Another week of learning and teaching is done. I am starting to get a routine going as far as teaching, planning, going to my classes, and doing course work. This week in COMM 110, students are giving their first speeches so I took the time that I normally would have been lesson planning to “front-load” and get some other work done. The time I would normally get that work done might be interrupted by grading these first speeches. While I am learning from first-hand teaching experience, the readings for this week also gave me a few pointers about aspects of teaching that I never really thought about.

A few useful topics I found:

• The beginning of chapter 3 in First Day to Final Grade stated that even experienced teachers need to plan how their classes are going to go. Having a goal for class will help students know what they are supposed to get out of each class period. When planning material, have useful transitions so that the material flows together. Students have many different types of learning styles, so varying the way material is taught day to day may spark some students one day and not others. I am a much better presenter when I am prepared, so I know lesson planning is time-consuming, but something I will need to take seriously. Having a goal will help me to know if the students learned anything for the day.
  
• Discussion is an activity that is often taken for granted in the classroom. A discussion needs to be run properly in order to be effective. I found this chapter useful because I often wondered how it could possibly be hard to run a discussion? I found the answer to that question last year when I tried to facilitate a discussion with 24 freshman students in their skills for academic success class. The students had to read a novel and spend the next class period discussing the entire novel. I felt like a huge failure when no students had anything to say and I couldn't even make discussing an entire novel take 50 minutes. We should have had enough material to discuss for multiple class periods!
  Never making a student feel sorry that they spoke is also something helpful from this chapter. Silence is hard to sit through, but some students are truly worried about what others will think of their answers.
  
• Finally, the last chapter of this week’s reading provided helpful tips for ways of teaching in the classroom. I think the most relevant ways for me will be information exchange, pros and cons, exam preparation tips, and paper workshops.

I would implement these new tips into teaching in my field by:

• Planning lesson plans a week or so in advance. By doing this I would have time to better prepare and adjust for any students that will be absent. I will know how much talking I will be doing in class and how much student interaction should be happening. In my lesson plans, I will start writing a goal for each class period. When I wrote health education lesson plans, I wrote goals and also what North Dakota and National Health Education Standard each goal and objective met.
• Discussions are very important in the field of communication since so many topics can be subjective. I think having students take a few minutes to prepare by themselves or through a pair and share activity will give everyone an equal chance to participate in discussions. Discussions help students know that it is alright to agree and disagree with what is in their textbooks. Through discussion in my COMM 110 class, many students came up with different definitions of the word “communication” and had their own models for the communication process.
• Finally, I would implement some of the class plan ideas by incorporating a few into my lesson plans for each class period. By doing this, you can target a few different learning styles in one. Some students will learn best by watching a video, while others may learn better from the PowerPoint presentation at the beginning.
  

I would like to incorporate the following into my teaching:

• I have a student that comes into class late every class meeting. He often misses attendance, so I have to remember to mark that he was there later. I also have to fill him in on what we just covered. Two of the times we were doing group work so his group had to fill him in before they could do their work. I think I will send him an e-mail or pull him aside after class. As the text mentioned, once he realizes I notice this, I think he will start being on time.
• I sometimes have problems filling 50 minutes of lecture, so I think I will start writing in possible discussion questions into my lesson plans. My students are pretty receptive to questions so I think now that I have learned how to properly run a discussion, the discussion will be more successful. One thing I am working on is when students respond or ask questions. I am having a hard time thinking of what to say back. It is not that I don't have a personality for interacting with others, I just always find myself agreeing or simply saying yes or no. I think I will start trying to remember to ask other students what their response would be.
• Finally, I think the information exchange plan for class would be successful in my classes. It is a win-win activity because some students don't read the entire chapter (if any at all) and are always in need of practicing speaking in front of each other. Assigning smaller parts of the chapter to become "experts" on to teach the class will benefit the student as well as the class.

Based on this week's readings, I found a few links for more information.

• Lesson Plan Maker
• More Discussion Leading Tips
• Discussion Tips - I really liked outline item D. These are helpful bridges to keep the discussion going and students to elaborate more.