After accepting the offer to be a teaching assistant, I felt nothing but pure excitement! I remembered having some LIT teaching assistants in my undergraduate career, and I knew immediately that I was going to try my very best to be just like them. However, no matter how many times Karen warned us at orientation, I was still not prepared for certain things that may happen in the classroom that are NOT LIT. We are now in week six, and I have already experienced some moments that I felt I could have done a better job in communicating a message or simple directions for an activity to my class; however, I also believe that it is so important to celebrate little victories, or the LIT moments.
From our week with Cooper and Simmons (2002), we learned about active learning as well as its importance, effectiveness, how to implement it in our classes, and that it is essential in order to meet students’ need for social interaction within the classroom. Cooper and Simmons (2002) taught us that active learning leads to information retention, higher levels of engagement, and promotes synergy as students must move around the room, speak up in class, or interact with other students. Since completing this reading, I have put myself in the shoes of my students. I imagine myself sitting in Introduction to Communication as a senior, someone who expects a lot out of a class, and/or someone unmotivated. In other words, I try to imagine as many perspectives as possible in order to meet my students' interests and needs, then I create my lesson plans accordingly.
Although I like to switch it up at times, I have developed a basic structure for my class. I typically begin with a short, discussion-based review with a PowerPoint regarding what students learned in the online lecture. As I am doing this, I do my best to ensure that it is student led, not me simply regurgitating information they should have already learned from the online portion of the course; rather, this is my attempt to examine their understanding and have the class engage in active learning through discussion. In my PowerPoints, I always include popular memes or video examples that demonstrate my with-it-ness, or I ask students to provide me with examples of what these concepts may look like in their lives. Following our brief, interactive review, I initiate a hands-on learning activity of some sort. However, my activity from verbal and nonverbal communication week stuck out to me as a particularly LIT teaching moment.
I began the activity by randomizing students into groups of three. I informed the teams that they would need an interpreter, a messenger, and a drawer, and I let them delegate these roles within their groups. After students assigned roles, I had all of the interpreters stand on the left side of the room, and I gave them a sketch photo of a UNT sign that I found online; the messengers stood in the middle of the room, and the drawers stood on the right side of the room. I told the class that only the interpreters may see the photo then describe it to their messenger. Next, the messenger would then run to the drawer and relay the information so that the drawer may illustrate what they hear from the messenger. I allowed the messenger to go back and forth as many times as they needed to, and they had 10 minutes for the activity. After the activity, we debriefed as a class on what nonverbals they used to depict their image, what verbals were used, the impact of messengers that went back to their interpreter multiple times, the impact of “noise” when they were speaking to the team members, and the role of perception and language in describing the image. Following the debrief, I had the students take out a sheet of paper and reflect on three key takeaways, their most favorite thing about the class, and their least favorite thing about the class. Not to my surprise, most of my students wrote that they dislike public speaking and the attendance policy. However, I was overjoyed to read that there were three major themes of what the students’ favorite part of the class was: the class discussions, the activities, and “Madie.”
This semester has had its ups and downs, but I am continuing to learn and adjust more and more everyday as both a student and a teaching assistant. I have the tendency to be pessimistic when I am overwhelmed with stress, but thus far, learning from my mistakes and celebrating my victories has both built my confidence and pushed me one step closer to being a LIT teaching assistant.
#It’sMADLit
From this post, it seems like you've made a vary clear impact on how your students view their learning. From what I can tell you've found a system that works for your class, however I am wondering if you feel like there are any activities that you felt could have been moved up in the semester and would have helped you as a TA to understand your students more? Were there any moment where you had to take a step back and figure out how else to approach a specific lesson to clarify students understandings of the material?
ReplyDeleteAmber, thank you for posing these questions. There are absolutely times when I wish that I could have set things back, and I am learning from my experience every week. For instance, I have yet to do the color personality test; however, this week is group communication week, so it may be beneficial for that topic. Furthermore, I feel that my activity may have also been great for group communication and teamwork. I am considering doing this activity again, but modifying it a little bit to have different tasks and roles to accomplish a goal. What do you thing?
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