Reflections on students' comments about EDU480, fall 2009

It is the first time I taught EDU480, a new course in our Childhood program in the second block. This course inherits a lot from EDU375 with a focus on elementary social studies methods for grades 4th and above. Meanwhile, issues explored in EDU378 must be continuously discussed without repeating the course content.

It really takes several semesters to refine a course. I am very pleased that the adjusted mean of the CTE of this course is 4.54. Among comments, I noticed that one student complained about the lengthy assignments. I admitted that. The WOW poster assignment is a time-consuming project, and I allowed individual or pair work. I have every reason to keep it for it really challenges students to look beyond their limited worldview and start to focus on another country in the world. This global connection is too previous to be cut off in this course. In spring 2010, I will assign this project as a team project, which allows up to 4 students to work on one selected developing country of the world. While I still give students the option to conduct individual or team project, workload should be balanced in a more effective way.

Another negative comment I have noticed is

I am very touched whenever I read students' comments that my way of teaching inspired them and made them confident about their choice of becoming a teacher. One student wrote,

This is my second semester with Lin Lin and again I have enjoyed the class and the material presented. The lessons were well thought out and much work was put into the activities. I have found Lin Lin’s information so helpful in preparing my social studies lessons and found it related to my host teacher’s curriculum map.

Comments like this are not uncommon for me, but every time I read them, I know I am doing the right thing.

However, another student wrote,

I felt as though many assignments were very unclear. I felt very confused and unsure of what was being asked of me.

I almost could tell who wrote this comment based on my observation of the students' performance in this course. I did not spend very much time explaining every course assignment. All assignments were uploaded on eLearning and they really require students to take the responsibilities to read them on their own before I could answer their questions. I would rather not spend valuable classroom time to read assignment instructions that were posted online before they even took some time to read them.

Yet another student commented,

Lin Lin is a great person and is really nice, but the class was very confusing and things weren’t explained well.

I realized that I really need to spend some time in class to go through activitie and assignments so that EVERY STUDENT's needs are met. Obviously these two students' needs were not met sufficiently. I know for this semester how I could do to make things clearer and transparent for them.

However, it might sound that I'm defending myself for negative comments. It is true and research support my statement that teacher candiates are not feeling comfortable when instructors challenged them to have a new perspective to look at the world around them.

They are so comfortable to teach a unit about the 13 original colonies, but none cares to ask how the United States took the land to become 50 states from the 13 original colonies.

They are so comfortable to teach a unit about citizens' rights and responsiblities in the United States, but few asks what it really means to be a democratic citizenship. If citizens are all expected to abide by laws, what if a law is unjust to some people?

This is a great course that provides me the opportunity to change the world by changing the beliefs of our teacher educators in the future word by word, activity by activity, one assignment by another assignment. They might share negative comments on my CTEs, but I believe one day they will recall that Lin Lin has done the right things in her courses.