Of the many things I have had to learn since taking this job, teaching a class has probably been the most challenging...and the most scary. What scares me is not the mastery of the material because I love doing the research. What scares me is the actual teaching process...the pedagogy. Luckily, help is available through a variety of sources. My best on-line resource is the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a forum about teaching found on the Chronicle site, these three books were recommended numerous times to first time teachers at a college level.
The books arrived yesterday. I have already read two of the three and perused the third in the wee hours of this morning. The suggestions and recommendations are wonderful...helpful, not at all intimidating, practical, and applicable to my course. I spent the morning making changes to my syllabus, lecture notes, and power points to incorporate many of the suggestions. I now also feel more confident about talking the other teachers about standard language to include in their syllabi regarding absences, grading and accepting late papers. I plan to encourage more small group work because:
- Student retention of material covered in the first 10 minutes of a lecture is about 70%; in the final 10 minutes of the lecture, retention drops to around 20%
- In a 50-minute lecture, students are attentive to the lecturer around 40% of the time.
- If an instructor speaks at a rate of 150 words per minute, the students will hear around 50 of those words.
Yes, there is definitely an art to teaching.
2 comments:
valerie,
i am at mom's going over the fine art of computer navigation... what was the expected retention rate for verbal instruction????
hee hee, that's funny! Maybe next time you should read one of Val's books on pedagogy before you go to Donna's. I'll brush up on my skills so I can give her a refresher course when we visit over Labor Day.
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