Teaching Post 11/13 - 11/15

This was an interesting week, but I feel it was a productive week. On Tuesday we finished our large group discussions about the topics and, again, I was glad to see so many students participating and asking questions. After that I just went over the general outline of what a research paper is and what it contains along with a basic strategy to immplement in writing the paper. I feel the class went well, but I hate it when I have to spend so much time lecturing. I feel that it is boring for the students and that it's too easy for the students to "tune me out." Anyway, I think I was able to address some of their concerns and make the research paper seem doable.

Thursday was another boring day :-( We worked in small groups to outline the papers based on the topic. The students were able to help each other build outlines, but a lot of the students still haven't done enough research to be able to build an accurate outline. I think next time I do this exercise I will require the students to have done some research as homework and then hopefully more would have the knowledge needed to construct a good outline of their paper. We then talked about APA citations and in text source citations. I had a couple of exercises planned and they went well, but I could see that I was losing the students - it was just a lot of lecturing and very boring. On Tuesday I will do some group work with citations and sources and we will see how that goes, I just want to make sure that the students understand the concept and how important it is to reference properly.