Barry Westling

James, For me, I try to be "frequent and regular" in my efforts to keep students informed. You're right about informing more while there's time for the student to make corrections and see improvement in their final grade. Also, time to encorage, support, give advice, or sometimes, just listen. These ways helps build relationships, trust, and respect. Barry Westling

Annie, Absoutely. Control, and the knowledge to act on that information shared by their instructor is key to the student achieveing higher degrees of performance. Barry Westling

Michael, Yes, and along with knowledge and skills, we could add attidue - the behaviors, manerisms, and language that completes a professional career-minded student serious about not only getting a good job, but keeping it! We can do this by sharing information but also by being a good role model. Students can pick up those attributes by observing our actions. Some of these skills are so important, for some, they would last a lifetime and contribute to higher levels of successfulness. Barry Westling

Michael, Smooth and seamless, that's what we'd expect if we were sitting in our own classes. We owe the students our time and effort required to prepare appropriately for each class, consistently and regularly. That's the expectation the students come to class with, and we need to be ready to fulfill that expectation. And by doing so, our classes will turn more interesting and better learning outcomes will result as well. Barry Westling

Annie, Pretests don't have to be elaborate, in fact, they can rather short. I have taken 2-3 key objectives, stuff the students must know by the time they finish the course and derived questions from that into 3-4 question for each objective. This simple exercise will show how much students already know and how much emphasis I'll need to spend on areas I may not hac=ve suspected attention would have been needed. Barry Westling

Kimberly, I really like rubrics, least among the reasons is their objectivity that's useful for both teacher and student. Knowing how, why, and to what degree an assignment will be graded shares the expectatation of the teacher along with providing a great template for the student who chooses to align with the instructors purpose in the assignment. Barry Westling

Kimberly, Right - these are a teachers tool in determining how best to approach individual classes, personalizing them to accomodate specific needs one class may have, different from another. Barry Westling

Velma, Sounds great! Variety, creative resources, participation and interesting activities - all these contribute to the higher level student learning outcomes. Barry Westling

Velma, Great! This is an example of collaborative learning and garners student participation that is active and engaged. Student retention will be improved as the result. Barry Westling

Brian, Right. It's our job, we're paid to do it, and we were selected to do so based on our unique and special talents. We should not diminish our value to the students through lack of prepardeness. Trust and respect has to be earned. Barry Westling