David Wright @ NC State

Preparing the Professoriate

The NC State Preparing the Professoriate (PtP) program has been an invaluable experience for me over the past year. This program has given me the opportunity for a very significant teaching and mentoring experience that I probably would not have had otherwise (CSC295D/495D). It has also allowed me to meet outstanding teachers (and future teachers) from across the university and talk about teaching in a college environment as a career. The seminars I have attended have been inspiring, and as noted in other parts of this portfolio, many of the topics discussed have had an immediate impact on my teaching. And while these experiences will have an ongoing influence on my teaching for years to come, the feeling of being welcomed into the community of teaching and learning is perhaps the most powerful and immediate reaction to participating in the program.

There were two seminars that stand out as particularly important and influential for me. Both were given by the same individual, Dr. Ed Neal, Director of Faculty Development at the UNC Center for Teaching and Learning; one at the beginning of the year and the other at the end. The first seminar, entitled "Conceptualizing Learning Outcomes: Designing Instruction," dealt with techniques for making learning goals and objectives clear and explicit to both the teacher and the student. This is particularly important in introductory undergraduate courses where students are making the transition from (usually) highly structured secondary education and learning to take control and responsibility of their own learning. Particularly interesting and enlightening were the sample syllabi Dr. Neal provided that connected course-level learning objectives with individual lecture topics. A student can read the syllabus and trace a high-level objective to a study unit, then to a particular topic, and finally to a specific lecture (including readings, homeworks, labs, etc.), allowing the student to see how the various elements of the course fit together to meet the course-level objectives. Each level (unit, topic, lecture) has its own learning objectives that are a subset of the higher-level objective the element is derived from.

From the student's perspective, this kind of syllabus is a roadmap of the course, allowing the student to quickly identify where their own learning is in relation to what is expected at any point in the course. From the instructor's perspective, this format does much of the foundational work for each lecture by establishing the particular learning objectives down to the lecture level. Continuity and cohesion within study units and the course as a whole are also easily checked and maintained. I used this format in the syllabus I constructed for CSC495D. Once the structure was explained to the class it was very well received. When the midterm exam date approached, most of the class realized (without my help) that the learning objectives listed on the syllabus formed a comprehensive study guide for the test. From my perspective as a novice teacher, this structure helped me organize and deliver CSC495D, overcoming one of the major problems we encountered with its predecessor, CSC295D (as discussed in my reflections elsewhere in this portfolio).

Dr. Neal's second seminar, "Teaching Critical Thinking," was enlightening for a different reason. It was during this seminar that I realized that an unspoken objective for the course I had been teaching (CSC495D) was for students to learn to think critically and objectively about the decisions they make while designing and implementing software systems. Unfortunately, this seminar did not occur until later in the semester, and I was not able to take full advantage of the seminar content in the class. However, I was able to put this information to use in a final in-class exercise that brought together most of the course content for the semester. This exercise was a watershed for many of the students in the class, illuminating all that they had learned in the class, why these skills were important to them, and how the content of this course fit in with the rest of the curriculum. Students said it best in their reflections on the course (the final part of the portfolio they maintained throughout the semester):