Overall
The class roster this semester was significantly smaller than last semester's, so I used that as an opportunity to experiment with some more techniques I've been thinking about to make my recitations a little more effective. In particular, I restructured my recitations to have the following structure:
Hand back quizzes from last week and discuss common errors (5 minutes)
Mini-lecture reviewing concepts from the lecture section (15 minutes)
Supervised practice time + go over with them (15 minutes)
Quiz (15 minutes)
This outline was centered around prioritizing feedback for students so I may proactively correct misunderstandings before it was too late into the semester. I was concerned that the traditional way of handing back quizzes only served to communicate to students what they got wrong, but not why it was wrong or what the right answer should instead be if if they were still on the right track. It was not feasible to leave such detailed feedback on each quiz, so I opted instead to just go over it with the class all together at the beginning of a recitation. I'll come back to talk more on this goal of striving for more specific feedback in just a bit.
I also moved all of my lectures to be on my iPad and used slides that I would designed ahead of time using colours, transitions, pictures, etc. This proved to be quite a successful change, as I felt I was delivering it made my explanations more consistent across lecture sections and removed the possibility that I might forget to mention something. Using plenty of different colours was also an excellent aide, and this modality also significantly expedited presentation of the lecture as well since I'm no longer needing to spend precious class time to draw up various diagrams, tables, or graphs.
Ahead of time, I also would make worksheets with problems from the textbook that I carefully selected to demonstrate the concepts we went over. In particular, I designed my worksheets to be sloped, that is, the first problems were straightforward, easier, and very similar to the example problem that I'd do in the mini-lecture section. This would allow students to get comfortable and warm up with the concepts. Then I'd gradually scale problems in difficulty to hopefully correspond closer to something that they'd see in homeworks or tests. I would hand out these worksheets, ask them to work in pairs or groups, and go around the room to help students who were stuck on questions, almost like if I were teaching a K-12 class. I'd also be simultaneously checking students questions if they got it right.
Though not required, I also thought that implementing these worksheets and a practice time to do them in helped with getting them feedback. In the moment, I could swiftly detect for and, if applicable, correct any misconceptions and/or slowly guide them to the answers. Indeed, it seemed as if these techniques helped them a lot, especially on more drawn out processes like analyzing and graphing the shape of a polynomial through its first and second derivlatives.
Concerns
If the main driver for this restructuring was a goal for more explicit feedback to the students, I think I certainly succeeded. However, there were some reoccuring problems that make me skeptical to try this again (exactly as is anyways) in the future.Â
1). Not enough time in class. While the above lesson plan looks nice on paper, in practice, especially considering the depth and rigor of Lehigh's classic Calculus I class, the time allotted to each section is way too short. I'd often be dashing in between discussing common errors and my mini-lecture and often talking way too fast to catch up with the clock. This came to bite me back on more technical or abstract topics. Additionally, students sometimes seemed frustrated when it seemed like practice time would end before they could even really get comfortable with the topics. In general, I might've bit off a bit more than I could chew and been a bit too ambitious with what little time there is in a recitation.
2). Excessive prep time. Between grading quizzes (and trying to write helpful comments instead of just checks or x's), designing the week ahead's slides, carefully choosing what problems to put on the worksheet, typing these up in LaTeX, and carefully prioritizing which concepts to go over in what little time we have, I often ended up taking on what I now suspect is an excessive amount of prep time for a PhD student. Furthermore, considering that much of time, the quick turnaround time for practice made it hard for students to benefit from everything like I'd want, I feel like the excessive prep time I put into this is not all going to the right places. I still want to make my recitations helpful, but I wonder if maybe there's a recitation outline whose required prep makes more efficient use out of what time I put in.