On Monday night, I taught my first college class!
I am teaching a hybrid course called Second Language Acquisition and Development for K-12 Educators as an adjunct. Hybrid means that we meet at PSU 5 times and then on alternate weeks I use the D2L digital format to post assignments and prompt discussions.
As an adjunct, I basically inherited the course content and it's my job to deliver it. Having all the content created for me has its advantages and disadvantages, but I think overall it was beneficial given that it is my first ever college course.
Since I have control over the format of the D2L course page, I tried to make that super organized so my students will have an easy time understanding what their assignments are and when/how they need to turn everything in. I took several online courses when I was living in Germany and working on my doctorate, so I am pretty familiar with how those types of courses operate.
So far my takeaways from being a professor are as follows:
- I really like having my own teaching space. It was weird to arrive in a random classroom prior to class only to find that a different class was in session. I showed up very early, but by the time I got access to the room, my students were already coming in. I had to figure out how to get technology running, arrange the small room to accommodate 30 students, and get all my papers organized with an audience. I had no idea what the table/seating arrange would be and since we were very crowded, the set up was not ideal for the group activities I planned.
- Adults ask a lot of questions. Even though I thought I made things VERY clear, there were still many clarifying questions.
- Adults actually did what I asked and I didn't need to redirect any behavior. It was great to just calmly circulate when they were discussing in groups. I listened and enjoyed what they had to say. I don't often feel that way in Kindergarten.
- The amount of work I have to grade just grew exponentially. I don't grade a whole lot in Kindergarten, but my college students have to write a 500 word reflection each week minimum. 500 words times 30 people is a lot of reading. Plus, I have to read the textbook chapters so that I can be familiar with the content and plan activities to go along with the content.
- I was a lot more self conscious teaching adults than I ever am teaching children. Hopefully that gets better.
The next course I am going to teach is entirely online, so that will be interesting as well.
Now, please share with me some of your favorite memories of college courses so I can be a rockstar professor!
What did professors do that you LOVED and also what did professors do that you HATED?
2 comments:
So cool that you are teaching a college class. That would TOTALLY stress me out to only get into class when the students are already showing up!
I have done just a brief amount of "teaching adults' mostly in the form of leading meetings. I have been lucky to have good audiences because sometimes I think adults can be worse than kids with the chatting haha.
I really wish I could take your online class... I was seriously thinking about it but then I realized it's probably really expensive... right?
I taught some graduate classes as an adjunct at the local U in my town. As a preface the next paragraph, one of the problems I found was that since I was teaching a "required" class for an advanced degree, not everyone wanted to be there.
I found that adults were much more difficult than kids to keep interested. That could be because I'm used to little ones (K through 3 and it might be different at upper grades), but there were a few -- maybe 30% of the students -- who seemed to be involved mentally on a regular basis.
One of the things I did to increase interest which seemed to work a little was to require a "how does this relate to my teaching assignment" reflection at the end of every class meeting. Of course...that might not work if you're not working with active teachers.
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