What I Want to Do Next Semester

I tried a Google Site for education/teaching stuff this past year and hated it, so I'm migrating the teaching posts I put there here.

posted Dec 28, 2014, 12:57 PM by Karra Shimabukuro

I keep a running bug list all semester. Some of these are things that I just want to revisit before revising the course. Some things may not be able to be fixed (like weird, awkward, or just plain bad class dynamics).

I had bad juju in one of my classes this past semester and just couldn't overcome it. Sometimes that happens. But a lot of what's on my list are easily achievable things for next semester.

• Make sure my students understand the Student Learning Outcomes. Which means frontloading.
• Be accessible to my students during office hours. As in tone down some my personality from the classroom.
• Increase attendance during office hours.
• Spend more time giving feedback. Specifically:
• Electronic
• Questioning techniques
• Color coding
• Holistic
• Prompts
• Provide more check ins for understanding

A trap of teaching for so long is getting lazy or complacent, so I actually print this list out and keep it in my binder for class as a constant reminder of what I want to do. I have a course release this semester because of my job as Core Writing Coordinator so I just have my one ENGL 220: Revising Milton course to focus on. Lots of time and energy to give all these things the attention it deserves.

In addition to this, I had some pretty toxic interactions with people this semester so I have it on my list to avoid those this semester as well.

I'm also test running some things for this class that are different from what I've normally done, in part because I proposed this course because it's a book project and I need to work some stuff out. We'll see how it goes.

What are YOUR goals for next semester?