Due to the original class time coincided with Remembrance Day holiday, a make-up class was scheduled on Wednesday night at 6-9pm. This was something I had to take account of, as the time change would affect students’ energy level and motivation. I might have to put in extra effort to get students’ participation, and I have to make sure I stay on task so class doesn’t go overtime. Learning from previous experience, I gave more thoughts into how much emphasis I should put on different materials, and how to rearrange the content on the teaching guide in order to make my teaching more effective.

Having a better idea of the class dynamic, I felt more confident teaching this time and did much better in time management. I still went overtime for my first activity, as there was so much information to cover. However, knowing I could make adjustment for the subsequence activities, I was calmer and wrapped up the first activity properly. During the second activity when I had to facilitate discussion among individual groups, I again did better compare to my previous practicum. I was able to keep track with the whole class from time to time while helping with individual groups. The class was more engaged in their task rather than losing focus to chatting.

This practicum with BIOL140 gave me valuable experience in teaching some activity-dense classes. I learnt about how to balance between content delivery and in-class activities. I also learnt about how to control time better when running multiple activities in class. During the reflection session with my mentor, Dr. Nomme, I wondered if I were to start instructing the course from the beginning, what I would need to do in order to run classes smoothly. I think my mentor made some very good points – for any discussion-base activity, it is important to motivate students to take ownership of their work. It is often hard to entire everyone is making meaningful contribution during activities, especially when class size is big. By laying out learning outcomes and goals clearly at the beginning, we could let students know what they should be expecting during class, and that they should work towards the goals together. It is also important to develop respects from students, which would help with motiving students to participate in class activities. With this being my very last practicum through the CATL program, I hope what I have learnt from all my practicum experience will shape me into a teacher better helping with students’ learning.

It has been a long time since I last looked at first year undergraduate materials. In preparation for my first experience of teaching a first-year Biology laboratory class, I had to revisit some technical terminologies and definitions used in BIOL140. I also requested for students’ assignments that would be relevant to this class’s activities, so I was more prepared for facilitating class discussions that were based on these assignments. After the observation, I knew the students in this class were a little quiet. My goals for this practicum were to 1) motivate students to share their answers and thoughts with their group and the whole class, 2) to be able to facilitate confidently this activity-heavy class.

This class had three activities, and the content to be delivered was pre-designed in order to align with all 36 sections of the course. The first activity was an exercise on experimental design critique. Students would read two passages and answer a list of questions. As an instructor, I had to encourage students to share their answers. Through discussing students’ questions, I delivery lecture content and highlight key points as well. I spent time addressing each key point, and since there were quite a few things I would like to address, I ended up going over time by 15 minutes just on the first activity. After noticing the time, I rushed into giving instructions for the second activity, which was to have students to plan for their animal experiment in a group discussion. My role was to go to each group and facilitate their planning using a list of guiding questions. Since I was focusing heavily on catching up with time, my attention was solely on different groups, rather than on the class as a whole. Fortunately, my mentor helped with facilitation from the opposite end of the class, so it did not seem like the rest of the class was neglected. And before moving onto the last part of the class, I then realized I was doing fine time-wise.

Facilitating an activity-heavy class was quite a challenge. It was hard to predict students’ responses, hence difficult to control time. In this practicum, I think I had some good interactions with students. I was able to encourage students’ participation by setting a friendly and relaxed learning environment. However, I need to work on my flexibility for facilitating class activities. I need to make sure I am not cramming too much information within the class, and learn how to move forward smoothly when needed. Furthermore, group discussion is a great tool of learning for students, and I will work on its facilitation skills for the upcoming practicum. My goal is to be able to care for individual groups without neglecting the rest of the class.

For my third semester of practicum, I wanted to experience something different. After being a guest lecturer for a small and a big class during my first and second term respectively, I decided to approach Dr. Kathy Nomme for mentoring my teaching in a laboratory course. BIOL140 is a first-year level lab course that is mandatory for almost all students in the Faculty of Science. Compared to upper year lab courses, students in BIOL140 spend more time on doing “dry lab”, in which they learn about scientific writing, planning fair experiments, and how to do scientific critique. Therefore, the opportunity of facilitation in BIOL140 is lot more than other lab courses.

The class I was observing today had just about 30 students. This was one of the 36 sections being offered in this term, and was opened to only students in the Science One Program. The class started with introduction of the agenda, with the estimated time scheduled per activity being provided. Three activities in total were carried out in this 3-hour course, each with specific learning outcome. There were not much actual “lecturing” happening during class. In order to reach the different learning outcomes, Dr. Nomme asked a lot of questions to guide students to think about the topic. There were also class activities like group discussion and PBL-style exercises. In order to keep track with students throughout the exercise, Dr. Nomme would start with giving instructions, then give time to students for working on the exercise, and check in again halfway through. Time cues were given throughout so students knew if they were falling behind or not. What I also noticed was that students were generally quiet and needed lots of encouragement for speaking out. The classroom was also quite long width-wise, which could impact students in either end hearing comments from their fellow classmates.

