Month: February 2009

Cutting Down on Texting:

                What an annoying and very distracting habit! Probably one of the things that I find most irritating and that is probably one of my faults; I react strongly to texting in class which may be disrupting in hindsight. So, in hopes to cut down on this poor habit, I decided to take the perch behind class and stare down into what I call, “Texter Alley.” The first students I asked to put their phones away were two girls who ten minutes into lecture, didn’t have the notebooks open! After I asked them to put their phones away they definitely started taking notes and from my observation of their notebook pages, it was the second time they took notes (and it was the FOURTH week of class)! Trudi took to the top of the isle and we both got into the habit of encouraging other students to tell their peers to stop texting. Hopefully this tactic will introduce some peer policing. Not sure if this was intentional or known, but when Dr. Gurung chose the two guys to act out the brain demo, that was seriously in the heart of “Texter Alley.” Immediately all texting in that region stopped which was awesome!

And the Brain, Brain, Brain:

                The brain labels and functions is not that all easy to learn and with all the texting going on, how can it be learned for those individuals?! Okay, I promise I am done with the text talk from here on. Like I said the topic of brain function and parts can be pretty dry and dull material but that is not the case for our class. The use of the nerf brain was a great visual learning tool and specifically, using its nerf properties to squeeze the brain down to an animal’s size and then releasing the nerf brain and let it slowly evolve into the fore brain, creating the human brain. Good visual of how that part evolved and its reasoning behind the evolved lobe. I thought the Neuron Activity went very well (despite Josh’s anxiety and nerves) and flowed smoothly. The terms posted on the slide on the overhead helped the students out a lot when defining the different components of the neuron. The video recording worked well in addition to the success of the in-class neuron activity.

Group Engagement number three:

                A nice smooth transition from learning the material to using and applying that learned material.  I think the numbering off went more smoothly and quickly than the last group activity. While I was walking around, I heard a lot of discussion and cooperation amongst the groups. It seems like from here on out, the group activities will form and work together more quickly than the first two. The students must have caught onto the idea of forming the group quickly in order to have more time to accomplish the group work.

Brain Exercise follow-up:

                A brilliant idea to do a follow-up on the previous day’s Neuron Activity for the students will, understand what they were to get out of it and learn more specific information about the process. The follow-up showed how many parts of the neuron and the brain cooperatively work together to do one simple function. There was a lot of information and examples explaining how the sensory system feed information to our brain. The brain is not all that simple and it is crucial to go over the key things to remember about the brain and its functions. I’m sure a lot of the students feel quite overwhelmed with all the brain structure and material so they for one will appreciate.

Nice connection with Attraction:

                I really enjoyed all the animal kingdom-mate attraction examples. I felt as if all those examples made the connections nicely for the students. Seems like all the mates that have the most sensory appeal are the most likely to find a mate.  What about humans? It doesn’t vary across cultures- this was interesting to me because I know some tribes and bands were they find breasts not to be attractive or idolized like they are in our culture. These bands and tribes see women’s breast everyday (due to their dress) therefore they are just as attractive as arms or necks. So what does determine attraction? -Media. Really interest, thought provoking, and overall great questions with this material.  In the end, it is up to the babies to determine attraction – this is just wild stuff!

A few quick things first:

A few students kept shouting out answers really quickly.  So, we began calling on people specifically.  This worked out really well for the smaller group because we could figure out where the person was faster.  I also would go around the room and ask other people if they agreed or disagreed with that answer.  We also asked some of the students to explain or define their answers.

After about five students were in the room I asked them to begin looking through their notes.  I wanted to give a couple extra minutes for those that were running late.  I kept standing by the door of the room in the Commons so that I could flag down any lost looking people.  No one came up with questions during our silent part so we began the slides.

After each Chapter section of the slideshow we asked again if there were any questions on that material.  We only had one question the entire session.  It was a clarification on correlations.

At about 11:30 our attendance doubled.  I’m not sure if they thought that’s when the session started or what happened.  After we made it through the slide show one time, we asked for any more questions and then I offered to go back over the beginning part.  Josh had to head to class.  Most of the late attendees stayed and went through the first part.

After each section of slides, we asked a couple questions from the study guide.  Most of the people didn’t really seem to know that it even existed.

Reactions:

I really wasn’t very nervous about having to be in front of this group or talk to them.  I was shaky on the questions and I think that that was the biggest stressor for me.  Had I been able to feel confident in all of the answers I think that I would have felt more prepared and confident overall.  I’m sure that I knew most of the answers but I just kept second guessing myself.

I wish that Josh and I would have had a little more time together to connect and explicitly plan how we would approach the situation together.  I realize we both had extremely busy schedules and we did try to get together (we were together for about 20 minutes :).  I think neither of us really knew what to expect either.  On the second one, we’ll all be feeling a little more prepared.

I really feel like I am able to respond naturally to questions and situations (like a student always shouting the answer).  I feel like I can adapt to that pretty well.  I’ve felt pretty confident in other similar roles that I have had.  However, I really feel like I am thinking about why I make those choices and taking a more indepth look at my behaviors. I am also gaining knowledge of other ways to approach situations and excite discussion and teach.  I know that the focus here has been on the university setting but I really feel like what I have been observing and learning is applicable to the K-12 level as well. 

OKAY THAT WAS REALLY LONG 🙂

IS IT SUMMER YET?!?!?!  Not that I am wishing for school to be over…but could the snow really just STOP!?!?!

Sorry, it’s late! I have the notes, I just haven’t had time to sit down and type them!

