EDU375 Fall 2007

Statistics at a Glance
EDU375 - 600 Linked Section, mean 4.2, adjusted mean 3.87, and median: 3.93
EDU375 - 603 Unlinked Section, mean 4.9, adjusted mean 4.82, and median 4.82

My Reflection on CTEs and Students' Course Reflections

I returned to Cortland to resume teaching EDU375, one linked section and one unlined section. For EDU375 -Teaching Undergraduate Social Studies Methods, I collaborated with Dr. Ellen Newman, Dr. Orvil White, and Dr. Shufang Shi. I went to the Raquette Lake with both classes, participated in Math Night at Parker Elementary School. With Dr. Shufang Shi, I assigned a joint task with EDU314 -- Social Studies WebQuest project. Thanks to Dr. Shi's effective instruction, that project came out really well. We would continue working on this project for spring 2008.

Course evaluations showed that students would like to learn how to write a lesson plan in more details. Providing a Lesson Plan Template is not enough. So this semester I spent two weeks inviting students to practice writing a lesson plan using the provided lesson plan template. They will read Chapter 1 of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and the selected pages in Bill Biglow's Rethinking Columbus. They will then develop a lesson plan and demostrate a learning activity in class teaching the content knowledge in their readings. I encouraged students to pair up and write the lesson plans together. They signed up for the reading assignments and collaborated to present the lesson to the class.

The CTEs for both sections showed a difference of 0.8 in terms of mean and a total of 1 point in terms of adjusted mean and median. Not only did I get a "record low" CTE, but also I received two "Strongly Disagree" for questions "My instructor explained difficult material clearly." and "Overall, my instructor has been effective." The "record low" CTE for me didn't cause any alarm on my part. For I expected to have such a low CTE with this section. If you read the comments, you would see two of the three comments provided on CTEs mentioned that I should not have graded grammar. This semester in my EDU375 course, I required a higher quality of writing especially in one assignment known as Community Diversity Analysis Paper. I shared the assignment instruction, the grading rubric, and each student did a peer review for another student before I graded their final draft. Still, four students out of 16 in that section emailed me or talked me during office hours that I should not have graded so harshly on their poor grammar and spelling errors. I didn't agree with them, but I provided each of them opportunities to redo the paper and submit again for a better grade. All these four students were from the linked class. Are they grade-oriented or learning oriented? None of the students in my unlinked block emailed me about being graded too harshly. I didn't get any "Strongly Disagree" from the unlinked section.

Fall 2007 witnessed a new EDU375 syllabus, in which I included three new assignments: WOW posters of a third-world country, Biography Billboard of a Multicultural Hero and the geometric representation of the hero, and the Social Studies WebQuest. I also demonstrated a unit on Citizens and Citizenship by leading a class discussion on the definition of a citizen, three types of citizens, and by leading a class discussion after the whole class viewed the Broken Levee, a documentary by Spike Lee, which challenges students' thnking about being a citizen in the United States.

I appreciated all the support from other faculty working with me in both sections and I'm thankful for students' cooperation and understanding throughout the semester.