Back to reflecting!

It's been a long time since I've posted but I'm making an effort this year to spend more time reflecting after teaching.  Yesterday was my first class at my new place of work and, while I'm still processing the experience, there are a number of observations that I can make right away.

First, the learners are different.  My experience with teaching as been in large, public universities.  I'm now teaching in a small, private university.  One of the main differences I saw was in how the students work together.  In my large, public university, I would start explaining the group teaching project I have my students do in class and they were already thinking as a group as I was pulling the groups together and handing out instructions.  In my small, private university, I noticed students were a bit more reluctant to do group work, much as I was in my own small private education.  In my mind, I was almost always against doing group work because I had an easier time processing on my own.  My own educational experience emphasized individual work and that's where I felt my strengths were.  I believe my students in my small, private university feel the same way.  Many of them are strong, high performers who have learned to do so through individual work.  As a result, my group project fell rather flat here.

Second, the environment is different.  I'm used to a large number of similar classes.  While I would ideally spend time planning for each class, once the 'season' hit, I would churn out session after session, knowing that each class was pretty much expected to complete the same or similar writing assignments.  Here, it seems that there is more individuation between classes, making for more prep and a variety of instruction.  I had to prepare a specialized instruction session for how to find a specific resource and that also fell flat.  I didn't build the scaffolding for learning correctly and as a result, I felt the students were confused.  It's hard to teach something specialized without a strong frame of context, otherwise it seems a little pointless from the students' point of view to perform such a specialized task.  It seems obvious now but during my prep time, I couldn't see the problem.  It was only as I was teaching that I realized my mistake. 

This isn't to say that one university is better than another.  Public and private universities both have their benefits and deficits, just like anything else.  What intrigues me the most is how much the differences in environment and learner characteristics can change how well instruction performs.  I've learned that I need to explore activities that are engaging but solitary and I need to take the time to build a logical and obvious learning scaffolding, if I want to avoid confusion.  I have two more sessions this week, so I'll tweak my exercises and instruction and see how it works.

What are some of your favorite prep activities to avoid the mistakes I've made?