After the observation, I learnt some techniques in teaching an activity-heavy course. Before my practicum, I will be thinking of how to engage students in participating discussions and answering questions. Although the in-class activities were pre-designed to align with all 36 sections, I will think of ways to provide my own input to the teaching material. I am looking forward to teaching in this new environment.

On March 28, I had an opportunity to do my first large class-teaching with over 200 students. My class was one of the three sections offered by BIOL201. Since my teaching has to align with the two other sections of this course, it was important to ensure I had delivered all the content needed. Originally, my practicum was scheduled to be two 50-minute classes, but since the progress of class had changed during the term, I had to deliver all my lecture material in a 90-minute class period. It was important for me to reflect on my teaching during class based on students’ reaction, and make changes accordingly.

Overall, I was able to capture my students’ attention throughout the class with the help of a few techniques/tools I used. I used the cam doc as a white board to write as I was teaching about the different steps of the Ticarboxylic Acid cycle, rather than displaying everything on the Powerpoint slides at once. I was able to breakdown the materials better for students to follow. I also designed some iclicker questions for students to answer alone the class to test their understanding. I always shared the respond with class right after and addressed any common misconceptions in order to give students chances to reflect their learning timely. During class, there was a little accident – a student asked me a question which I was not entirely sure about the answer. Understanding the importance of being accurate in answering, I turned to my mentor, Dr Chowrira, for suggestion. Though feeling a little embarrassed, my mentor told me that it was done very naturally and was definitely the right thing to do. According to my mentor, I also did well in pacing and setting up a friendly environment. Furthermore, I repeated the questions students had asked, which was a good practice that I should keep doing in a large classroom like that.

As for something that I could improve on, my mentor pointed out that I occasionally “formulated things”. Rather than asking students to “see the pattern” of how reactions work, I should have tackled from the point of “why” certain things happened. This is to encourage students to understand the reasoning rather than memorizing contents, which is an important concept in teaching in general. Furthermore, I should have spent more time wrapping up the class. Not all activities could be run all the time within class. It is more important to provide a summary at the end of class, rather than trying to squeeze all contents and activities at the end. This was a mistake I made in my previous practicum, and will definitely be something that I need to pay more attention on in the future.

Despite a few things that I should work on, the class was generally smooth, and I gained great experience in teaching a large class.

In preparation for my next practicum, I paid a visit to a BIOL201 lecture on February 16, instructed by Dr. Sunita Chowrira. Dr. Chowrira is an experienced instructor who cares about helping students to learn more efficiently. She readily uses active learning techniques to help enhancing students’ learning experience. BIOL201 is an introductory course on biochemistry offered to students by the Biology Department. This course serves as a prerequisite for many upper level biology courses, hence it has a high enrollment rate. A total of 750 students are split into three sections, with one taken up by Dr. Chowrira.

Today’s class was on enzyme kinetics. With pre-class reading and quizzes assigned, most students came with some knowledge on the topic. With a large class of over 200 students, my goal was to observe in what ways Dr. Chowrira was able to run different class activities to keep students engaged throughout class, yet still be able to control the crowd.  Students were sitting in rows, facing the podium in the centre front. There were two big projector screen side-by-side at the front. The instructor showed the learning objector on one screen, while teaching with Powerpoint slides on the other one.  Students could refer to the L.O. at any time during class to ensure they did not miss any key points. An in-class worksheet with some concept questions was available for students. These questions were designed to prepare students for the assigned problem set. Students were given time to discuss and tackle the questions as the class proceed. Other than worksheet, there were many iclicker questions asked throughout the class, in which Dr. Chowrira would show the class results and explain the answer after each question. Other than asking concept questions, the instructor also used iclicker to check on students’ understanding during class and their thoughts on homework and problem sets. There were questions like “How did you find the homework questions”, or “Do you understand the section we just covered”. Students were less embarrassed to share their thoughts in form of clicker questions. There was an useful gadget that I would like to use was the cam doc. It is sometime useful to write down notes for students as you talk, but the white board in class is too small for students at the back to see. The cam doc project document on the desk to the screen as live video. The instructor wrote on the paper as it was being projected on the screen.

After visiting this class, I had a better idea in how to run activities in large classroom without aid of TAs. It is important to have means to provide any form of feedback promptly to the class. Walking around the classroom during discussion time would be one way. Also, showing the class the iclicker results right away and explaining any major misconception would be very useful as well. My goal for the upcoming practicum will be to try running activities effectively to help with students’ learning and engagement during class.