what I have found to work is speaking with other instructors and continuing to stay afloat with people in the business. I let my personality shine through in the class. I value my students and let them have healthy debates about the subject matter. Attending workshops and expos are also a plus.
Hi Darci,
One suggestion I would have to help you with your "bag of tricks" would be to look at training and development methods. I have found that the business/industry training and development methods can be used in education easily. They tend to be shorter in duration with high returns on the results. You can find these on many different web sites with just a bit of exploration.
Gary
Hi Richard,
You are right about needing to have different ways of presenting materials. Teaching styles need to have variety in order to appeal to the wide range of students in classes today.
Gary
Hi Leonard,
Great professional development plan. I wish you the best. I like your expression of a teacher as being of "beginners mind". We all need to seek that level of learning. It is fun to learn. I am sure your teacher will be nice to you. Just make sure to take him or her a nice apple on the first day.
Gary
Hi Patricia,
You have two strong factors going for you. You love to teach and as you say that show through and you are an experienced expert in your field. Your students are getting the best to all worlds with an instructor that loves to teach and cares about their success.
Gary
Hi James,
I commend you for your efforts to improve your professional skills as an educator. We all need to take advantage of ways we can do our jobs better and you have a plan to do so.
Gary
Hi Allina,
Great to hear about your perspectives on developing your skills as a professional educator. I am excited about your growth and success. Never lose your love of teaching. As you develop more strategies for instruction you will find that you have even more enjoyment in your teaching because you will be able to concentrate even more on your students.
If I can be of any help in your work please let me know.
Gary
I feel like I need to continue to search for new activities that put either my lectures or the textbook lessons into practice. I try to limit the amount of time I lecture, and I try to keep class engaging. However, I find myself occasionally out of ideas for activities. Talking to other instructors has helped, but I feel like I do need to develop a larger bag of tricks.
I like to treat each group as individuals. All groups come with different backrounds nad levels of eduacation / experience.
The objective is to have each student learn the foundation and use that to grow from later .
Strong and detailed course outlines, lesoon plans, and syllabi
I believe that it is important to read journals and other peer review articles about instructional styles. This will allow you to sometimes change and adapt to the needs of a particular student. Having only a certain teaching style doesn't benefit you or the student.
Create more interactive activities. Speack to other math instructors for additional support.
My instructional style is very versitile. I like lecture, slideshow, hands on, demo and student interaction as they complete a task that is demonstrated for them. Going forward I will wrap together my personality and competencies that will encourage, inform and instruct my students even more so than before based off the information I learned in the class.
I have only been teaching for three years now. I started out working full time in industry and teaching part time and have since moved to teaching a full time job while still keeping my part time teaching job. Needless to say, this is a lot of work. Most of my students are also working full time, have families and other responsibilities. I feel that this provides me with certain amount of empathy with my students. I feel that empathy is synergistic, and thus helps to create a line of communication to my students.
The more I teach the more I want to study. I cannot think of a better way to improve my teaching skills than being a student. The beginners mind someone called it. So I am reducing my load this summer and taking a couple classes myself.
(I hope the teacher likes me.)
I can honestly say I love teaching. I have learned many different teaching styles by observing other instructors at my institute, and by taken their approach and incorporating it with my teaching style. If you really love what you do the students will feel your passion and hopefully your passion will motivate them to stay engaged in the classroom. When ever possible I tell my experiecnes in class and the students seem to enjoy that.
I need to read some more articles and books. I haven't done a whole lot of that although I have access to several on line libraries. I also need to take advantage of some of the regular faculty meetings at one of the schools for which I teach. I go regularly to the faculty in service at one school but not so regularly to the other. I always get good ideas when I talk to other faculty.
I have a lot of ideas for this since reading this first module. I work a full time job in the field that I am instructing. I love teaching, but I am finding that it is difficult to balance between both jobs and my personal life. Which, I imagine is a struggle for many who are working two jobs. I feel that I really need to work on organizing myself and taking time to reflect what is important for me. I am taking a quarter off from teaching and I am going to continue to take courses to enhance my teaching ability. I am also going to take time to observe other instructors in their classrooms to get ideas and new perspectives from their styles of teaching. I have been instructing for only about a year now and I absolutely love it! I do believe that this course is really going to help me improve and define my instructional style.
Hi Carrie,
The key is to introduce content at focused times in relation to the hands on labs the students are doing. This way you are building both the knowledge and skill base for your students.
Gary
One way to enhance my instructional style includes paying attention to student's various learning styles and trying to incorporate a greater variety of those types of activities into the presentation. I also think that repetition of the key information is important for learning. Finally, I think it's beneficial to continue to observer other teachers at work with an eye for their teaching strategies.
As long as I am willing to keep learning, I think my instructional style will continue to evolve. As it evolves, it will be developed, refined, and enhanced. As instructors, we need to keep refreshing our minds as well. Hopefully, we never get stuck in a rut!
