Monthly Archives: December 2021

Observation 6 – EOSC 220 101 (In-Person Course)

On November 16th, 2021, I observed Prof. James Scoates teach a lesson in EOSC 220 – Mineralogy, a 3-credit, second-year geoscience course. The lecture portion of class occurs on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm in ESB 1012; there is also a weekly 3-hour lab component that takes place (different lab sections occur on various days and times), however, I will not be observing labs. The layout of the lecture hall is instructor focused, with desks all facing the front of the room where there is a podium, a wall of whiteboards, and two projector screens. In this lesson, students were learning about the fundamentals of carbonate, phosphate, and sulphate minerals and their role in geologic processes.

James’s lesson was worksheet-driven, where he had the bulk of the activities on worksheets that he and his TA’s handed out at the beginning of class. He started off the lesson by telling the students that they will be doing a jigsaw activity and proceeded to explain to them how it works. As he describes the logistics of the activity, he shows the steps on the projector screen so that students can follow along. Explaining the logistics of an activity to the students rather than throwing them into the activity absolutely minimized confusion, as none of the students had questions after he explained it, and the transition going into the activity was very smooth.

Since the activity was dominantly worksheet driven, James acted as a facilitator more than a traditional instructor. He did this by not lecturing at all, and instead, dictating the transitions between parts of the activities, letting students know when it was time to read vs. time to chat loudly, letting students know when to form pairs and when to merge pairs into groups of four, helping students find groups, constantly circulating the room to help students with their questions, and facilitating the end of class discussion. This approach to teaching is learner-centred, and it is clear from this teaching style that James values active and group learning.

There were three different versions of the worksheet (i.e., carbonate, phosphate, sulphate), all with the same layout. Each worksheet started off by identifying what that group of minerals is, then lead into another section on where they form, geologic processes they are linked to, their relevance in society, and questions that remained unanswered about these minerals. The backside of the worksheet had notes sections for when groups would merge to teach each other about what they had just learnt. The information on these worksheets was complimented by question prompts displayed on one of two of the slides (where activity instructions remained fixed on the other) to get students thinking about how each group minerals compare, how they are related, and what geologic processes they are associated with. The layout of these worksheets enabled students to take charge of their own learning, by getting them to actively engage with the material (i.e., reading, discussing, reflecting, researching) during class time, in comparison to lecturing, which is passive and far less engaging.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, James would put up prompting questions on one of the two projector screens at certain points of the activity to encourage students to think about the bigger picture of the concepts that the students were learning about. About 10 minutes before the class ended, James got all the students to wrap up their small group conversations and asked them to share their thoughts about the prompts on the projector screen. Students who would raise their hands were given a microphone so that when they shared their answers, the entire classroom could hear them. While students would explain their thoughts, James would show images of the geologic processes that the students were talking about on one of the two projector screens (i.e., the plate tectonic cycle). James had these supplementary slides prepared and knew that having these visual aids would help students visualize how the concepts they had just learnt about connect to bigger picture ideas in geology.

Once a student finished answering a question, James would validate their answer and summarize what was just said, plus fill in any important gaps of information if needed for students to fully understand the relevance of what was being discussed. Giving students the opportunity to apply their newly learnt knowledge by prompting them to think about how it connects to different geological processes (that they are likely learning about in other classes) shows that James values both experiential learning and the far transfer of knowledge. The impact of this is that students get to see examples of the application and importance of the content that they are learning about in real-time. Getting students to share what they have learnt not only from the worksheet but how they have connected what they have learnt to bigger picture ideas in geology through classroom discussion shows that James values formative assessment, as he is able to assess if the students met the learning objective for the lesson.

I had a discussion with James after his lesson where I asked him questions about decisions he made when creating his lesson, his journey from transitioning from passive to active learning, and his experience transitioning from virtual space to in-person.

