I am teaching a new course that is being introduced by the department this Fall to all business school students as a business core course. I am still in the throes of understanding how students are entering this course and how well they are prepped to receive this content. The primary take away is they are weak in their pre-requisite knowledge, and this is creating a bottleneck in terms of keeping up with my course schedule.
The teaching artifact I’d like to work on is teaching in chunks, and making my teaching more a briefing and less a lecture. This is particularly relevant since the first few weeks of my course syllabus is designed to be a review of their pre-requisite course (statistics) of which my students remember nada. Which means a two week statistics review ends up becoming a 4 week re-teach of statistics.
However I am trying to work out what is keeping students from engaging during the class sessions. Do my expectations of engagement need to be re-set? Thinking in progress…
4 replies on “my teaching artifact?”
I’ve had some success with having students create their own lexicon/glossary/dictionary as an assignment which both encourages them to figure out important concepts, and produces a nice review and/or study guide. Maybe in the first few weeks of class students can create their own review “cheat sheet”?
Amita, I find interesting what you say about “briefing” rather than lecturing. I’m wondering if that has a special meaning in the context you are teaching. I am always looking for alternatives to lecturing so I’m intrigued by this.
Hi Tonia,
Yes I will be asking students to prepare a review of the statistics topics they are expected to know from the most necessary pre-requisite to my course. My course cannot proceed if they don’t remember their statistics foundations. As a result I have been re-teaching statistics for the first 4-5 weeks of my course, instead of reviewing for the first 2 weeks of my course. So my teaching artifact now guides them on how to prepare the reviews they present in class but setting them up with OERs in case they need the help.
Thanks Benjamin. Yes I love the idea!
So funny story about cheat sheets. When teaching in-person classes, I allowed my students to prepare a one-page cheat sheet for the exam and was the only help they could bring with them to the exam. These last two semester of online teaching, my students asked me to prepare a cheat sheet for them. I am rarely stumped but I was at a loss for words for two minutes. So I have been thinking of how to get them to prepare these in time.