This course definitely reinforces that what I have been doing for the past ten years plus of technical training is following closely to the course design.  I fully recommend this course to beginning instructors as well as veteran instructors/educators.

There were many useful areas of this content:

• Use multiple senses to help student retain content of material taught
• Education is lifelong
• Use and develop soft skills for successful professional behaviors
• Have a PLAN B
• Pre-test may be useful tool when class does not seem ready for material
• Point system may be beneficial grading system

It is important that ST instructors bring 'real-life' expereince into the lecture, especially if there is no hands-on skills that go with the lecture.

Students like a varitiy during lecture. Breaking lecture up and showing surgical procedure videos, then having a discussion about the 'procedure', not only encourages the student to look forward, but relate it to the current subject.

Top priority is to Communicate with the students all the time. In class (face to face), email, text, moodle, phone. Give them feedback on the performance. Question/answer session in class. Think outside the box or book. Be creative with your lesson plans. Share real life examples.

I find that when I am teaching math within my classes (especially word problems) a lot of my students "shut-down" because of their previous experiences with math and word problems.  So, it isn't always about their base knowledge they have coming into the classrooom, it is their self-worth from other instructors and classes too.

Roger

Good point in learning technic's and implimenting feedback from students during reviews. 

Methods

While I think that i do a pretty good job of modeling, mentoring and monitoring there is always room for improvement.  I think I do need to improve in the area of monitoring and holding the students accountable.  This, of the three, is the most difficult for me.  One good idea I got from this course was to give each new student a card for them to write down why they want to succeed, who are they changing their lives for, what are they working towards, and have them refer to that when times get tough and they want to… >>>

My students that I have now, want to be given answers and do not want assist in their learning. I get very frustrated as this challenges me to strive to find out what will work and what doesn't work. I already implement adaptive learning techniques, but what I did wrong this time was post their enrichment assignments early to be emailed to me when it was due. And what they did was go through the book and fill out the assignments before I had even gotten to the chapter to be discussed. Except for the midterm and final, all my… >>>

I have only been teaching for 3 1/2 years. As I first started out, I taught the lecture/student model. It now becomes apparent to me that lecture alone is not the most prolific way of getting across information. Working in groups, working with a partner, applying knowledge when appropriate for exams, and or hands on activities is more beneficial, and provides instant feedback to the student in hopes they are moving in the right direction. This also keeps the students interest as they move along in the program.

It is important to incorporate hands on activities to entice students to critically think. In the course it covered a topic called the "weakest think". I can adapt the activity to several dental hygiene senarios and techniques to assist and assess the students ability to learn the tasks.

Gaming has been a method that I have seen spark interest in a subject, creating learning competivness among students. Many students are visual learners in this present society and traditional methods of F2F does not always spark their interest. Playing "Jeopardy" using class content as the subject matter really engages the student while letting the less versed students recognize through peer pressure what they may not have grasped as course knowledge and gives them focus areas to concentrate on.

Writing lesson plans used to be a much larger chore until I realized I can have a lesson plan and refer the technical details to a best practices manual. That way, I can make my lesson plans and have the course layed out and work on my Best Practices Manual one lesson at a time as I go along.

Hope this helps someone else!!

Always work hard

I have discovered that I am able to engage students when I ask them to think critically about the tasks they perform in their clinical program. Once they are able to think through the process and connect the dots, they have many "aha moments". Their motivation and confidence increase, and they are eager to undertake new challenges. I've discovered too that they frequently benefit from diagrams, pictures or alternative ways of presenting the same material.

I am going to use some of the techniques to try and help a family member with their schooling.

After taking this course I realize how important Adaptive learning could be in higher education.  I agree with how this could appeal to many different learning styles and how beneficial it can be to the masses, however I do wonder if we as a country have to begin this process in early education to get them interested and excited about learning.  I do think that higher education may be too late for some students to want to even go to school.

 I am interested if Adaptive Learning is successful, we can modify how we teach or what we offer to students on how to be successful, however people and their habits are not so easy to modify.

At the beginning of each term, I spend a few minutes with each student to gauge what there interest are, how they feel about the subject matter and so on. During the meeting I also ask if there are any challenges that they have that may impact their ability to have a sucessful term and if so, what I should know so that I may help them to succeed.

After the meeting I ask them to put in worrds a LETTER TO THEMSELVS outlining their reasons for comming this School, if there are any support systems that they would like… >>>

This module has continued to male me relevant in the classroom by allowing me to diversify my instruction and reach all students.  It allowed me to gain valuable suggestions to impact studetn learning and retention of information.  I have always diversified my instructional methods from powerpoints to group activities to youtube clips to engage students.  This has certainly helped me to recognize which studetns learn accrodingly and which ones need additional guidance.