James incorporates active learning in all his lessons, which are typically worksheet driven (like the lesson I observed); these worksheets serve as material for students to read, reflect, and discuss on. James used to collect these worksheets, but doesn’t anymore, as collecting and checking over them was far too much work and didn’t really benefit the students in any way; instead, these serve as their notes. Using worksheets, students get to learn by reading and discussing in groups, working together to think how newly learnt concepts apply to big picture ideas in geology. James assesses students in a formative fashion during class through discussions, by asking groups to share with the class what they have concluded after working through the worksheet together. Summative assessments are done via low-stakes quizzes and higher-stakes exams.

James discusses his pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and how he has developed and refined it over his years of teaching. One of the main practices he does to continue growing his PCK is that after every lesson he teaches, he goes into his notes about the lesson he just taught and annotates his notes on what did and didn’t work and how the lesson should be refined for next time he teaches it. James uses PowerPoint slides as a supplement to his lessons (e.g., for displaying instructions, question prompts, etc.), so he keeps these notes on a hidden slide in each lesson, that way he more-or-less keeps everything in one place.

James managed to keep the students engaged throughout the term, with virtually no lecturing. He said there was resistance at the beginning, as students wanted to have lessons recorded, so to have students “buy-in” to not having them recorded, he discussed the science behind active learning with the class and they stopped resisting. He said he doesn’t like recording lessons as students don’t actually learn anything since they just skim recordings for key information and memorize it. On a side note, he said his third- and fourth-year students in other courses he is teaching are more enthusiastic about engaging in his lessons than in previous years.

Observation 5 – ISCI 330A 101 (In-Person Course)

On November 9th, 2021, I observed Dr. Denise Gabriel instruct ISCI 330A – Topics in Integrated Sciences, a third-year level, 3-credit course, which is an “Interactive examination of a theme common to all areas of science”. This course is held in KLINK 464 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 am to 11:00 am. Of the 25 students enrolled in the class, 24 were present. The layout of the classroom is instructor-focused, where large tables face the front of the classroom, the direction of the instructor and a single projector screen.

The lesson was designed in the following repeating sequence: introduction to new ideas, self-reflection solo or in pairs, brief lecturing, group discussion, followed by a summary of the newly learnt ideas. At the beginning of the class, Denise made it clear to the students that this is a capstone lesson of all preceding lessons; the lesson topic was “Our adaptability via Genetic and Learnt Traits”. Before she proceeded with the lesson, she gave a brief overview of how the ideas taught preceding this lesson link to this lesson topic. I think this was a nice way to highlight key concepts that the students need to consider thinking about and linking to each other (plus any new ideas) during their reflections and discussions for the remainder of the lesson.

Throughout the lesson, Denise gave students the opportunity to reflect on their previous knowledge, then briefly lectured to provide more information for context, and then built an understanding of the concepts together by classroom discussions. This lesson format shows that Denise values active learning and metacognitive practices, as she ensures to hold space for the students to reflect and actively engage in discussions regarding course materials with their classmates’ multiple times throughout the lesson.

For reflections, Denise would often get the students to do a think-pair-share. These paired reflections were successful because the first few minutes of the reflections would start out quiet as students reflected, and then chatter would build up in the room until Denise would call back their attention. These reflections usually lasted 10 minutes. I noticed that Denise didn’t often explicitly state how long students have, just asks them to discuss the question(s)—perhaps there has been some sort of expectation set throughout the term that the students are used to? Or maybe this is a strategy that has other purposes built into it (e.g., time management).

When introducing new ideas, Denise ensured to review any foundational definitions/topics related to that idea to ensure that everyone could follow along and participate in the reflections and class discussions. For example, after introducing the idea of genetic adaptability, Denise asked the class how much they know about the basics of genetics and how genetic adaptations occur. The response from the class was vague, so she decided to briefly recap the basics of what genes are, how zygotes are created and how mutations occur to ensure that the students would be able to understand the difference between genetic adaptations and cultural adaptations.

