Month: May 2009

a bit too dramatic perhaps:) 

i think the TA experience has a right to be demanding because teaching is a demanding enterprise. while i think the requirements of the TA experience may have been intense at first, i don’t think it should have been cut nearly as much as it was. in my mind, we have to prepare for the real world and while adjustments can be made for anything, we have to learn to manage our time and to prioritize. 

i have a new respect for teaching. things that i thought were important ended up not being as important. the information on what things effect student learning were very interesting. 

exam creation…i dropped out of tests and measurements last semester because i was less than enthralled by the teaching method used and felt i could learn more on my own. this experience certainly helped me with that. i learned more about question formation and evaluation than ever before and i wish we would have been given more time to do play with this. perhaps allow a  TA to create an entire quiz on their own to develop skills.

i wish there would have been more interaction with the students. i feel like i had a lame group. there were only one or two students that would contact me and even then it wasn’t consistent. does that mean my pod just wasn’t interested or was i not inviting enough? or was my age a factor?

we did a lot in pairs as TA’s and while i thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone, i would have liked to do a bit more on my own. i wanted to push the envelope some more in review sessions and i felt a little restricted doing so when conducting it with someone else. i did get to try new things, but i don’t feel like i explored it enough. 

i like this blogging thing and will likely continue on my own. it gives me a chance to review and process information in a different way and a little deeper. i could have made more time for this component, but that’s my own fault. i can see how it helps stimulate more questions, helps to observe things from another angle and develop actions to follow up on. 

i like diving into experiences and part of my problem is that my time management skills get tested when i’m stressed out and sometimes i end up performing less than stellarly. this semester was my most intense semester and a lot of the intensity came from non-school related things. managing a full school load, two jobs, and a crashing personal life tends to mess things up. add grad school baloney in there and it’s a full salad of stress. i got through it and learned a few things about myself including that i’m not as good as compartmentalizing as i had hoped. there was a couple of weeks in april where the boundaries blurred and it affected every aspect of my life. not good. rather embarrassing. this was good practice for grad school though, or at least that’s the way i’m going to look at it. i go into things with good intentions, but i have to remain diligent with the processes i set up for myself to follow through on those intentions. 

as for increasing student engagment and learning in the class, i’m still of the opinion that students need to take responsibility for their learning as much as professors and educators provide them with the tools to do so. you can lead a horse to water…is what i think of. making quizzes available and worth grade points is an excellent way to keep students reading. if they choose not to participate, they don’t earn the points, that seems fair to me and completely up to the student. there were plenty of tools and resources available to them including review sessions, study tables and immediate access to a TA if they needed one. to me, that’s quality educational service. 

i would have liked to do more with the pods. i’m not sure exactly what yet, but one class meeting devoted to some pod division may have been fun early on and might have encouraged more interaction. something like these may turn into a legistical nightmare, but arranging the room into pods for a group exercise may have created some familiarity within the students as well as give TA’s an opportunity to meet the pod as a group. the hard part for me was remembering who was in my pod. connecting a list of email names to faces in class was a huge challenge and i only got to know a handful. creating that relationship is important and i think it could be developed more. 

all in all, i liked this experience tremendously. it tested me in ways i didn’t expect and i feel like i came out of it more confident in my abilities as a student as well as an academic reseource. if an opportunity presents itself in grad school, which it usually doesn’t for master’s students, i will definitely try for it. i don’t know if i’ll ever teach in a school setting, but i would love to continue educating people in some way shape or form and this has definitely given me the tools to be good at it. dr. g is an excellent example of a professor who takes great pride in what and how he teaches and while it may sound like a brown-nosing job, i learned a lot just by watching and absorbing. people who teach by living example as well as through instruction are rare and i am honored to have had the opportunity to work for him. i think every student in that intro to psych class had a better experience than they expected just by having dr. g as a professor.

