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Ask a question from your peers to help you in your professional work. Seek different points of view on a topic that interests you. Start a thought-provoking conversation about a hot, current topic. Encourage your peers to join you in the discussion, and feel free to facilitate the discussion. As a community of educators, all members of the Career Ed Lounge are empowered to act as a discussion facilitator to help us all learn from each other.

Pre-requisite

Most of the time when we see frustrated students in the classrooms that complaint about the course content, I think it is in part due to lack of information or miss-selection by the time they are enroll in school. Admissions play a critical role into delivering the long-term goals of each program. Unfortunately, students get enrolled in programs without filling out the pre-requisites for the programs. That situation could be problematic later on for the students, instructors, and the school administrators as well.

Grading Percentage Weights

What are some of the examples that you as an instructor use to assign grading weights to various subject areas?

Signs its back up time.

How many of us have the ability to keep in touch with our students and notice that they have started to disconnect? What are the obvious and common signs of this? (i.e. reaching for their phones, staring at the clock, sighing, rolling their eyes)

Death by Powerpoint

What are some interactive examples that can be used in the classroom to engage Students while presenting a Powerpoint lecture? Most of the information that I provide is Powerpoint based. I try at all costs to avoid being a Statue Instructor by asking questions from my Students to engage them and to bring them into the fold of learning and participating while providing them with a powerpoint lecture. I would like to know how and what other instructors use to enhance the learning environment while using Powerpoint.

Instructor Teaching Styles

I wonder how many of us educators can honestly see ourselves in one or more of the categories as stated in the beginning of the information provided? I can personally see myself in more than one category. But I realize it is a generalized overview of teaching styles. Which category do you see your self in? How can you change and adapt your style to become a more effective teacher? What can you sustain and maintain about your style that works?

seeing the campus through the eyes of the student

This brings up a good point. I believe that you can develop a bettter relationship with the students if you know where they are coming from. I was a student of the campus where I'm teaching right now. I find this to work to my advantage, because I can relate to my students and they find me approachable.

Time management

Sliding window of time, prioritizing on-the-fly which is more important can help with time management. Constant reading of how the students are reacting to classroom activities or responding to questions during the presentation can confirm if students are understanding the material and went to move on to the next facet of the subject or a new subject.

Lesson plans

Lession plans help to keep the day's lession on track. Having taught my classes for so many years makes the necessity of a lession plan for me not particularly important. But, the plan is NOT just for me. My supervisor, my administration, my students and most importantly - my substitute, when needed - have an absolute need for my day's plan. Including not only what I intend to cover, but why the material is being covered, helps to keep everything relevant, and everybody on track.

Content and performance Standards

I think that is very important to highlight for students what constitutes content, fact, information. And provide a measurable standard of performance. In my case, in technical college, it provides a measurable guideline to determine satisfactory performance. Students learn to see what are the basic, and the possible outcomes of their performance

Assessment

Informal assessment should take place in the classroom on a regular basis. This includes evaluation of students as they interact with their peers, we can ask questions to make sure the students are student are retaining and understanding the information that we are sharing with them. I have found that incoroporating activities in segements of my lectures not only make the class more exciting but it also helps the studnet to become activitely invovled in their learning experience. Vernise

Study Guides

What I find to be very helpful(but very time consuming) is I put together a study guide based off of the test that is going to be given. I will re-word the test question, answer that is on the test will be in the question on the study guide and the question that is on the test is the answer on the study guide. I have found that it is another great tool to help the student study and to retain the information because it is presented to them in another format.

Facts, Concepts, Procedure & Metacognitive

Taxonomy according to Bloom expands the framework of knowledge and cognitve process. There are four types of knowledge: Factual- basic elements that students must know Conceptual knowledge- interreltionship among basic elements within larger stuctures which allows them to work together. Procedural- refers to how to do things and the methods and steps that it takes to complete a task Metacognitive- knowing what you know. Taxonomy learning helps with writing a lesson plan, objective and clarifying what students should be able to know once the lesson is complete. Vernise

Lesson Plan

Lesson plans can be very helpful and is a necessary part of preparing a a well sturctured course that will not only fulfil the students educational needs but also meet the standards, objectives, rationale, procedures and assessments strategies of the course and college requirements. Vernise

Getting to know you

Getting to know your students can be very helpful in planning your course. Students are interested in the instructors sharing things about themselves. Sometimes this allows student to share more freely about themselves. Gaining comprehensive knowledge about our students will help us as instructors to deliver best practice course studies for our students. Vernise

Importance of Rationale

I think the imporatnce of rationale can't be underestimated. I think it helps having students "buy into" the subject matter at task. Many times when I teach my class, I encounter subjects that are a little obscure, plain, hard to comprehend, or flat out old school and boring. I personally take a little of the class time (typically when I introduce the subject) to explain the relevance of the subject, and its relation to the overall picture. I normally don't include this explanation in my lesson plan, but I think its a good idea to have it as part of it.

Know your audience

As part of my introduction to class, I always make time to find out who my students are, and a little bit of their background. Many times I find out that, -although my class is a required class-, many of the basic principles are forgotten, or have not been applied in class enough to understand their relevance. By asking simple questions, I try to understand the reason for that, and how I can best deliver the information to that individual group, as well as identifying at the same time, how much my students know. typically, Age, and their work experience are the main factors that individualize each group.

Using Instructional Objectives

Enjoyed learning about the concept of the A-B-C-D learning objectives. Thought it might be appropriate to add "E" and "F": "Establishes the Foundation" to add to the learning objectives.

make up work

our school policy is that missed assignments must be made up or turned in the very next day the student is on campus.

Prerequisite

My program does not have any pre-requesites. Often I get students who lack basic skills needed to be successful in class. I have often thought about our school offering a basic computer class for example to students who wish to enroll.

Presentation Methods

I generally stick to Power POint and internet videos. My power points tend to be very generalized so that students aRE ENGAGED IN LECTURE TO GET ALL THE INFO.