Barry Westling

Hi Mary: I think every new instructor is confronted with this at the early portion of their teaching caeers, So, don't feel bad. One relatively simple approach is to rely heavily on your copurse objectives and student learning outcomes (SLO's). If these are written well, they should guide any instructor to what the student needs to leave the class with. After a time, you'll have so much cointent you'll have to be deciding what information are you going to trim down due to time constraints. Resources are all around you. Past graduates, local, culinary experts, medical personnel, military, just have… >>>

Hi Phyllis: I believe teachers can use pretests as a gauge to where the emphasis should be based on the results of pretesting. Why waste time on information if students are mostly familiar with the some of the material already? At the same time, a teacher may expect students to be able to perform at a certain level and find that that overall, performance is much lower than expected. So here, the emphasis shift would be to possibly sacrifice some higher-level material for basic, foundational lessons. Of course, all of the objectives for a course have to be met. But… >>>

Hi Carlos: Pretest's don't have to done all the time. But when they are, They can be quite beneficial for both student and teacher. Comparing first day to last day performance is an interesting analysis to make. Sensing where the class as a whole is generally performing is good information to have when beginning a class, so that time is not wasted and the emphsasi can be adjusted or tweaked in order to maximise the time available. Some teachers will use pretests as a review process prior to "the test that counts". Also, I don't think taking a pretest bothers… >>>

Hi Ali: Frequent status updates and current information assist students in guiding them the direction that will be most successful. Like a boat adrift, if we can steer the student in the general direction, with constant reinforcement and "on-course correction", they';ll likely do much better. I always like to add that the way information is conveyed is important too. Kindness, caring words of comfort, along with encouragement and support, advice and suggestions for improvement will be received as concern by the teacher for the student's success. That's a good feeling to have - like the teacher is the advocate, not… >>>