When lecturing, Denise ensured to simplify and connect pieces of complex ideas together. For example, when a diagram on heritability was shown on the slide, Denise ensured to go through the entire diagram in steps to break it down into digestible chunks. She then proceeds to provide a couple of well known “real world” examples and how they break down in the diagram (i.e., to supplement what she was verbally describing, she simultaneously had visual cues pointing to the spot in the diagram on the slide). Breaking down these complex ideas and connecting them to examples made the lesson ideas very digestible for students, as no one appeared to be lost, and students were able to attempt to link their own ideas to the diagram during a classroom discussion. The action of breaking down an idea, providing examples that apply to that idea, and then getting students to apply their own experiences to newly learnt ideas highlight that Denise values experiential learning and far transfer of knowledge in the classroom.

During classroom discussions, Denise acted more as a facilitator than an instructor; asking question prompts to get the students to share ideas out loud and recording key points on the board that were related to the lesson topic. To build onto what was being said, Denise would validate student responses and either ask the students to relate what is being said to the new ideas they are learning about (i.e., is what the student shared cultural or genetic adaptation? Why?), then, Denise would clarify any necessary gaps that were missing regarding the relationship of what has been said with the lesson topic. When people are reluctant to share their experiences/ideas during class discussions, Denise shared her own examples (general well-known ones or personal) with the class. Doing this ensured that students had enough examples to think of the new information they are learning in different ways, and to help encourage them to share their ideas with the class—which it did, as students would begin putting up their hands to share their ideas after Denise would share an example.

At the end of the lesson, Denise left the students with a question (written on the lesson slide) to reflect on regarding their experiences with the contents in the question prior to the next lesson. Doing this helps to bridge the lessons together and gives the students the opportunity to practice self-reflection, thinking about how the application of ideas transfer to different areas of life (i.e., far transfer of knowledge), and to create intrinsic motivation to connect with and engage in learning about the subject matter.

After the lesson, I had a fruitful chat with Denise where I provided her with some constructive feedback on her lesson, asked her about her pedagogy, how her experience has been teaching since returning to in-person teaching and talked about some learning theories. I won’t discuss all these things I just listed; however, I will bring up some highlights that I thought were quite insightful in the paragraphs below.

From our conversation, I learnt that Denise values a democratic classroom, where she asks students how they feel, and allows them to vote on future deadlines and how they would like to be assessed throughout the course (e.g., final exam vs. final assignment, doing a presentation or handing in a written report, presenting online or in-person, etc.). I listened to her once the lesson was over, having a meeting with the students about how they want to be assessed in this course, and she said something along the lines of “We have learning objectives for the course, how we meet those is up to you”. Being flexible on how students are assessed in the classroom allows for more inclusivity with respect to assessment (e.g., allows for students to choose the most comfortable option for them).

Finally, I learnt that Denise has noticed a change in her students’ attitudes since coming back from learning virtually during the pandemic. She noted to me that it is more difficult to engage the students in classroom activities and that they now seem to want more lecturing before so that they don’t have to physically “do” as much work. She notes that almost all of the students want the lessons to be recorded so that they can go back to them and “listen” to them—Denise was firm on not recording her lessons, and instead for students to contact a friend in class to discuss the lesson if they have to miss a class. This highlights that the virtual learning during the pandemic, for these students at least, likely meant a lot of passive learning (i.e., just being lectured to online with minimal student interaction), and now they seem to be more used to that style of being taught. However, Denise does not value passive learning, and clearly communicated to the students those students need to participate in class in order to learn the topics; being lectured at will not allow them to truly understand the material and work on seeing how concepts apply outside of what is being taught in the classroom.

