As another building block on the way to your final teaching portfolio, here are the guidelines for the CTCH 602 mid-semester assessment. If you would feel more comfortable responding to question (2) anonymously, we can arrange to do this:
- At this point in the semester, assess your own learning thus far in CTCH 602. What are you learning and how are you learning? What is proving most valuable to you as an individual and why? And how does your learning relate to/help you meet your short-term and long-term goals as a teacher and faculty member in a college or university?
- Now think about our learning community as a whole. What has proven productive for you in the content, the teaching, the approaches to learning, the flow of the semester, etc., and what has not? What would you like to examine in greater depth and what do you think we might cover in less depth? What might you want to change and how?
The most valuable part of the class has been remembering and reflecting upon my own teaching approach. It’s been 17 years since I taught ROTC, and have not really thought about my approach much since than. This has really brought back a lot of reflections about what I did, especially those areas where I could have improved. Additionally, the ideas tied to sensitivity of different learning styles among students has been very valuable as I look at how to implement these ideas, especially in teaching an introductory course which may include a large number of students. These ideas will be valuable in my future teaching.
For our learning community as a whole, the pace has been good. The in-class discussions have been very productive in sharing ideas across a diversity of experience. Our one lesson on how to post and about the on-line resources available was a little challenging to get the hang of at first, having never done it before, but it does serve a purpose as we have used it several times now in sharing ideas with one another. I might recommend printed notes or tutorial on these items beforehand. Another suggestion would be more timely feedback on the assignments we have submitted, thus allowing us to implement any suggestions the instructor may have. Maybe I missed something as far as where the individual feedback is posted, but I’ve only seen an E-mail feedback on two assignments so far. Other than that, I thoroughly enjoy the course.