Category Archives: My teaching practice

Practicum (term 1): Theory through a Case Study

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Teaching practicum report 1

Guest Lecture: Vancouver Housing Market – A Case of a Growth Machine (Nov. 29th, 2016)

(Course: Geog 250 Cities)

A good lecture is a like a good paper. It needs structure and the main idea, like a thesis statement. An idea that is to be communicated to the students that will be their main take-away. It is like the main learning objective. Their could be additional more specific LOs, but the main one needs to be clear and straightforward. Just like in any good presentation. And while most of my presentations are good presentations, I think, there is always room for improvement.

In my first practicum, a lecture on the Vancouver housing market for the 200-level Urban Geography course, I have been preparing different aspects as a part of the teaching program: working on specific learning objectives, thinking of engagement strategies, creating good slides. However… the basic narrative, the main idea, might have been lost as I was focusing on other more minor details. It is something I haven’t foreseen and wouldn’t have noticed had it not been for the comments from my mentor. Continue reading →

TPI: Teaching Perspectives Inventory

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Teaching Perspective Inventory

Date of survey: 09/07/2016
Name of respondent: Idaliya Grigoryeva
Subject of teaching: First-year intro to human geography

tpi-scores-mine-sep-2016

Source: My scores based on the TPI test available at http://www.teachingperspectives.com/tpi/.

In my teaching I try to combine the two teaching perspectives that I find most important: transmitting knowledge and nurturing students. Transmission perspective emphasizes the importance of the subject content in teaching and learning, and the nurturing perspective assumes that effective teaching needs to engage not just the heads, but the hearts of students to achieve long-term persistent effort and commitment to learning.

Contradictory at the first glance, these two perspectives make up a perfect combination for teaching as presenting the course content goes along with employing engagement strategies to make the learning process more interesting for the students and having more long-term goals of developing and encouraging the students’ critical thinking and further learning beyond the classroom. What this translates into in practice for me is having an instructional as well as a personal development component in every discussion session I lead. This is meant to enhance the students’ understanding of the course materials and core concepts while engaging in critically thinking about the issues we discuss, sharing their personal perspectives and being able to provide arguments in support of their opinions.