I am a 3rd year doctoral student in Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. I have been a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Psychology in Education for 2 semesters teaching courses such as Lifespan Development to Nursing students and Intro. to Educational Psychology to pre-service teachers. Teaching each of these groups requires slightly different strategies and emphases but I have found teaching the Ed. Psyc. course particularly challenging. The Ed. Psych. course includes topics about children's cogntive, physical, and soicoemotional development, theories of learning, motivation, effective teaching strategies, and assessment. I KNOW that in order to provide the most effective/influential instruction to my students I need to not only model the "effective strategies" that I am teaching them about, but also make my use of such strategies explicit. In other words, I need to not only "preach" about constructivism, student-centered instruction, etc., but also utilize such strategies, AND point out to the students what I am doing that demonstrates the concepts. Without such an approach, I cannot expect the concepts to transfer into classroom practice. What is problematic is that in order to implement such strategies effectively, one must spend a substantial amount of time on each topic (which is not feasible under the constraints of the semester schedule and description of course content). Thus, I am faced with the question of depth versus breadth. Do I teach fewer concepts better (so that they may actually transfer into classroom practices) or do I stick with what seems to be the status quo and teach for familiarity with many concepts? I have managed to develop lessons that model many of the different instructional strategies, however, the ones that I believe most strongly in (and those that the research suggests are most effective for developing understanding)are difficult, if not impossible to implement regularly within the constraints of the course. Thus, I end up feeling like the course may seem fragmented or disjointed because I am trying to give the students real exposure to the various strategies. Any suggestions for the difficulties surrounding teaching teachers about teaching???? Jennifer ____________________________________________________________________ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape WebMail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com.
