Blog Entry #9

This week's readings covered a variety of topics from teacher evaluations to the role of teachers in learning to how to make an online class. I would like to focus mostly on teacher evaluation, laboratory teaching, and the roles of teachers.

Teacher evaluation is a very important to see how the students are doing with the information you are giving them. In biology courses there is a lot of information in the beginning that will be built upon, so a teacher needs to have a sense that that information was understood so that there will be no problems in the future topics that require you to go back and reteach something. I like the idea of formal evaluation at about the mid semester point that will allow students to write out their concerns and what they thought was good. It would be simple to write out a survey and have a few questions about what was the most helpful and what was the most detrimental to their learning. There are always evaluations at the end of the semester for professors and teaching assistants that are helpful most of the time. While I have never actually taught a class formally to receive these, I have seen their like before and found them useful. The SROIs that are given out don't always help that much though. There is little help from the circled numbers section regarding performance. I don't think that it is helpful to know that you got a 2 on how you communicate without comments on what the problem was. Students rarely fill out the comments section unless they have strong feelings either way, so I think that these comments should be taken with a grain of salt. Don't get overinflated by the good and definitely don't get too discouraged by the bad, mean, sexist, or even violent comments. I think that most of the offensive things are filtered out by the administration for TAs at least.
Meta-teaching is good for teachers that are secure in their position. It is helpful for both the teacher and the student to know what to do to fix in class problems. I helps the students by fixing the problem and by giving them confidence because they see that they have a way to potentially change things that are not conducive to their learning. The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan has good information on different types of teaching evaluation.

Laboratory teaching is very important to me because there are a lot of labs in science classes, and it is likely that I will end up teaching in a lab next semester. The book had a lot of good ideas, but there is a problem with getting the lab coordinator to agree to much that isn't already done. The Bio 150/151 labs are uniform to make it so that nobody has a disadvantage or advantage. Right now there are a lot of expository experiments and a few elements of inquiry and problem based learning. I can see the need for expository labs when there is a lot of sections and the topic is basic, but I would like to see a little different technique each lab. There is no need to pick one style and stick with it. The introduction lab could be expository while the biomolecule lab could have more of an inquiry feel where they need to test what they have and compare with other groups. I think that a problem based learning could be used for a genetics lab where it would be modeled in a CSI forensics lab theme. The real thing that holds all of this back is that there is a certain expectation of how things should be done by the administration and that it is easier to keep going with the course as is rather than experimenting and causing problems. If it isn't broken don't fix it. Every now and then there is a big class that is taught in an off year for a small class. These are often used for a little more experimentation or to give aspiring science teachers a chance to practice leading an actual class. This would provide an opportunity for the lab design to be altered without causing too much of a fuss. As you may be able to tell, I like the University of Michigan CRLT site for information and it just so happens that they have a section on teaching labs for grad students.

The McKeachie text has a section that lists the six possible roles of a teacher in experiential teaching. We are usually all aware that there is an expectation of being an expert, an authority, and a facilitator, but I never really thought of most of my teachers as being socializing agents, ideal examples of ego, or even people. I think that there is a little more difficulty in that. We expect teachers to know things that we need, but do we know what we need to know? I have never done such work, but there is truth to this. Seeing a teacher in a different light is difficult, but if you do and select the proper role model they can provide a lot of direction. I would be very nervous to be this role model early in my teaching career, but as I progressed and became more comfortable I think that it would be easy to develop a network of people, experiences, and theories that would help out my students a lot. Who better to help students socialize than somebody who can use existing contacts or experiences. The biology department has hired a person to advise pre-med students as their main job. It helps the students to have an advisor/teacher that specializes in such things so that they can use their information more effectively.

I also liked the section covering distance education. Not specifically because I would use it as a full course however. I don't like the idea of a biology class being taught online only. There would need to be some in person classes too. The real reason this is interesting is that there is a plan in place to use online teaching if the H1N1 flu gets out of control so there isn't another situation like the flood in the spring. A short period of online work is necessary here and this section could be useful.