Teaching in College
I took this course to learn about teaching in a university environment, and it was an excellent foundational element in my education as a teacher. While the instructor had a certain amount of material the course was intended to cover, she was also very sensitive to what we, future college teachers, wanted to learn and understand. In particular, several class sessions were devoted to discussing topics such as the promotion and tenure process, differences between research-intensive and teaching-oriented institutions, and service obligations inside and outside the university. An underlying theme to these discussions was how to balance all of these responsibilities with your own life, family, and personal goals.
One of the most important requirements of this course was to interview a faculty member about their experiences as a university teacher. I chose to interview a professor at a nearby private 4-year college rather than one at NC State. I have become relatively familiar with the teaching environment here, and wanted to learn about teaching at a substantially different kind of institution. While we had discussed the differences between the two kinds of institutions in class, hearing it first hand from someone who had taught in both environments was especially enlightening for me. This interview further strengthened my resolve to seek a position at a smaller, teaching-oriented college or university rather than one on par with NCSU. My summary and reflections on this interview are included in Appendix C, along with other materials developed for this course.
I was also required to observe and critique an instructor in my discipline, which was an interesting experience in itself. It was very different, and a little bit awkward, to sit in a classroom as an observer and not as a student. At times, it was difficult for me to keep myself in the observer mode, particularly since there were several points in the lecture that I wanted to comment on. This was an important exercise, for two reasons. First, as a faculty member, one of my responsibilities will be to evaluate other faculty's teaching. Second, the experience of putting myself in the observer perspective has made it easier for me to reflect on my own teaching, and made me more aware of things I do in the classroom that have positive and negative effects on the students.
The other important activity in this class was a short subject teaching experience. We were required to deliver a twenty-minute lesson on a basic or fundamental topic in our own discipline to our classmates. This was a challenge in several ways! The first was to find a fundamental computer science topic that could be appreciated and grasped by students outside the discipline. Second was trimming the content of that topic down so that it could be covered in twenty minutes (including time for some type of exercise). It was also a challenge to structure my delivery so that I was explaining the material so that it could be understood without talking down to the students. Most of us in the class went over on the allotted time, often due to time spent in the exercise or because of student questions during the presentation. We had to develop a detailed lesson plan for our lecture, and follow that up with reflections on the experience and a rewritten, alternative lesson plan specifically using a problem-based teaching approach to deliver the same material.