Observation 4 – ISCI 312 101 (In-Person Course)

On October 26th, 2021, I observed Jim Evans teaching a lesson for his ISCI 312 – Symmetry classroom. Note, he is not one of my CATL mentors, but I am doing my Term 2 practicum in his classroom. Of the 57 students enrolled in the class, 37 attended in person. Jim does his best to run the class in a hybrid manner, by teaching in person and recording all his lessons (since coming back to in person due to the COVID-19 pandemic) live over Zoom, however, I did not take note of how many students attended the lesson virtually. From my observation of this lesson, I think that Jim values lecturing paired with pedagogical content knowledge, experiential learning, and low-stakes formative assessment. Jim’s lesson was lecture-dominant, where he had ~10–15 minutes carved out near the end of class for a low-stakes formative assessment.

When introducing the idea of frieze patterns, Jim showed how concepts that the students had previously learnt about (in this case, the lattice, translations, and 2-D point groups) linked to frieze patterns. He did this by showing how when you combine a 1-D lattice with a 2-D pattern, this creates a frieze pattern. He then showed the 7 possible frieze groups, what symmetrical operations are used to create each group’s pattern, and where the unit cell lies within these patterns. To assess if the students were able to follow along with what he had been lecturing about, he had the students complete some practice questions identifying the respective frieze group of a couple sample frieze patterns.

Prior to Jim’s assessment, he walked through a sample frieze pattern problem so the students could listen to and observe his thought process and approach to solving such problems. Modelling this gave the students a foundation of what type of questions they may be asked during future assessments and how to possibly approach solving these types of problems. The formative assessment that followed this example was in the form of presenting a couple sample problems of different frieze group patterns on the lesson slides and getting the students to attempt to identify the unit cell (e.g., location and shape) and decipher the appropriate group (e.g., P2mg) for the frieze pattern either alone or with nearby peers. Jim gave the students ~5 minutes to solve each pattern. During the time the students worked on the questions, Jim remained at the front of the classroom instead of circulating around the room. Once the 5-minutes was up, Jim would ask for volunteers to share with the class what they got for their answers and how they approached solving the problems. He offered volunteers to come up to the whiteboard to draw out how they solved the problem, but no one was comfortable enough to do so (perhaps because of a fear of being wrong in front of their peers).

Regardless of giving the students a demonstration and having them work together on these patterns, a lot of the students struggled with coming up with the correct answers. I think this struggle signified that there was (1) a lack of ability due to a lack of exposure since this was a new concept to the students, and/or (2) an inability to identify the simple symmetrical operations that make up each part of a pattern (so a lack in understanding of the fundamentals preceding this new concept) leading to the lack of ability to combine the operations together to determine the frieze group pattern as a whole. Because of this struggle, Jim had to spend a bit of extra time going over each of the sample patterns with the students. Since there was a prevalent struggle in understanding how to successfully identify frieze groups in different patterns, I think that Jim could have (1) gone back to the fundamentals of identifying 2-D point groups and the isometries that construct frieze groups and assess which one of these concepts the students may still be struggling with, and then (2) provide more sample patterns for the students to work through during the class so that they could become more aware of why they struggle with the process of working through these problems, confront that/those issue(s), and then become confident in their ability to identify frieze patterns. I also think that during the time the students were working on the frieze patterns, Jim could have circulated around the room in an attempt to listen in on how the students were going about solving these problems to get some immediate feedback if the students are going in the right direction or if they are completely stumped.

Something I liked from Jim’s lesson is that he had a list of “Key Takeaway” points at the end of the lesson, which acted as his summary—this served as a nice list of items the students are expected to understand to succeed in the course. Something I thought was missing from this lesson was the far transfer of how frieze patterns represent themselves in different disciplines. I think this would have been useful for the students to either see some examples provided by Jim or two have been given some time to find how frieze patterns prevail in the students’ respective disciplines and then share them with the class. An example of where frieze patterns manifest themselves in my discipline is in the atomic structures of minerals, which translates well to how frieze patterns exist in crystalline materials that may be more prevalent when in other disciplines (e.g., DNA in Biology).

