For a 90\u00a0minute lecture on biological membranes (for an introductory biochemistry course at Columbia College), I probably spent close to\u00a08 hours making (only) 14 slides. I had a lot of fun creating the teaching material. The PowerPoint presentation was carefully animated – each concept inviting discussions and each slide building on the one previous. The\u00a0process of designing the presentation\u00a0allowed many opportunities\u00a0for me to question the overall alignment between\u00a0my learning activities and\u00a0learning objectives, to strategize\u00a0around\u00a0how to best engage all of my students, and to think about specifically how each participatory\u00a0activity may help\u00a0my students\u00a0learn (e.g., stages of the Kolb’s cycle).<\/p>\n
I invited the students to collaboratively draw a typical biological membrane at the beginning of class and built on their previous knowledge as I introduce additional more in-depth concepts (e.g., chemical structure and molecular interactions). Throughout the lesson, I used many guided questions to help them make connections between concepts. At the end of the lesson, the students taught one another as they collectively filled out a compare and contrast worksheet on the projected whiteboard.Overall, I am happy about the lesson \u00a0– most of it unfolded as I had planned and anticipated. I feel confident that the students met the learning objectives by the end of the lesson.<\/p>\n
The learning objectives for my lesson were – by the end of this lesson, you will be able to:<\/p>\n
From this teaching experience, I think one of my strengths is my ability to leverage technology in creating powerful teaching and learning aid. In animating the slides and in minimizing text, it created space for story-telling and helped to enhance student engagement. I also think that the learning\u00a0activities were well-structured to provide a safe space for everyone to participate and were well-aligned with the learning objectives. I found it difficult to manage time (I only filled 75 of the 90 minutes in this lesson), not knowing how to best balance\u00a0between amount, depth, and breadth of content<\/em> and opportunities for students to engage with the material and to integrate knowledge.\u00a0<\/em>I recognize that finding this fine balance\u00a0takes practice, experimentation and experience – but it is most definitely something I need to\u00a0be conscious of whenever planning a lesson.<\/p>\n In my post-teaching discussion with the course instructor,\u00a0he\u00a0left me with some questions to ponder on\u00a0– how could you further challenge your learners in this class? what kind of assessments could help you distinguish stellar students from good students?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a 90\u00a0minute lecture on biological membranes (for an introductory biochemistry course at Columbia College), I probably spent close to\u00a08 hours making (only) 14 slides. I had a lot of fun creating the teaching material. The PowerPoint presentation was carefully animated – each concept inviting discussions and each slide building on the one previous. The\u00a0process … Continue reading “Teaching Practicum Reflections – Biological Membranes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15927,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,1202224],"tags":[3580799,1202224,109022,444658],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-gcp","tag-disciplinary-knowledge","tag-gcp","tag-reflective-practice","tag-teaching-practice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15927"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/81"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/dchen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}