always have all materals ready before your course begins and have them in proper order to follow from the text book

allowing the students to do hands on work in the lab allows for a increased level of learning

I am excited about greeting and helping my first class. Any advise on not having my personal/background introduction sounding too scripted? Would a q&a period be appropriate and help begin engagement? Any ideas or thoughts?

I like this idea . I will try to implement it in my classroom

I feel that the time spent for everyone to appropriately get to know each other is invaluable. I allow at least 15-30 minutes for this, and often use the "introduce someone else" technique.

My biggest challenge is remembering student names. It's really important, and when I have, for example, three "Bills" in the class, I get confused ... Visual, not verbal is my strongest learning style.

One thing I try to determine is the course design when I'm required to teach to an already given syllabus. It's important to know the underlying intent that drives the higher-level goals, objectives, activities, etc.

I've been teaching for around 30 years in traditional and for-profit settings; ground and online. The biggest challenge I have faced is when a student goes for the grade and not the learning. anyone else ever experience that?

I am a new instructor this quarter who has little experience in the classroom. My energy level and enthusiasm is very high along with my passion for the course content (Professional Development...resumes, cover letters, interviewing). My class is small (less than 10) and very motivated yet very quiet. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to better engage the students adn encourage participation?

I teach a drawing class, so the learning styles return back to visual, but is probably a combination of many

I'm a new instructor. I really don't want to lecture for my entire class period, but I try to come up with Vet Tech related games and can't! I've done jeopardy for finals review and breed bingo for the breed topic. But what else is there?? For stuff like medical records? or OSHA?

I'm not sure my class will like this. I wonder if I should wait until next quarter or start it mid-term?

I'm pretty new to teaching so working with students who have issues with reading and under standing what they have read is challenging

Last quarter I used a "muddiest points box" to allow students to write a question about the topic that they may not have wanted to ask in class. It worked really well. However this quarter the students either don't use it or use it to ask questions about their own pets. Should I just stop using it?

I teach physical therapy. I tell my students that they can learn a lot from looking at someone's eyes. We can see fear, pain, happiness, along with many other emotions. The same goes for students. YOu just have to look. But here is my concern. As an instructor, I hate looking in people's eyes. I am a very strong introvert and by looking into the student's eyes, I have to use a lot of energy. However, I can and will do it if necessary, especially when I need to get my point accross. There are many people who are like me. When I was in grad school, we were discussing stereotypes and someone mentioned that people who don't look at you in the eye is mischevious and not trustworthy. I was really offended by that. But introverts are not the only ones who have problems looking one in the eye. What about various cultures who feel you are being disrespectful if you look your superiors in the eye? What about the person who is abused, both mentally, physically or verbally? They don't want to look you in the eye as well. When we look at our student, yes, we will get a lot from their eyes, but look deeper than that, and it will tell you more than you could imagine!

What reinforcement strategies do you use successfully to help students retain new material and content? How do these change when helping students that are struggling?

I went to a course on active learning and the development of learning groups. One of the things they taught us there and I found it to be really useful is to develop a questionairre and a rating system based upon the topics that you are learning. You then have the students line up based upon their rating with low at one end and high at the other. They then count down in how many groups you want. I have found that this allows for a mixture of students who have knowledge in the area as well as students who has no experience in the area. I would ask questions such as how long have they worked in the field, their age, how many years of college have they taken, etc.

How have you successfully helped students that have reading and/or writing deficiencies in you classroom?

How have you used learning groups in your classroom & how successful were you in their use?

What do you find is your most successful non verbal communication skill in the classroom?