I think that this was by far the best course that I have taught to date. I am very well acquainted with the course material, the pace of the class, and the students who take this class. I was able to anticipate a lot of their questions and concerns and was able to explain things really clearly and use previous lessons to help explain new ideas. I had a very large group of students who would regularly participate in class discussions and was able to really build the classroom environment that I wanted. I think that a large part of this comes from the fact that I was very confident in teaching the class. Because I was more confident, my students were allowed to feel less confident and be open to learning new concepts. Of course there are still things about this course that I could improve, especially with this confidence. I think I’m now at a place where I have the scope to really effectively incorporate group work and variety into our class time without having to worry about the pace of the class.
While changes I made for this section aren’t reflected in the lecture notes that I have posted, it is reflected in the lecture recording. This particular section takes what we cover in 2 dimensions in chapter 5 and makes it into a 3 dimensional process. During this class, I decided to approach this topic by drawing parallels between section 5.3 and the new material. More specifically, my lecture was focused on showing students that the overall structure of both problem types is the same. I think that this was by far the most success I’ve had with this section. Students regularly struggle to grasp this material, a lot of the processes seem brand new and it’s becomes an additional thing that students need to memorize right at the end of the course. I think my approach this semester was helpful to show that they had really already mastered this process for the previous exam, they simply had to make adjustments for the dimension.
Regarding the lecturing, I know that in the past when teaching this section it has been incredibly easy for the process to become muddled in the details. I think that my lecture on this material was clear, concise, and left plenty of room for questions.
Towards the end of November 2019, we had a number of events occur on campus that made campus feel like an incredibly volatile, unsafe place the week before Thanksgiving break. Consequently, I cancelled class on Tuesday of that week and chose to record a handwritten version of my lecture and post the video series onto YouTube. Based on the course calendar, I was scheduled to give an exam on the Thursday of that week. However, I knew that it would be detrimental to the student’s performance to have them take an exam during such a contentious time on campus. Moreover, more than half of my students’ parents wanted them off campus. This review lecture video gave me the option of postponing their exam without having to worry about them forgetting all of the material. Based on comments in letters of endorsement written by students, I think that students were really grateful for the flexibility that I was able to have.
This was the first semester that I chose not to do weekly quizzes. While I did provide students with blank quizzes and solutions from previous semesters, not giving graded quizzes was problematic for a couple of reasons. It made it much more difficult to be in touch with my students’ learning. It was challenging to learn students’ names because I no longer had to grade and return students quizzes. I was no longer able to offer them low-stakes feedback on their work, and so I saw more small mistakes on the first exam that would have otherwise been managed by the first few quizzes. Lastly, the students didn’t necessarily have the same drive to actually learn the material; they only needed to make sure they could complete the WebWork which does not require subject mastery. That said, the fact that I no longer had to spend 20+ minutes of class time on a quiz every week was very helpful for slowing down lectures. Ultimately, the next course I teach will almost certainly involve regular quizzes.
It is clear that there is still some frustration with the assignments, though it seems to have decreased slightly from the previous semester. I think I can continue to improve how I implement WebWork in the course. I think emphasizing the value of the WebWork during lecture and giving examples that are more similar to homework questions. I think that the dissonance between the lecture notes and WebWork question format was possibly even more frustrating to students. Furthermore, the fact that it can be so picky about decimals can often cause students to write it off as a valuable form of feedback. I think that if I teach this course again, I would certainly change what I emphasize to help students make the conceptual jumps between the examples in lecture and the WebWork.