posted 2006/04/03 at 15:09
A couple of weeks ago I had one of the higher-ups in the comp department sit in on one of my classes. They claim that this is part of a larger programme for "faculty mentoring," but in reality it was more of a performance review than anything else.
I just read my results, and all in all I think I did well for myself. The only real difficulties that my reviewer brought up were more issues of teaching philosophy than anything else, and I'm hoping that I can talk with some of the higher-ups about my teaching philosophy and how I integrate it into my class. I'm certainly taking the reviewer's suggestions under advisement.
That being said, I don't think that this semester has gone as well for me as last semester did. I'm having a hard time connecting with the students, and I think the main reason for this is football. Seriously, in the fall semester when I came in early Monday afternoons to teach, I could always strike up a conversation with people on Sunday's games, and that in turn led to us discussing other things. It created a comfort zone that I felt transfered over to class discussions. This semester, though, there's no football to talk about, and I usually spend the moments before class in self-absorbed reflection, which isn't exactly that conducive to engendering discussion. I'm going to have to find ways to remedy that in the future. (I think catching Family Guy Sunday evenings might help, but to be honest I don't really care that much for the show.)
The other big problem I've run into this semester is that I'm not energizing my students that much. My whole teaching philosophy is predicated around the students taking charge of their own education; I make it a point not to bog them down with dictator-like proclamations like "Turn your cell phones off before class," or "Raise your hand if you want to speak," because I think things like that reinforce patriarchal notions of authority and make the classroom environment much less conducive to learning. That being said, this semester my students haven't been that eager to take the reins and learn on their own. It wasn't like everyone in my class last semester did so, but I had a couple of students there who were very good at marshalling the class and leading them on learning excursions that were both beneficial and relevant to them. I don't have anyone like that in my classroom this semester, though, and I've had to deal with more than my share of uncomfortable silences here.
Still, my students are writing very well, and they are learning the critical thinking skills I think are the most important things that they will learn in college (or even in life in general). However, I kind of get the feeling that this semester my students are learning these things in spite of my teaching, instead of because of my teaching. I'm really going to have to reflect on my teaching methodology here this summer.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon