As part of the GCP, I get to go and watch really excellent tinstructors teaching!  For me this is a pretty informal and enjoyable process — the instructors know when I am coming to their classes, and I don’t do a formal evaluation.

I did my first teaching observation about a month ago, so near the end of October 2015.  I watched a large (150-200 students) lecture, in a first year science course about natural disasters.  This is unlike any of the teaching I currently do, or have done in the past, but it is something I hope to do in the future, so I was extremely interested to see how the instructor conducted the class.

I came into the class with the intention of observing two things in particular:
1. Indications of the instructor’s Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) — in particular, how he connected this one class to the overarching narrative of the entire course.
2. The ways that the instructor utilised various modes of communication to enhance learning — meaning, were there chances for the instructor to communicate/interact with the students, for the students to interact with instructor, and for students to interact with one another?

The instructor started the class with a video clip of a news report following a landslide (the class was during the landslide unit).  This served as both a hook, as it immediately engaged the students, and as a bridge, as the video related to a landslide the class had discussed in the previous session.  Already, the instructor was using his PCK to show that this class was connected to the larger framework of the course.

The next slide showed the goals for the lecture, and the instructor skipped right by it, although he reminded the students that they should look at it when studying for the midterm.  At first I wasn’t sure I agreed with this decision, but now that I have thought more about the idea of experiential learning, which considers learning as a process and not outcome-oriented, I can understand this decision.  I believe that if instructors focus too much attention on specific goals at the beginning of a class, they prevent students from doing their own, perhaps unanticipated, learning.  Nevertheless, course goals.outcomes/objectives serve as valuable study guides for tests, so it is good that they exist for students to have as reference points to use after the class is finished.

About three minutes into the class, a student informed the instructor that the microphone wasn’t working properly.  The instructor thanked the student for telling him.  I thought this was an excellent example of a student interacting with the instructor and being positively rewarded for doing so, suggesting that such behaviour was acceptable in this learning environment.

After 6 minutes of lecturing, the students were invited to have a small group discussion, and then to report their answers back to the whole class.  The instructors wrote their answers down so that they were displayed for everyone to see.  This is a teaching technique that is used with small classes, and it worked very well with a large class as well.  It allowed the students to learn from each other, rather than from the instructor.  Further, the topic of the discussion forced the students to integrate knowledge from the past few lectures and think critically — more PCK, not to mention actual practice for the upcoming midterm!

The instructor returned to a more traditional lecture mode, but he included lots of pictures and videos, rather than purely text.  He continued to link the information to other classes in the landslide unit, and to other units in the course, showing his facility with this course and thus his PCK.

Then, the students did another activity: clicker questions.  For one question, the instructor didn’t give the students any prior information, to show the students that they already had enough knowledge to answer it.  For others, the students discussed their answers in groups, again using this alternate form of communication/interaction to learn.  The instructor also had students explain the answers to the clicker questions, rather than doing so himself.

After another short lecture, the students started a worksheet in groups.  The worksheet clearly relied on previous course knowledge, and helped students practice problem-solving and working together.  The instructor walked around the whole lecture hall as the students worked, so they could ask him questions — allowing for another form of communication and interaction.

Finally, the instructor related the topic of landslides back to the students’ personal lives by asking them to consider where they lived in light of the risk factors they had been discussing, to show them that they should care about this material.  I believe this shows a sophisticated level of PCK, as it indicates the understanding that the content of a class needs to be related to the overarching course narrative, and the overarching course narrative needs to be meaningful to the students, or else they will not be motivated to learn.

In summary, this was a fantastic class.  The instructor demonstrated a high level of PCK and gave students multiple opportunities to engage in various interactive forms of communication.  I was inspired, and I also learned things about landslides!

As a side note, this instructor was quite comfortable using the lecture hall’s digital technological gadgets, and I believe this enhanced the class, particularly when he put the videos of crashes and explosions on slow-motion repeat.  I personally dislike digital technology, for some ideological reasons, but I have also realized I am slightly afraid of it, particularly in large class teaching situations.  I distrust it, and I don’t want to rely on it, but I also just don’t want to have anything to do with it.  The class that I observed, that I have just described, has made me to start to wonder if this is a reasonable attitude to hold.  On the other hand, I have principles to uphold…