First of all, I am SO disappointed I missed the neuron/silly string demonstration.  Thanks Jess for videoing the event and I am looking forward to reading the other TA’s reactions!

I wanted to give you kudos for using mnemonic devices while you were talking about parts of the brain.  You also presented each part of the brain in a few different ways and provided a few different triggers for helping them understand and remember all of the parts. 

I am consistently impressed with the topics and examples you choose to explain the ideas of psychology.  Psychology is an interesting thing to study any way and it can be so applicable to life.  But some professors just don’t pick exciting examples or examples that are applicable to our lives.  The ways you portray the psychology topics keep the students attention and keeping them engaged.  Humor can be so important in a lecture.  I have never really thought about it, but the classes I have always enjoyed the most are the ones that we are able to laugh in.  Humor is extremely effective in keeping the students engaged and even helping them remember the topics.  I would be much more likely to remember a silly or funny example than an example that is straight forward and dryly delivered. 

I always feel that we are being distracting when we do the attendance.  However, the students had the routine DOWN today.  To use Dr. G’s word, I think they’ve habituated to us, I just haven’t quite habituated to them yet!

I also noticed that you were still favoring the left side 🙂

STUDY TABLES

First, this was fun. I really liked talking about the study table in class and I think it helped when we clarified that people didn’t have to stay the whole time. Only a handful showed up, but they came with questions. Most of them were about correlations and experiments, IVs and DVs. There was a question about ERLP and what the scoop was with that. We went over some study tips and talked about information overload a little. There’s so much to read, so much to take notes on and we talked about ways they can read the material and look for the big concepts and figure out how to apply them.

T-POD

So far I seem to be getting good responses out of the pod. The biggest test that I put out there to see if I’d get responses is asking if them to respond if they wanted study tips. I’m not going to waste time putting them together and then sending them out freely to students who have no interest. There have been a few students who have introduced themselves in class, but I wonder if I’m a little too weird for them or if my age somehow makes me unapproachable. 

TA MEETINGS

These feel rushed. Always feel rushed. Maybe it’s because there are so many of us, and I know there is business that we need to take care of in the meeting, but Jess and I were talking about us TA’s getting together informally to talk through things. I feel very smart being around these people and would like to get to know more about them. 

ENTERING GROUP PROJECTS AND THINGS

Wow. This is the most boring/tedious part of the whole experience. There has to be a different/faster way to enter this stuff. 

MISCELLANEOUS

I’ve had several students complain to me about group engagments in class. They’ve said the groupings are too large, too inconvenient, or the people they’re stuck with don’t mesh well with them. The brain function identification one was hard to grade. I tended to err on the generous side. 

REVIEW SESSION

Seems very difficult to make sure students are learning/participating in a session with such a large group. There were comments after that it felt disorganized and that people were answering too fast and I’d like to know how we’re supposed to be accountable for students learning things. Granted, Jess and I had never given a review session before, so it’s hard to look prepared and organized without any practical experience. We had 48 people in the room and not only was it hard to hear, but it was hard to tell who was picking up on things and if students don’t speak up, how are we supposed to know if they’re getting it? I noticed that as a theme today as we read over some of the students comments. They seem to think that we/Dr. G are responsible for their learning the material and only a few seemed to take responsibility. If we don’t hear from them, if they don’t ask questions, how are we supposed to read their minds and predict how they’ll learn best? I think if I were a professor that would exasperate me the most.

Mandy and I got together this morning to go over the study material and then again about a half hour before the session started.  Although we both looked over the review powerpoint before, we didn’t realize there weren’t any answers included in it until this morning.  That caused some stress on my part because even though we thought we knew the right answers, we wanted to be confident in delivering them…and what if our answers were wrong?!  We happened to see Caitlin and Josh, who were trying to find the answers at about the same time we were. 

When it came time for the review session, Mandy and I felt prepared and confident, but still had a few discrepancies between our answers, Caitlin and Josh’s answers and the two different books’ answers.  Everything had a different version of the truth which was quite confusing at times.   When students started coming in, we had them sign the attendance sheet and told them to begin to look over their notes and jot down questions that they had.  We asked if anyone had any questions while we waited for a few more to arrive.  No one had any questions (we even waited).  We decided to continue through the power points, with Mandy doing pages 1-3, me doing 4-7.  It worked out nicely because we were both well rehearsed in our “areas” of the powerpoint.  Students (41 in all) had generally known the answers before we put the choices up.  It was great.  We did have a few questions though…we didn’t for sure the size order of chromosomes, genes and DNA.  The previous group had a different answer, but we still told them the answer we thought it was…and good thing we did, because it was right! We also had a question on the 7 themes of psychology that the study guide talked about (but we later learned in a mtg w/Gurung that it only applied to Weiten users).  It was funny because going into the mtg, Mandy and I weren’t so confident about how it went, but when we left, I think we felt pretty good with how things went.   I like how both Mandy and I respond when we are under pressure…we are both super chill and just try to be as honest as possible w/the students.  Neither of us freak out about unnecessary things or things we can’t change.  I think we work well together.

Looking back on the Gurung & Bord (2007) article, we incorporated pretty much every main idea in the passage…we made sure that we worked cooperatively as a group, we gave the students the chance to test their knowledge first by just presenting the question (metacognition), we held the session the day before and gave students 3 different opportunities to come to one and we didn’t present anything new. 

I think it worked, but the true test comes tomorrow.  DUN DUN DUUUUNNN.