Posts Tagged ‘mistakes beginning teachers make’
March 21 - Reflections on Teaching: Mistakes I’ve Made
By: Chris Palmer in Faculty Development
I started teaching at American University at the age of 56 after a rewarding career as an environmental and wildlife film producer. That was almost ten years ago, and I’ll be the first to admit that I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I had never taught before and I wasn’t even sure where to begin. I had no teaching philosophy beyond some vague, unarticulated feeling that I wanted my students to do well. And so, I started asking lots of questions.
October 15 - When Mentoring New Faculty, Don’t Ignore These Issues
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Faculty Development
Beginning college teachers benefit when they have an instructional mentor. That fact is well established; as is the fact that mentoring benefits those who mentor. The influx of new faculty over the past few years has caused mentoring programs to flourish. All kinds of activities have been proposed so that mentors and mentees can spend their time together profitably. Addressed less often are those instructional topics particularly beneficial for the experienced and less-experienced teachers to address. Here’s a list of possibilities.
October 2 - Understanding What You See Happening in Class
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
While conducting a class, even though teachers may be doing all or most of the talking, students communicate important nonverbal messages. They communicate these messages through facial expressions, body postures, and how they say what they say, as well as what actions they do or the skills they attempt to perform. Both novice and expert teachers see the same student responses, but expert teachers see in those responses something very different than novices see.
April 24 - Teaching Large Classes: Strategies for Managing Large Lecture Courses
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies, Teaching and Learning
Once I passed my 50th semester of introductory biology, I began to regret that my profession doesn’t have a real apprenticeship for teaching—why should every young professor facing his or her first big class…have to make the same mistakes I did and, perhaps more important, why should they not know that everybody…has the same problems?
