Trying to work with students that have recently graduated from high school and getting there input is trying at best.

I have found it to be very helpful to allow the students to talk about themselves and what their expectations are for my courses. This is helpful because it allows me to know their skill level coming into to the course and also allows me to tweak the course if necessary to address some of their learning desires.

I love student groups and agree with the 6-8 students per group but most of my classes currently have 5 or less people in them. It's very difficult to have student groups when there is only 1 student in the class.

As a new instructor, I am trying to find the balance of lecture versus hands on. I am teaching a communications course which hands on or group work would be the most beneficial. Unfortunately, I have a ton of required lecture/quizes/test that seem to come first. I feel like I could teach them more without the formal lecture but I am brand new and I don't know where to draw the line on formal information (accredited lesson plans) and actually doing. I would prefer quick lectures and then tactile. I just need to figure out how to teach them all their required info without too much lecture. This unit has me really thinking of balance.

I love the idea of telling students how to study. I take it a step further and also inform them of what they should be doing in class and on homework in order to get the most out of my lessons. Every teacher teaches differently. A study method that worked for one student in one class does not necessarily translate.

I am in a school where my classroom changes just about every 6 weeks. I am excited and frustrated what I am learning is that I can and will make each transistion new and exciting for the students as well as for myself. What can be done when the room has cosmetic disturbances?

On my first day of class, I started off with a personal motivational speech for my Speech Communications class. I wanted to give them my background, but also show them my level of expertise on the matter of public speaking. I could tell I really blew them away. It set a very positive tone to the course. Each week since, I have found them to be fully engaged, eager to learn, and excited about what I am trying to teach them.

It seems that a large majority of career school students like a tactile approach and are always complaining that we are giving them too much lecture and not enough practical experience. However, we cannot copy the practice setting exactly and only have limited supplies work with. I think that it is good to balance lecture segments with videos and labs, but I am also looking for more creative ways, such as games of some sort which is not my field of expertise. I am also experimenting with brainstorming questions or reverse teaching presentations.

I was really nervous when I started teaching in a different setting where I am now. People got used to the old instructor who left and were constantly comparing me to her. I didn't enforce my expectations early enough and suffered as a result with poor class discipline and only a handful of students actually paying attention and learning. Attendance went down and people were dropping out which reflected negatively on me. Eventually, I was able to adjust my course content to their level and keep them engaged and interested, but it took a while. It's not that I didn't talk about the syllabus, procedures, policies, accessibility, goals, objectives, etc., and it's all about motivating them and sharing stories. I also learned that that setting was not ideal for me, and switched to teach at another school.

All of the materials except for lecture handouts and any supplemental instruction aids I use for the course are typically assigned by corporate office here at my institution. On one occasion they have eliminated a perfectly decent textbook for a class that requires one and decided that a chapter of another textbook would suffice for a 6 week course. As a result student had no source of information to rely on outside of my lecture handouts and their own notes. Textbooks are necessary for an integration of textual with visual information that facilitates learning. I cannot imagine how a course as complex as pharmacology can survive without a good quality textbook. So, while having academic freedom in selecting topics is nice, in reality you are bound by constraints of the learning materials the corporate office deems appropriate, even though in your professional judgment they are inadequate.

While this module summarized a lot of what I already know about professionalism, technical knowledge, and support and encouragement given to students, I think ultimately learning occurs if there is a goal at the end to succeed. I have been trying to come up with a variety of tools to use in the classroom in addition to lecture, such as articles, reflective writing, video clips, and of course, laboratory practicals. I often find people yawning in my class when they feel that the information is over their head, and yet, I try to say it in many different ways to make it simpler to understand. I also see that when I have enthusiasm for a particular topic and can spontaneously talk about my experiences, their eyes light up. I learned that it's good to have variety of methods and be able to motivate them.

This CEE course was very helpful in defining the sometimes very abstract learning environment of the lab/shop. Learning the 5 levels of the competency based curriculum is very beneficial to me as in instructor. The levels act as guidelines to ensure the students are gaining the most out of the laboratory learning experience.

I decided to provide my students with my notes after the lecture and I encourage them to review said notes, along with their own notes, immediately after class so as to retain as much as possible from the lecture.

I am an instructor in the legal department of my college and I have come to realize that students react much more enthusiastically to real-life legal examples that I provide to them, rather than the same mundane exaples provided in the textbook.

Authors of recent textbooks have discarded the old, boring dialgue that we have seen historicall and replaced it with a more colloquial style of dialect. I think that this more modern style truly allows the student to relate more with the material than the old style.

Laughing is a natural way of calling attention, if a person hears laughter they naturally want to know what is funny. I believe we have so many stresses in our modern life that there are to few true pleasures left. Laughing is one of them. When a student laughs he/she encourages the people around him/her to focus. This is a great technique for pulling the student interests back, the humor must be clean an avoid offense. If your timing is right you can cause time freeze in you classroom, it will appear that time has slowed. When the end of the course shows up and no one noticed it was the end of the day you have done the impossible, turned a learning environment into a fun zone. You will notice improvement in attendance and good scores Ryan

An instructor must realize that an instruction style must adapt to the students' learning style. In this technological age where students learn more on Google and Youtube than they do at accredited universities, I, as an instructor, try to go with the grain, rather than against it. I embrace Google and Youtube when I convey my lesson. Both sources have exceptional and entertaining real-life examples of the coursework outlined in the book and my students seem to truly embrace this technique.

During this course I realized I use the lecture/discussion format in my classroom. I now have more ideas on how to use the small group active learning in my classroom.

Getting adult learners involved in their learning is one of the fastest ways to get involvement in the material. Adult learners have usually found in their lives that when applying skills while working is the fastest way to learn and accomplish a task. So why work against this, they usually do not want to sit and memorize information. I have found that teaching these individuals the skills they will need in the field, and practicing these skills will also counteract the learning differences that tend to arise between young and adult learners. this in turn tends to engage the students in a more meaningful manner.

For my lectures, I usually try incorporating group lessons at the end of an assignment not only to reinforce the lesson, but it allows presentations to be individualized into his/her preferred learning style.