Overall, Jim’s lesson slides were very “clean” (minimal text, large figures), and there were clear communication guidelines between Jim and the students who were attending in person (raising of hands to ask questions). However, I thought there was a bit of a disadvantage being a student attending via Zoom with respect to communication in a hybrid class setting. For instance, when student’s in-person ask questions, the students attending via Zoom were not able to hear those questions. To combat this, I think Jim could have repeated student questions before providing his answers to them to help provide context to those attending virtually. Another disadvantage is that those who attend via Zoom are not able to see Jim’s physical cues in class, e.g., where he points to on the screen when singling out a step in a problem. To combat this, I think Jim could have heavily annotated his slides prior to the lesson, or he could have attempted to annotate them live (although, he only has a mouse for such annotations, so it may be tricky to draw). Finally, students attending virtually don’t often (if ever) have their questions answered. This is because (1) Jim doesn’t stand next to the computer the entire time that he teaches, so when he walks around and lectures he is not aware of the questions being asked in the Zoom chat, and (2) it is incredibly challenging to teach in-person and virtually as one person, as you are not always able to manage all the questions that may arise virtually. Perhaps a way to combat this would be having a TA sit in the classroom and monitor the Zoom on their personal laptop, where they could put up their hand (physically) for those attending virtually and state their questions (if needed) or respond via the chat function.

Practicum 6 – ISCI 312 101 (In-Person Course)

On November 30th, 2021, I taught a lesson on “Crystallography of Crystals and Viruses” as a guest instructor for ISCI 312 – Symmetry. Of the 57 students enrolled in the class, ~44 attended. Unlike previous lessons I have taught for this class, I did not attempt to simultaneously teach and record the lesson over Zoom.

I wanted the final Symmetry class to be a “capstone” lesson, where students got the opportunity to connect most of what they learned throughout the semester and see how it can be applied to a new concept that I was asked to teach about—crystallography. I designed this lesson to incorporate the ideas of far transfer, experiential learning (ELC), and (PCK). For the topic of crystallography, I decided to introduce the students to organic and inorganic crystals in the first half of the lesson, and then viruses in the second half of the lesson. I chose to look at this broad scope of ideas through the lens of crystallography because this is an interdisciplinary course where many of the students will eventually (if not already) work with crystalline materials. Furthermore, a learning outcome for the course is that the students should be able to connect related ideas (far transfer; ELC) with respect to symmetry in different areas of life (e.g., systems, disciplines). To provide the students with practice identifying such connections in my lesson, I led them through a series of group-based activities (PCK) to help them connect and understand that different materials (e.g., crystals and viruses) are all made of the same foundation—a lattice structure. Note, the concept of the lattice structure is not new to them, as they learnt about lattices and symmetrical operations that could be applied to them throughout the term.

For the lesson, I designed a 4-part activity where students practised self-directed learning in small groups. I provided each student with their own worksheet that had a series of tasks to complete which were guided by action and question prompts. This activity acted as both their notes for the lesson and practice working on problems with respect to crystallography. I made sure to inform students that the activity was not for marks/it was not “due” at the end of the lesson, and that it was okay if they did not finish it by the end of the lesson, as the activity is hefty and will help them prepare for their final exam. Below I have summarized the activity design and what happened during the lesson.

Part 1 (15-minutes) of the activity split students into pairs, where each pair of students would either be given blue worksheets for “inorganic” crystals, or yellow worksheets for “organic crystals. For this activity, students were asked to research general characteristics of these types of crystals, look up the atomic structure of a crystal of their choosing that falls within the category of organic/inorganic to practice seeing the symmetry in the crystal structures by drawing and annotating 3D models, and provide an example of how understanding the atomic structure of this crystal has benefited society/contributed to our understanding of the natural world. This activity was somewhat successful, as I gave the students a brief demonstration of exactly what I was looking for them to do before they began the activity and some of them were able to complete the activity in the amount of time given. However, I during the lesson I realized that the students had not been exposed to 3D lattices until the previous class, so they were not used to looking for symmetry in atomic structures. Because of this, some students were falling behind because they were confused when they couldn’t readily see symmetry in the atomic structure of the crystal that they chose to investigate. The major problems I came across during this activity were (1) technological, as this was the first time the students used software to look at 3D models of crystal structures, so they struggled to figure out what exactly they were looking for, (2) lack of knowledge and understanding, as students didn’t realize that atoms in a lattice could actually fall on the outside of the lattice structure and that the symmetry is often more obvious when you begin to expand/repeat the lattices, and (3) burnout, several students were slow at processing what to do because they were exhausted in general, and they are not used to doing self-directed learning activities in this class.

