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