AY 300 - Fall 2009: Curriculum Recap

• As usual, one of the most useful things for the students
• Primarily me talking and little student work

• Generally favorable

• We should try to make this more interactive, as Jeff suggested last year–get them up in front of the class to feel that feeling

• I didn't spend much time on this
• Didn't like previous year's model of dissecting worksheets and designing new ones..
• I did have them put a worksheet (original or substantially modified) on the eBRB

• Would have liked more

• We should spend some time improving this, if for no other reason than to keep fresh ones coming to the eBRB

• Time-consuming for me, but will be more manageable with two of us.
• I thought it was instructive for me as well as the students seeing themselves teach
• Hard to get them to actually watch the videos when not being forced; not sure if we can/want to try to address this
• I think it's important and useful–“parent-knows-best” kind of situation I think

• Hated seeing themselves on video, wouldn't review independently
• Balked at the idea of a second video-taping

• Keep it for sure, maybe add a second go-round to show improvement
• This could be moved forward if we want to do it twice, or later if only once

• I felt like these were largely a chore both for me and the students
• Nonetheless these are very useful in future teaching semesters, so they will be kept

• ??

• I would like to think about whether we can make this seem more relevant throughout the course of the class
• Perhaps we could have them exchange them and read each others, then discuss how others' sections went in class once a month?

• Of the two, I think they got the most out of the EGSI visits, though I did not have a lot in place to structure their post-game analysis
• This required little to no work for me, but I could've done more
• Did this early and I believe it should be kept there, i.e. Week 2 or 3 (the first weeks of real section teaching, not ice-breakers, etc.)

• Liked the EGSI visit

• I think if we do the above suggestion with the teaching logs, then we could get rid of the peer visitation (maybe)

• I think I did a poor job with this one, but it's mostly the students' responsibility

• ??

• Depending on class size, we could have them actually lead the demo with the class as if they were teaching

• Following recommendations, not everyone got up to do these. I think this was a good idea to save time.
• On the other hand, not everyone got that practice in.. hard to say which way to go

• ??

• We should spend some time thinking about this

• This all felt like a pain in the ass last year, but that was my fault in the implementation
• Felt forced, maybe because I didn't ask for specific enough responses to the readings

• Generally negative

• We should read all the stuff from my year, and maybe the year prior, and cull
• Whatever we keep should have a clear purpose, and if we assign something, it should address that purpose

• It was definitely useful keeping in close contact with the Head GSIs, we might even formalize this to a weekly/bi-weekly meeting/lunch
• I still had a hard time helping them implement group work, and the sense I got from the videos was that some are just better than others, and it had little to do with my course
• Both they and I enjoyed discussing the previous week at Celia's happy hour towards the end of the semester, but I like the idea of having a more general pedagogy discussion with the dept. too
• Visits from the profs and GSIs for advanced courses were useful, but again I could have done more to structure the discussion I think. Alex went off on his tangents, and Marc had some pretty pessimistic ideas about teaching…
• Mid-semester evals remain a positive/important part of the curriculum

Things to do before the semester starts!