My First Time Teaching: Lessons Learned

John Weiss

18 Sept. 2003

A Brief Overview

• Spent about 20-30 minutes lecturing (95 minute period)
• Rest of time was activities/minute papers/concept questions/discussions
• Gave out rubrics for all graded work with the syllabus
• Grades were based a little on quizzes/final/homeworks, but more on daily in-class grades, weekly essays, and observing projects.
• Used 90/80/70/60 scale strictly
• Had daily (timed, open-book) reading-quizzes. Forced them to read before class.

Set Expectations High!

• Students will rise, or stoop, to the level of your expectations
• They need to know there is support and the expectations can be met.

Summer Term is Insane

• Too little time to prepare
• Too little time for students to absorb idea
• Too little time for assignments

Term-Long Projects

• Assigned a term-long observing project on the behavior of the Sun or Moon
• Students picked their own question and method of answering it
• Required to make at least 10 observations
• Turned in a roughly 5-page write-up at the end of the term, laid out like a real paper

What Worked

• Students asked good questions and had creative approaches
• Most students seemed to have fun with their projects (because they "owned" them?)
• Was a great exercise in writing and a chance to do real science

What to Do Differently

• Do a mid-term status check, including data to date and preliminary results!!
• Have a longer term/data baseline.
• Discuss write-ups a bit more near the end of the term.

Incorporating Writing

• Required a 2-page essay each week along with the ordinary homework.
• Topics where opinions to be supported by scientific (data-based) arguments:
  • Is Pluto a planet?
  • Should 1110 count for the science requirement?
  • Where would you send a billion-dollar mission?
• Grading mainly based on clarity, structure, and quality of arguments.

What Worked

• Writing definitely improved over the term.
• Questions seemed to support the material towards the end.
• Students enjoyed the questions.

What to Do Differently

• Workshop one or more of the early papers in class.
• Spend some time before the first paper to discuss structure, etc.
• Stagger the due-date with the normal homework to spread the workload out.

Student Journals

• Required students to keep journals (format of their choice) addressing:
  • Thoughts/questions on course materials
  • Thoughts about how the different parts of the class are working
  • Ways that they find themselves seeing things differently after the course
• Collected Fridays, graded Saturday morning.
• Responded to questions, thoughts, etc. for each journal.

What Worked

• Most students wrote in their journals daily.
• I got lots of feedback on a day-to-day basis.
• Students got feedback on questions that they couldn't/didn't ask in class.
• Students really thought about how the course was working. (Towards the end, they really were figuring out why I was doing things the way I did.)

What to Do Differently

• Decrease the importance of the last part of the journals.
• Ask specific questions on a daily basis for them to try to address. (With some flexibility as to how much to say from day to day.)

More on Comprehension/Knowledge

• I weighted the upper part of Bloom's Taxonomy a bit too heavily, in retrospect.
• Not by too much, though.
• I'd do more fact/understanding activities.

Concept Quizzes and Minute Papers

• Due to technical issues, I didn't do as much of these as I had hoped.
• These would have been gianormously helpful for the last point.
• Be prepared to take the low-tech backup with these.