Hi Nathalie: This is a very engaging way to teach and I have tried various versions of it in the past.
One of the problems I found was that sometimes students presented info with glaring mistakes and unfortunately, after the fact, I was unable to 'fix' some of the misunderstandings and misconceptions :( Have you found this at all? and if so, how do you 'fix' it without hurting anyone's feelings. I may have not been sufficiently assertive in an effort to not minimize all the other work the students did, and to not dishearten from future active ventures. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 619-260-4006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---- Original message ---- >Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:02:39 -0400 >From: "Nathalie Cote" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: [tips] RE: You YouTube?--question for Nathalie Cote >To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> > >I am a cognitive psychologist who is a generalist at a small school (that is, >two full-timers in the psych dept) so when I took on teaching Neuropsychology >I did not even pretend to be an expert on the subject. I use Kalat's >Biological Psycholgy and I teach the first couple of weeks on some of the >basics of the nervous system (roughly chapters 1-5 in that book). But after >that, the students select topics to teach, alone or with a partner. I schedule >them so that once a week a student teaches and the other class meeting of the >week I teach, and I usually use that time to teach something related to their >topic so that if they make errors I can "clean up" behind them. I find that >they rarely make errors - the more common mistake is that they don't dig >deeply enough into their topic. We talk about the difference between teaching >and making a presentation. They are encouraged to be creative and to take >their strengths into account. They are required to give me a lesson plan and a! ! n assignment for their classmates before they teach, and they are required to evaluate their classmates' learning. I strongly encourage them to meet with me a few times as they prepare and most of them do. We talk about Bloom's Taxonomy and about planning the lesson around their objectives. They are allowed to choose topics that may not even be mentioned in the text. Their lesson grade is 30% of the final grade (they also write some short papers and do other exercises). I let them teach more than once, and I count the highest grade they make. Many of them choose to teach two or three times, often because they want the experience and the practice, sometimes because they are determined to make an A. Note that this works because it's a small class - usually ranges from 6 to 12 upper-level students. This semester there are 11, and I have more than usual who are highly anxious about it and won't be teaching more than once. So we have opportunities to talk about stress management. S! ! tudents in past classes have told me that after surviving teaching a 75 minute class in Neuropsychology, they were no longer afraid when facing things like 5 minute presentations in other classes or even their senior thesis oral defense. > >To give credit where it is due, the way I set up the course is strongly >influenced by the way that Charles Brewer taught Advanced General Psychology >to seniors when I was an undergrad at Furman U. He met the class the first day >and said "so, it's your course, what do you want to do?" and let the students >design the course. The year I took it, we chose to teach each chapter >ourselves, in dyads, each of us teaching twice. > >Nathalie Cote >Belmont Abbey College > --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
