It there is one thing I have learned from all of the teaching demos, including my own it is what engages the audience and what doesn’t. I am really glad I picked humor as my instructional strategy. I had a really good time researching it and learned a lot about how to use it appropriately. I think that too often we as teachers feel too self conscience to use humor because of the risk we run of looking foolish. Looking foolish every now and then makes life interesting and it sure does make class interesting. Another thing I have learned from the teaching demos is that making your learners feel comfortable is also very important. The demos I have felt most engaged in are the ones where the facilitator was relaxed and put the learners at ease.
Although I wasn’t in class on this night I wanted to share some insights about my day. The reason I wasn’t in class was that I was in a training seminar in DC. The training session was my first step to becoming a blood bank assessor. In order for blood banks to gain and maintain accreditation the blood bank has to submit to an assessment or inspection once every two years. I am on my way to becoming one of the assessors. Needless to say the training session left something to be desired. We sat in a room in the Westin Tysons Corner for 8 hours listening the a woman talk and watch a power point. The only active learning activity came at the end and because the teacher had not managed her time wisely we didn’t have enough time to finish the activity. I found myself the entire seminar thinking of ways to make the presentation more learner centered.
I really liked Adam’s math problem teaching demo. I can see why he is an effective GED teacher. The practices he employed while teaching us the math problem are ones I try to employ when teaching in my profession. Often times in classrooms we don’t have the time to spend involving the class in the path the the answer. I think this is really important to do. Sometimes traveling the path is the only way to ensure that the learner gets to the destination. So many times instruction ends up being wham bam thank you ma’am and the learner suffers for this. We are often so caught up with what we have to teach we fail to show the learner how to understand the concept.
Ali’s teaching demonstration was amazing. I brought back a lot of memories from college. I was a biology and math tutor in college and this is what first gave me the teaching bug. I loved being able to sit with a peer one on one and work through problems and help them understand the material. Ali was so great at this. Sometimes students just need that one on one question to prompt their understanding. I find myself so often ask my husband or a co-worker for help with some problem and by relating the problem to them I unintentionally work through it on my own. I think students just need an outlet to voice the material sometimes. Ali’s technique was so good in that is allowed the student to formulate her own opinions about the poem without fear of being wrong. Ali did such a good job putting her at ease. I miss those days of peer tutoring and the feeling I would get when I could “see” the light bulb come on for a student.
Erica’s lecture on e-learning really allowed me to see how involved structuring an e-learning module can be. I spoke with her some after class to find out more about the program she uses to create the modules. I would love to create some e-learning activities for the blood bank training program, but the time involved is daunting. I had always kind of viewed e-learning as a short cut around actual instruction. You don’t have to pay someone to come teach the class, just have the student do the learning module. One thing I would have liked to know more about though is the evaluation piece to e-learning. Most of the e-learning modules I have used had very limited post module evaluations. The evaluations did not accurately reflect how well the student learned the material. I see some research in my future….
We have talked about Bloom’s taxonomy in almost every class I have taken so far in this program. I have understood it before now but the way Wendy presented it really brought it home for me. I find myself using the verbs sheet when creating learning objectives now and structuring learning tasks around these verbs. The activity we used in class really tied the concept together for me. Using the verbs to structure learning objectives not only taught me the concept, it was also a great example of an active learning activity!
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