Reflection

Teaching at Madison College

Since graduating high school, all of my experience as a student has been at larger universities. While I have spent time visiting friends at smaller 4-year schools, prior to this internship I had very little experience with 2-year schools and community colleges. One thing that immediately stood out to me at Madison College was the atmosphere. Pretty much everyone I saw was well dressed and seemed to be there with a purpose. It seemed like a very practical place. There was no one who had clearly rolled out of their dorm room and barely made it to class after a night of partying (a common site at UW-Madison or Princeton). There was also a lot of diversity amongst students, with a wider range of ages and ethnicities than I frequently encounter at UW-Madison. I think it is important to use diversity as an advantage in the classroom and draw on the different experiences of students to bring more depth to course content.

Curriculum Development

My internship experience taught me a lot about how much effort goes into developing the curriculum for college courses. While I, perhaps, did more evaluation than one would normally do when introducing a new assignment for a course, simply writing the lab, figuring out the materials, and deciding how to grade it was a lot of work that I would have struggled to complete if I was responsible for teaching the whole course. I think that Delta Program Internships can be really valuable for getting this kind of project into classrooms where the professor may not have time to be researching the best way to change their course. I also learned that having mentors is key for course development - if someone with more experience can guide you as to what sorts of things will improve your course, it is much easier than coming up with ideas on your own. Prof. Smith helped me a lot in deciding what kind of new lab to write and how to implement it.

Teaching as Research

In general, I think course evaluation and self evaluation are important parts of being a good educator. However, the extent to which I evaluated the one lab that I designed was a lot of work, and I don't know that the results were valuable enough to warrant the effort. The weekly survey responses did not show significant differences between the labs, and while the final survey allowed me to analyze the data in more ways, the sample size was not big enough to determine many trends. In the future, I think I will stick to more simple evaluations except for in scenarios where I can consult an expert on survey design and will be able to have a very large sample size. However, I learned a lot about basic methods for course evaluation during my internship, and I'm sure that will be useful in the future.