class notes re: stress topic

• lots of students came in late. annoying.
• study on emotional expressionas it ties directly into mental health was a fascinating topic. i like the 15 minute writing task…ways studentds can use the info they learn. all of the practical stress helpers refreshed my memory of what to do when i feel like crap. so much of the last classes were good, practical appliations of things full of good data. 
• all of this drove home the “show me the data” mantra of the first week of class and i like that it remained a distinct theme throughout the course. it’s one thing to talk about learning goals, it’s another to practice them and drive them home every class. 
• students are participating more and asking some very interesting questions.

abnormal psych class notes

• the introduction for this topic was very effective. i liked the emphasis on subjectivity and reminding students that mental health. stressing to students the tendency of seeing disorders everywhere as a result of this class and mentioning the Barnum effect all throughout this unit was also effective. 

last class notes

•  “Analyze This” was a nice way to show Freud in a contemporary setting. i think a lot of the examples dr. g has used throughout the course will help students look at what they see in media more objectively
• the battacca bat was fun
• i like the organization of topics re: therapies the way it was presented in class vs. books. the flow made more sense since they all relate and build on each other. i think students got that this time.
• update on modern trends show that psych is a constantly evolving field and the answers are never concret. perhaps students will continue asking questions. 

i think i did ok. i felt like i was comfortable with the topic and that i covered everything that was relevant. meeting with dr. g beforehand and hashing through content with a figurative machete was extremely helpful since it is easy to forget that this is an intro class and even though there is a wealth of information at our fingertips, the most important question to ask is “what do they NEED to know at the intro level?” i kept thinking that i could have found more current research to present, but time is a factor. 

using steve to demonstrate a little paranoia was not as effective as i’d hoped. i thought of it the morning of and didn’t have a lot of time to develop the storyline and it might have been more effective had i used him more throughout the presentation. steve told me he had fun in class even though he felt robbed of face time.

i gelt like my Rosenhan reference was a little weak and that i didn’t explain it well enough. i have have been able to tie that in with steve had i planned it better.  

i did feel like the comparison piece between A Beautiful Mind and Meet Etta was pretty good. as i had hoped, most of the students had seen the movie, therefore showing it in class would have been redundant. had there been more time, i might have shown in immediately before Etta to give a more direct comparison between the dramatization of schiz and real life schiz. 

time flew. at first i didn’t feel like i was taking long enough but when i was done, i couldn’t believe how much time had passed. i was nervous and shaky at the beginning, but calmed down as student responded. i felt more at ease as it progressed. i kept trying to keep the “conversation” going, as dr. g put it.  

i don’t feel like i walked around enough, but not sure that was very important either. students participated nicely and i certainly did not feel like they gave me (or any of the other TA’s) any less respect than they give to dr. g. that was nice. they answered questions and wrote when they were “supposed to.”

i tend to evaluate myself more harshly and expect more every time i do something. all in all, i’m very satisfied with how i did and it was definitely all in the preparation. i spent a lot more time on it than i anticipated, but i wanted to know the subject thoroughly because for me, i can wing it better when i feel like i know a subject intimately and then i can even adapt mid-stride if i need to. i didn’t need to do that this time, but questions could have come from students and i wanted to be prepared. 

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i thought the other TA’s did a phenomenal job and i was nervous to follow them. there were some “staging” things that i caught such as turning toward the slideshow and talking with back turned to the students. those are things that are learned over time though. everyone seemed well prepared and very intelligent. it seemed we all started out a bit nervous and ended up relaxing as time went on. i was surprised to hear that some of the other TA’s spent so much time preparing. i thought i did a lot, but i think a couple did twice as much as i did. throughout everyone’s presentations, i thought the students were respectful and considerate. the day everyone else did theirs, i found it helpful to pass out cards to students and move around a litte. i had no idea if i was going that day or the following tuesday, so getting the jitters out by humanizing the audience helped take away the scariness of an anonymous crowd. i think they may have even empathized with us a little.

