This term I gave a lecture similar to the one last year, on gentrification of urban slums in China with the case study of Beijing’s hutongs. It was a 300-level geography class with about 60-70 students.

This is a different class that the one I gave the guest lecture in on this topic last year, but it’s a similar audience and level. The topic fit in well with the course for the instructor, so I mostly left everything as it was, having updated some statistics and reviewed the content. It was a really good opportunity for me to have a second run of the lecture, and I had a high standard for me as the first time it went quite well, so I wanted to do even better this time.

Again, it was an 80-min class where I spent about 2/3 lecturing and the rest on the discussion activity and the summary. I was very pleased with how engaged the class was, it wasn’t hard to get the people to discuss and share their ideas with the rest of the class, and while I was walking around and checking in with different groups, I was very impressed with some of the interesting ideas and examples they came up with.

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This observation is of my TA supervisor at the course for which I later gave the guest lecture. I came to one of the lectures before my guest lecture to get a better feel for the dynamics of the class and the format of the instructor’s lectures. I have also used it as an observation opportunity.

This instructor has her own teaching style, which I overall enjoy, but in this lecture one thing that really struck me was the lack of any text on the slides, with the majority of them only containing visuals, pictures, drawings, maps, etc. There were no key points or summary highlights. That is one thing I was interested in discussing with the instructor in our post-observation meeting to check in with her about how much of her slide design was intentional.

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Another lecture in term 2 was a development of my very first guest lecture on the Vancouver housing market. This time I focused on a slightly different angle of the issue, the social outcomes of Vancouver’s lack of housing affordabilty, also highlighting the reasons behind it. This time, it was a 50 min lecture for a 300-level course with 100 students registered, and probably around 70 people attending.

As Vancouver housing is the topic of my Master’s research and at that point, I have made quite a bit of progress on it as my research project delving deeper and deeper into the topic, one of the important things I had considered more is simplifying the material and terminology that I use. In terms of a variety of lecturing styles, this time I was only able to include a few open floor questions getting students to share some of their ideas, but the time was limited, so it wasn’t a substantial part of the lecture unlike in the previous 80-minute practicum.

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For my next guest lecture, I had 80 minutes in the class on Urbanization in the Global South and I got to talk about an issue of great personal interest to me – gentrification of slums in China.

As I has more time, I wanted to further develop interactive learning activity in the lecture, this one had around 70-80 students attending. I decided to split the lecture into two parts: more traditional lecture with a few shorter questions to the audience and the discussion activity.

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Teaching Observation 1

Interesting and informative lectures with a story (using LOs and PCK)

Teaching always provides a learning opportunity, for both the student and the instructor. And the observer. Being in a classroom in each of those roles is a very valuable experience for an aspiring teacher.

Over the last year, while attending my mentor classes as a TA for that course, I’ve always thought of his lectures as very interesting and informative with a lot of fascinating facts and data, and new ideas and perspectives of looking at things. Although the lectures were conducted in the typical instructor-centered style, they were still fun and engaging complemented with stories from instructor’s personal life and introducing current news pieces as part of the narrative. With over 100 mostly first-year students in the lecture hall, that seemed appropriate and engaging enough. Recently, I have attended another one of his lectures, for a third-year course this time, with about 80 students in the room.

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