Teaching Reflection (FA13 Week 5)

This week, I'm glad that my students and I had lots of discussion this week about their digital story project as well as why and how they are by to do their case analysis project. Last time, I got my mentor's feedback that each step of my ULA's demo was too quick so that lot of my students could not follow, which caused students more confusion. Before I let me ULA do other demos, I tried to demo by myself this week and slow down the pace. My strategy was: wait until everyone get to this step that I was doing, and then go to the next step. Although it seemed to have longer waiting time in each step, but every student have more time to process where to go and how to do the steps. And the most important thing is, I would need to demo once rather than many times with many different problems and questions students had during the whole demo process. In the demo process, I also found that while some advanced students were waiting for my next step, they would volunteer to help other students who did not quite follow. A lot of times I was thinking about how much detail instruction I need to provide my students in class. When I was observing Matt's class, he always emphasizes the importance of learning and solving problems independently. I understand that most of my students were freshmen and would want lots of support from their instructor, however, I agree with Matt that students need to learn how to learn and find solutions to their problems by their own. I have not found the appropriate instruction for this issue yet, but I will need to talk to more experienced instructors to figure out what is the best way for me to do for my students.