and feedback when it is a constructive feedback. And not take it too personally when the feedback is based on facts I cannot change (gender, ethnicity, ESL).
In the end we teachers learn also!
:-)