Trudi had her TA lecture on Schizophrenia and I think she did an excellent job.  Trudi has a funky spirit and connects well with the students.  I liked the way she started off asking the class questions and then continued to do so throughout her presentation (if I could go back and tweak my lecture I would have done more of that).  Her reference to A Beautiful Mind was great for the students to discuss and Meet Etta was effective as well.  I also thought that her PowerPoint presentation was easy to understand and highlighted the important concepts that students need to know for this topic.

The group exercise was a great way to recap the Abnormal chapter and get the students actively applying the material to scenarios.  Question #2 was confusing and I can understand why.  I would have thought it was insomnia, but since that wasn’t up on the screen I would have been thrown off a bit, and hopefully put OCD.  Out of the six groups that I corrected, three of them put paranoid for #2 and then crossed it off and put OCD.  That might be something to clarify during the review.

In reference to the overall semester, here are the things that I thought contributed to the success of a great Intro to Psych class with 6 TA’s:

• Assigning Pods (although this class may not have used the opportunity to the fullest, future classes may)
• Having the TA’s sit in the back of the class room in the desks and rotating with two TA’s sitting in front of the class during each lecture
• Music at the beginning of class
• Movement during lectures by Dr. Gurung
• Including humor within the lectures
• In-class exercises with groups of three
• Review session PowerPoints (with the answers included for the TA’s)
• Productive meetings that allowed us to be open and bond together as a team
• Attendance sheets
• Calling out students that walked in late
• The youtube Pavlov video
• Unique examples for topics that are not used in the upper level courses for references, reduces redundancy
• The way we operated as a team on exam days
• Reviewing the exam scores with TA’s in the meetings
• Reducing the TA paper to a shorter length and the topic is interesting as well
• The Freudian Slips youtube clips were excellent!

That’s all that I can remember right now, but I’m sure I have included others in my past blogs.  The one thing that I think could be dropped is the study tables.  Students had assigned TA’s to use as mentors and answer questions and we provided three exam review sessions for each exam.  That all seemed very adequate and I don’t think the students really understood how lucky they were that they were provided with all of this plus chapter quizzes to gage their content knowledge and study guides for the exams. 

Ok, that’s all for now.  -Mandy

In today’s class we had our TA lecture on Abnormal psych.  Our team communicated very welll and each of us had topics that we felt confident in.  There were six TA’s, but only five were able to present due to time constraints.

My portion of the lecture was on mood disorders.  I focused on Major Depressive Deisorder and Bipolar disorder.  I was the fourth TA to present, so at that point in class it kind of seemed like a time crunch.  I went through my slides as thoroughly as possible and I took out a few last miunte things just to save about 5 minutes, which in the end was a smart decision because it allowed Katie Bruni to have adquate time to talk about her topics and not end in a rush.

I was proud of myself.  I feel very passionate about the topic that I was able to discuss and I felt comfortable presenting.  For the pictures that were taken I am able to see that I used a lot of expression and hand gestures.  I stood mostly behind the podium, but that was sort of due to the time constraint and I didn’t want to lose focus at that point.  I would have felt comfortable enought to be more engaging with the students if I had time.  I asked once if they had any questions and I also asked somewhat of a participant type question, “Who here knows of someone with a severe mental illness?”.  I did that for two reasons; to keep the class on track with me and to show the seriousness of this section and how many people’s lives it effects.  I wish I had more time (i.e. for interactive participation) and we could have two days for the Abnormal chapter, but we still rocked it as a group and it was a lot of fun.

The support that our team has encourages each of us to be there for one another and route each other on.  We’ve had a great coach along the way.  Dr. Gurung has put a lot of spark into everthing we’ve done and I’m greatful to have had him as a professor because without that motivation and drive from him, it would have been a very long semester.

All-in-all, the TA lecture was fun and this experience has been a blast.  I’ve learned so much and it will make my future education a bit easier with the tools I’ve picked up along the way this semester.  I will miss our group!