Part 2 (18-minutes) of the activity got students to pair with a group that were assigned a different crystal type than them (i.e., organic group pair with an inorganic group). These groups were tasked with teaching each other what they had learned thus far, and then answer a series of questions along the theme of “how do we measure the atomic structure of crystals?” I think that this part of the activity was successful(ish) because some of the students moved onto this task and were able to complete it, and others decided to continue working on part 1. If I did the activity again, I think I could axe out them researching about how to measure the structure of crystals and lecture them on it to help save time and to give them a little bit more time to work on Part 1.

After part 2, I paused the students and reviewed the key ideas (i.e., differences between inorganic and organic crystals, types of instruments we measure crystals with) that the students should have found to ensure no one was falling too far behind for ~8 minutes. During this, I had a student question one of the examples I gave for organic crystals. Here, I realized that our disciplines think of organic crystals with different definitions; in geology, anything considered “organic” is defined as biogenic, and in medicine, anything “organic” is bonded with carbon. For next time, I think that at the beginning of the lesson I should have a brief class discussion on how different disciplines define these terms and the context that we will choose to look at them in the lesson.

Part 3 (18-minutes) of the activity got students to stop looking at inorganic and organic crystallography and instead investigate viral crystallography. Here, students remained in the groups that they formed in part 2, where they were tasked to research what part of a virus holds symmetry (and why), the 3 different types of viral structures, and then asked to investigate the viral structure of a virus of their choosing. For the virus students chose to research, they were asked to create a poster with a schematic drawing of the virus with its symmetry annotated, a type of diffraction method that has been used to study the crystal structure of the virus, and how understanding the structure of the virus has benefited society. I think this part of the activity was somewhat successful because over half the class was able to complete it, however, a few students had decided to work on previous parts of the activity or work on other tasks. It’s important to note that the students had a poster presentation in the next class, so I think a lot of them were wanting last-minute feedback from the course instructor with respect to that, and their final exam was scheduled for 2-weeks after this lesson, so some of the students began to panic and ask the instructor questions about that. To help the students focus on the lesson materials, I think it would have been beneficial to have the instructor either state at the beginning that they will not answer questions about coursework for upcoming items (i.e., upcoming group presentations and the course final exam) until after class, or simply not come to the class—although, the lack of presence of the instructor may have made students less inclined to stay and participate during the lesson.

Part 4 (5-10 minutes) was to get students to tape their posters to the wall and do a gallery walk, but there was not enough time to do the gallery walk due to some interruptions that occurred at the beginning of class. Instead, I took photos of the posters and got the course instructor to post them on the course Canvas page so that students could look at them on their own time. I don’t think that cutting out the gallery walk activity was a detriment to the students learning, however, it could have provided the opportunity for students to question each other’s work, as some of them clearly had issues interpreting their viral structures (i.e., drawing an icosahedral virus capsid and claiming it had a hexagonal crystal structure).

To wrap up the class, I asked a few students to share a benefit they found with respect to studying inorganic and organic crystal structures, and viral crystal structures, and then shared a summary slide of takeaway concepts, which reflected the big ideas that they should have come across during the lesson. The brief discussion was successful, as a few students readily shared their findings which tied in very nicely to my summary slides (alas, some students successfully understood the big idea of the lesson).

