Barry Westling

Jason, Good point. I think more frequent and individualized discussions regarding progress works they best. Personalizing our interest in the students success will convey that we care, are willing to listen, and are approachable about difficulties they may be experiencing. Barry Westling

Jason, Stories are good to illustrate a point. Unless the class is about "storytelling", these behold asset and augment, not occupy the presentation. Stories are great to introduce a subject, provide an application of a work situation, or help clarify some difficult concept. Students appreciate stories because usually there is something there they can relate to. So, we are actually taking something they already know and merging it with something we want them to know. Barry Westling

Norman, Well, I believe people always like stories, and anything relatede to a story is more likey to be recalled later. This is a great way to use the available time productively too. We want to avoid having students think we are just filling time. Barry Westling

Norman, Right. You're like most responsible teachers who carefully consider how best to teach these students in this class at this time. It will vary from class to class. There is so much media available, we really have to be choosy, so we end up with not just the acceptable, but the perfect. Barry Westling

Jason, Good thoughts. Also, I think one of the longer term benefits is to reflect on the growth and improvements I've made in my teaching style, manner, approach to students and situations, and response to the ever persistent changes that are thrust on instructors. It's really quite revealing. Barry Westling

Steven, Pretesting is really for the teacher to know what prior knowledge the students arrive with. It's a planning tool on where to make adjustments. Getting to know your students is a great thing too, but a bit different from the purpose of the pretest. Both activities are great, I'm just saying they're different activities with different purposes. If these were tools, we'd have a saw and a hammer. Both are tools, but with quite different purposes. But both extremely useful in building something. Just like we want to build something in class - increased learning! Barry Westling

Julie, You're right, and students are keen in noticing the subtle clues to a teachers readiness (i.e. unprepared and disorganized). Even if they don't say something, they'll notice when a teacher is consistently unprepared and as a result, lose respect and regard for the teacher as someone who can help them. They talk among themselves too, and that can even transfer from class to class, and then that teacher has created one of the worst things they would ever want: "a bad reputation among students". Once the trust is broken, it's very hard to gain it back. Barry Westling

Chandra, I can only speak for myself, but I never grade the pretest. In fact, students are much more willing to participate if they know their grade is not involved and we only want to see where the class stands as a whole. Barry Westling

Kristen, Your personality does add to this style of delivery. As teachers, we should be open to other, perhaps less conmfortable or familiar modes of delivery (at least now and then) to stretch us, to make us better teachers. Barry Westling