We are half way through the semester now and everyone, students and professors alike, are pressured [almost frantic] and tired. How can it be October already? Halloween is right around the corner.
I have to find a way to keep my late afternoon class engaged -- they are tired, I am tired, we are all ready to go home by the time class begins! Perhaps I need to use a workshop class structure more often -- engage students in creating activities to use in their classrooms; the other days I can model strategies embeded in a lesson. This Thursday [tomorrow] I'll be having students work with reading/learning guides and QARs in science and math; we'll also take a look at other questioning strategies.
I need to try a lesson out before the CEALL workshop next weekend -- maybe I'll do that on Tuesday of next week, have students provide feedback [so I can revise the lesson] and then have students work with the strategies to come up with adaptations for their content areas on Thursday.
We'll see how this goes -
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2 comments:
Actually, we're always tired and always ready to go home, no matter what time of day it is. College students are not permitted any rest with teachers who constantly believe their class is the only class.
But I think one problem you may be having with our 3:30 class isn't that we're tired, but rather that a few of us feel like we've been doing the same thing for the last 3 weeks. I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate a break from learning strategies, as that seems to be the only thing we've done since a week before our mid-term. If learning strategies are such a heavy part of this course (apparently they are), then I believe they should've been introduced earlier. Even you said that if we walk away with 6-8 strategies that we know well, then we'll be sitting pretty. However, what's happened has been that we've been smacked in the face by about 25 different strategies and gone on to cover 2 or 3 in-depth... and those 2 or 3 haven't really been things that I'm likely going to use in the classroom.
Don't want to be a naysayer or anything like that, but I think we would've benefited more from tackling one or two different strategies per day rather than dealing with all of them everyday.
By the way, I wasn't saying that you're one of the teachers who believes that your class is the only class. I was merely saying that every student has at least one teacher who feels that way.
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