I will not lie; this lesson was very ambitious—it was what would normally be 2 to 3 lessons condensed into 1. If I were to do this lesson again, I would either make the tweaks I mentioned in the paragraphs above or redesign it completely. If I made the previously mentioned adjustments, I think I could save some time during the lesson by lecturing on content that they are not expected to deeply understand (i.e., diffraction techniques). However, if I were to redesign the lesson, I would probably focus on one crystallographic group (inorganic crystals) for ~2/3 of the lesson, and either get students to freely research how what they have learnt applies to other items (e.g., viruses) and have a group discussion on what everyone found and the implications of these findings (e.g., what big picture ideas are we converging on in crystallography?), or I could lecture and provide examples of how it applies to other items (which is less interactive, boo).

Finally, the last lesson I guess lectured for I lost the “power” in the class to the other instructor, and in turn, the student’s attention and respect. To try to regain power in this class, I tried my best to be more assertive by not using minimizing terms, direct statements, eye contact with students, and speaking through the chest. I knew the students were tired and would not take me seriously, so I also stated that it is essential for them to work as hard as they can during the lesson so that they can learn the material and succeed in the exam. I normally don’t like to talk about things in terms of exams, but in this classroom, the students have been completely transparent with me that doing well on the final exam is what they care about at this point in time, so I had to use that as leverage to gain their attention maintain focus on the lesson. This worked quite successfully as I was able to catch their attention quite quickly when trying to transition through different parts of the lesson.

Practicum 5 – ISCI 312 101 (In-Person Course)

On October 29th, 2021, I taught a lesson on “Symmetry in Music” as a guest instructor for ISCI 312 – Symmetry. Of the 57 students enrolled, ~38 students attended the class in-person, and 2 students attended via Zoom. For this lesson, I wanted to do as little lecturing as possible to maximize time for active learning and formative assessment in a group environment. To maximize the in-class time, I recorded a 14-minute pre-lesson lecture, where I provided them foundational materials (i.e., examples of cyclic groups in music and their symmetrical operations) and optional supplementary resources that would help them to successfully participate in the in-class activities and discussions.

Teaching this lesson was incredibly challenging (content-wise, logistically, and power-wise), which made it a good learning experience for me, but under stressful and somewhat undesirable circumstances which may have negatively impacted the students learning experience. For instance, I am not familiar with concepts in music, so I had to try to teach myself fundamental concepts in music theory so that I was able to link it to symmetry and communicate that knowledge to my students. When teaching, my understanding of the concepts was not as solid as I would have liked. This made me feel less confident in teaching the subject as I was unsure if there were gaps of fundamental knowledge when I was teaching (which there obviously was). For example, the instructor of the course would keep interjecting during my teaching, which I appreciated to a degree because we both want the students to succeed in understanding the materials, but it also bothered me because I wish he could have supported me more before I taught the lesson by ensuring that I had all the essential material needed to align with the LO’s that he wanted the students to achieve (which were quite vague). The combination of feeling less confident and having the instructor interject during my teaching made me feel like I lost the trust of the students and in turn their engagement with the course materials. I have to teach for this class again for my final practicum, so it’s frustrating because I feel like I have essentially lost the “power” in the class, and this loss of control and respect may make the students less motivated to learn from me because they may think that I am not qualified/competent enough to teach them what they are expected to learn. To ensure this does not happen again I will need to set up clear boundaries with the regular course instructor about how they will act while I teach in their classroom; and to regain the respect of the students, I will need to be more assertive and confident when instructing them.

A technological issue occurred when I was lecturing, where the laptop I was using froze ~2/3 of the way through the lesson. It was slightly frustrating because this happened right when I needed to communicate new background information to the students so they could successfully complete the next activity and the visual aids on my slides would have been incredibly helpful to prepare the students for it. Regardless, I had to improvise on the spot, where I decided to refer directly to their activity worksheet and teach concepts using the first question in the activity as a demonstration for us all to work together on. This course of action was successful as the students were able to understand the ideas that I communicated to them and complete the activity with minimal struggle. My biggest stress at the moment when the laptop crashed was not that I could get the students to move on to the next activity, but that this was another layer of my lesson not going to plan, and possibly leading to my students disengaging from the lesson activity and not trusting me.

