In the fall of 2007 I was teaching the same course as I am teaching now in Elementary Data Structures and Algorithm. It was the first time I was doing a T.A. and I was a bit shaky. My classes revolved more around the traditional ways of teaching techniques involving fewer interactions with the students. As a result of which I had a lot of class reviews which directly stated that I needed to be more interactive and use active learning strategies such as group discussion, pair-share, problem-solving or the minute paper.
So this time I started with that in my mind and not surprisingly I have completed almost three parts of the semester using this strategy and I have been doing pretty well. Also one thing that has to be kept in mind is that this course is not the easiest to teach, covering a syllabus that would normally have been taught in almost 2 dedicated courses. The benefit of a course like this is that, the student gets a very broad overview of all these interrelated topics such as programming, design and partial analysis of algorithms. But on the other hand, because of a huge and diverse syllabus, all of which are again interdependent, if anybody gets left behind, it is really difficult to catch up. Teaching this course is made even more difficult by the fact that the audience is from a very diverse background. There are students from Electrical Engineering, students from Computer Science, students from Engineering Science and several others. Each of these students has different reasons, motivations and interests. So the course had to be constructed and presented in such a way, to be of use to everybody.
In applying these ideas, I am really fortunate to get such helpful feedbacks from the peer observation and the teaching observation projects. The feedbacks are encouraging but have lots of important suggestions. For example, as mentioned earlier, the practice of breaking the pace of the lecture from time to time, the practice of encouraging the students when solving a difficult problem, by being part of their team in the endeavor rather than just giving out the solution, from a position of superior knowledge. I believe that all these things have been really helpful in improving my teaching and should continue to help me, when I teach this course next time.
So this time I started with that in my mind and not surprisingly I have completed almost three parts of the semester using this strategy and I have been doing pretty well. Also one thing that has to be kept in mind is that this course is not the easiest to teach, covering a syllabus that would normally have been taught in almost 2 dedicated courses. The benefit of a course like this is that, the student gets a very broad overview of all these interrelated topics such as programming, design and partial analysis of algorithms. But on the other hand, because of a huge and diverse syllabus, all of which are again interdependent, if anybody gets left behind, it is really difficult to catch up. Teaching this course is made even more difficult by the fact that the audience is from a very diverse background. There are students from Electrical Engineering, students from Computer Science, students from Engineering Science and several others. Each of these students has different reasons, motivations and interests. So the course had to be constructed and presented in such a way, to be of use to everybody.
In applying these ideas, I am really fortunate to get such helpful feedbacks from the peer observation and the teaching observation projects. The feedbacks are encouraging but have lots of important suggestions. For example, as mentioned earlier, the practice of breaking the pace of the lecture from time to time, the practice of encouraging the students when solving a difficult problem, by being part of their team in the endeavor rather than just giving out the solution, from a position of superior knowledge. I believe that all these things have been really helpful in improving my teaching and should continue to help me, when I teach this course next time.
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