One Month Of Teachering

According to the calendar I've been teaching for about one month. Given that, I thought it was time I did a little reflection and think about how things have been going this last month.

Being in front of the class

My course is run as essentially a flipped classroom, where students are expected to get most of their initial experience with programming concepts from the online textbook. In class the student's spend most their time doing programming activities with my guidance (as well as the help of my TAs). This means that I don't spend a lot of time teaching in front of the class on the average day (fifteen minuets tops). That said, when I have a good plan, a fun example, and I can walk through it all in the front of the class, its a good day. Surprisingly, the students put up with my slightly zany personality, and seem to enjoy it when I teach or we program as a class. All of this is contingent, however, on me having a good plan.

Planning

When the class started one of my hardest problems was getting things planned out enough to feel comfortable in class. In some ways this hasn't gotten substantially better. I haven't really been able to give planning much more time than when I started, but I have managed to improve things. I feel like I'm getting better at planning in shorter amounts of time, and I feel like I'm getting better at being comfortable with looser plans.

This is all a good thing, but I still don't know if I'm doing enough. Due in no small part to the flipped classroom design I feel like most days I'm here to serve the in class exercises more than I'm really curating and guiding learning. Maybe that's the point, but I can't help but shake the feeling that if I planned better I could put more teaching, or better teaching into the class and maybe help enhance student learning.

I would love to spend more time planning, but I'm already taking a pretty big hit to my ability to work on other tasks as is. In fact one of my biggest concerns with all this, is that if this is how much time one course takes out of my day to day, how would I be able to do two or three classes and get research or some other tasks done? I know other people can do it, but I haven't figured out how they do it yet.

Course Design

One of the things about this class that I'm having the most trouble with is the course design. I love the idea of a flipped classroom, but sometimes I wish there was more middle ground. Just because I'm not doing the original teaching, doesn't mean that the students can't learn a concept by watching or participating in programming as a group. The way this course is designed in class is pretty much only individual or small group work.

Before I go on, I don't want people to misunderstand me. I like this course design. Flipped classroom is a great way to teach introductory programming and "doing" is probably the most important aspect of learning to program. I don't think other teachers (whose notes I am working off of) are doing bad work, and I don't want my thoughts to be taken as a criticism of their abilities or planning.

When I mean to say is that all teachers are different, as are all courses. What has worked well for the teachers whose plans I am using might not work as well with my teaching style. In the long run What I really want to do is take this course design and customize it (more than I am already that is). I want to put in more of the activities that I like, if only to avoid getting into too much of a routine. As one of my professors loved to say: "change promotes attention".

Overall I think the class is going OK. I'm getting the hang of teaching, and I'm starting to develop positive habits around teaching and getting other things done. That doesn't mean, however, that there isn't definite room for improvement. Teaching is still taking a lot of time away from other things, I'm still not sure I'm prepping enough, and while most of the students seem to be getting it, I'm still worried about a few that are starting to lag behind.

I kinda hope this is how most new teachers feel.