Logistically, an issue that I think really impacted the student’s ability to learn and participate during the lesson was the fact that the pre-lesson material was not uploaded until 1:30 am on the day of the lesson; this was not enough time for most of the students to both recognize that materials have been uploaded and go over the material prior to the lesson (at the beginning of the lesson I assessed this by asking them if they were able to look over the materials posted). For this class I did not have the ability to upload materials on the Canvas course, so to prevent this from happening again (if I am a guest-lecturer) I will try to give the course instructor the materials I need to be distributed at least a week in advance so that they have some buffer time to upload the materials to Canvas. Regardless, to accommodate for this issue during class, I discussed some of my summary slides of the pre-lesson lecture slides in more detail than I originally intended to, and I reviewed the assessment questions related to the pre-lesson lecture materials in detail by getting students to attempt to answer the questions and then discussing the answers as a class.

Another issue I experienced was with respect to the content I taught. After the lesson, the instructor and I debriefed where they realized that the students were struggling with grasping some of the concepts I was trying to teach about because he had not yet taught them about cyclic groups to the degree that I was expecting to understand them. If I knew that the students lacked this understanding of cyclic groups, I would have either taught the students about them in general first before applying them to music theory or I would have removed cyclic groups entirely.

At the end of the lesson, I handed out my post-lesson surveys (which are how I am collecting data for my SoTL project). A few of the surveys indicated that the lesson seemed scrambled and made things confusing for the students, causing them to disengage. Another survey respondent said the “Check Your Understanding” activities they completed in class should only be for participation marks because the material was “hard”. In contrast to some of these students’ experiences, a couple of students indicated that they were fascinated by the lesson material, very engaged in the activities and that they wanted to do their final poster project inspired by topics in this lesson; it was nice to know that this lesson was not a lost cause.

From teaching this lesson, I learnt a lot of lessons, which I will summarize in this paragraph. If an instructor gives me sample slides for their lesson, I should not feel pressured to use what they have provided me with to create my lesson, unless clearly specified by the instructor. If I am to use particular slides, I need to make sure the purpose of these slides is clearly communicated to me so that I can align them with the lesson learning outcomes and properly teach the students what they are expected to learn. If I am collaborating on an activity with an instructor, I need to ensure they are willing to meet some of my needs (e.g., clear communication guidelines, posting what I ask of them on time to Canvas). When collaborating, I need to ensure that I have enough time to read over their work to double-check that what they have done aligns with the learning outcomes of the lesson and is worded in a way that is easy for the learners to understand.

If I were to do this lesson again under the same circumstances, I would make some major revisions to the first ½ of my lesson. For example, if the students had not learnt about cyclic groups yet (or, at least had practice working with them yet), I would have introduced such groups and provided some generic examples of them, and then applied them to music where the students could work on practice questions together. Teaching the students about the fundamentals of a concept before applying it to a topic, such as music theory, would have made it easier for the students to understand how to apply symmetrical operations to a more abstract concept. I would keep the second half of my lesson, which was an introduction to symmetry in sheet music and identifying frieze groups in sheet music, more or less the same, because (despite the technical issues) this activity was really successful (minimal confusion, everyone completed it in the allotted time) and I think it was an easy to understand example of how to apply the abstract concept (frieze groups) to a real-world example in concrete-space (sheet music).

In contrast to the statements above, If I were to do the lesson again knowing the students were unfamiliar with cyclic groups, I would have applied symmetry to music through concepts they had already been familiar with (i.e., 2-D point groups, group theory, and frieze groups) and had activities with respect to those concepts. This way I could have just got them to think about how to apply familiar concepts to music theory to keep their focus on the application of concepts instead of learning new concepts and immediately applying them under new circumstances in a single class, which can be overwhelming and lead students to disengage from the lesson (as reflected in the survey results I received).