As part of my COMM 107 Assistantship, I will maintain a blog where I will share my ideas, approaches, and reflections on teaching. I encourage this to be a community where fellow instructors can share ideas in the comments and provide guest postings based on great ideas you develop along the way.
The purpose of the blog is to share:
- Lesson plans, activities, and strategies
- Observations and reflections on common problems affecting COMM 107 instructors
- Reflections on what works and what doesn't in my own room
- General approaches and perspectives on motivating students
- Problem-solving responses to questions that emerge for other instructors
...and whatever else this evolves into over the year!
This introductory post will orient you to who I am and what I hope to accomplish this semester. My typical posts will be more brief and to-the-point with reflections and resources. But if you want to know who I am better, please forge ahead!
Who Am I?
First of all, I want to introduce myself.
Quick facts:
Favorite Amendment - The first one
Favorite pastime - Going meta
Favorite instrument - The banjo
Favorite theorist - Kenneth Burke
At my heart is my experience as a speech and debate competitor, coach, and advocate. As a shy and depressive high schooler, involvement in speech competition saved me and provided me an outlet. To this day, I believe that engagement in communication activities and courses provides students the outlet they need to become passionate people capable of expressing what matters to them most.
My experience led me to over a decade of involvement in speech and debate as a competitor and coach; two years of graduate instructing a public speaking class at Northern Illinois University; and finally, a two-year commitment with Teach For America. In this role, I taught dual-enrollment speech and debate courses, organized slam poetry competitions, coached American Legion Oratory Contest champions, and organized advocacy assignments in which students petitioned their own school board members for changed policies.
More importantly, for the past two summers I have provided support for new teachers entering Teach For America. In my capacity as a Corps Member Advisor, I aided new teachers with little-to-no teaching experience as they strove through their five weeks of "teacher boot camp" in the Mississippi Delta. I reviewed dozens of lesson plans, coached Corps Members in-the-moment as they taught struggling readers, and helped them develop the organizational skills necessary to survive the day-to-day life of an educator.
What is My Role in Helping You Develop?
While college classrooms look notably different from secondary school, many of the challenges remain the same. What manifests as unruly behavior in high school looks more like apathy in a college room. Boring teacher-centered lessons as are unhelpful to a failing reader as they are to a college senior. High school teachers push students to think at a higher level than the rote memorization of facts; your lessons need to begin from the assumption that all college students can quite capably think on this level already.
My goal is to provide you the strategic supports you need to develop in your craft, reflect systematically on your work, and grow at an accelerated rate--all in preparation for a life in education.
My role includes the following supports:
Observations and lesson debriefs: I consider this the core of my position. I will schedule (in advance--don't worry!) observations of your lessons in which I will record details on how you and your students interact, the course of your discussions, the classroom culture, and other details. I will follow this up with a debrief conversation in which we will address your goals for the class, your students' progress, and what specific steps you should take to improve your practice most meaningfully.
Maintaining this blog: I am both helping you grow as a teacher and striving to grow myself. On this blog, I will consistently post resources, reflect on my own successes and shortcomings, spread word of brilliant instructor ideas from around the department, and foster a community of 107 educators committed to helping one another grow.
Lesson plan and assessment review: Just as a strong speech requires a knowledge of the desired effect on the listener, a strong lesson must begin with the end in mind: that is, the instructor needs to have a deep understanding of what he or she desires students to accomplish by course's end. Likewise, an effective speech requires advance invention, outlining, and careful attention to structure; so, too, must a lesson. I will strive to provide assistance in both of these areas.
Other roles include:
- Assisting in the implementation of a mentorship program
- Conducting research on the growing program
- Helping to design training sessions for 107 meetings
- Whatever else we need to develop 107 into a thriving program other schools look to as a model.
I accept this role with great humility. My own development as an educator (which, like anyone's, is a perpetual work-in-progress) could not have occurred without mentors watching me, conversing with me, and helping me develop the means to focus on what mattered, when it mattered. My goal is to provide that same caliber of support for my colleagues in this department to ensure they feel prepared to tackle this course.
How Do I See COMM 107?
As a well-rounded course that branches across every aspect of our discipline, COMM 107 can provide precisely the venue for student identity-formation at the moment in their lives when they absolutely need it. After all, a college freshman is:
- Away from home, meeting new people, interacting with new ideas, and assimilating into a new culture;
- Confronting the decision-making process of how to spend their own lives;
- Beginning to become more autonomous in preparation for future careers and relationships.
I cannot think of a more meaningful experience at this stage in a person's life than taking time to reflect on how we interact with one another, explain (and misunderstand) one another, and cultivate skills in listening, speaking, and thinking critically about messages.
The beautiful thing about the course is that the concepts are so universally applicable that no matter your field of communication, you will have a repertoire of examples and experiences that help you explicate concepts--and so will your students. The class, taught well, can allow students to see these concepts at play everywhere--and to wield them in their own efforts to communicate.
How Am I Structuring My Own Course?
As I construct lesson plans for my first weeks of instruction, I will provide them here. Before I do that, I want to give some of my philosophy on how I will set up the class.
Most educators work with some form of Bloom's Taxonomy:
Synthesizing
Evaluating
Analyzing
Applying
Understanding
Remembering
On the most basic level, students simply remember and understand. As they move up the ladder, students apply the concepts they have learned in new contexts, reinforcing their depth of comprehension. At the higher levels of understanding, students critically evaluate this information, pick it apart via analysis, and synthesize concepts learned across multiple units, courses, or areas of their lives.
In my high school classroom, I needed to cover all of this every day. And to some extent, we will do that as college instructors, too. But our situation is a bit different. We do not meet with students every day; and as college students, they are capable of performing much of the learning on their own.
The hierarchy, as I see it:
Remembering and Understanding
Students are responsible for this component of the learning on their own, outside of class. They can arrive at this understanding entirely through their textbook and supplemental materials we provide--with minor remediation of difficult concepts during class lectures. It is up to the instructor to reinforce the expectation to read so that students come to class prepared to apply, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize ideas.
Applying
This can occur both outside of class (instructing students to watch YouTube videos or read supplemental material). Students apply new concepts and ideas in different circumstances to better understand how they function. In communication, this often manifests as simple connections between the concept and their own lives--or any of the other gazillion domains where communication occurs.
Evaluating and Analyzing
We do not want students to accept the concepts in their textbooks at face-value. Nor do we want them to engage with the communication around them passively. This level of learning is what the majority of class should be dedicated to. Students should be confronted with new texts, ideas, and hypothetical situations where these concepts apply, and then stretch their thinking. They should be expected to make judgment calls about ethics, efficacy, and merit of messages. Moreover, they should analyze the implications of the theories themselves. On their written tests, this is the level at which students need to demonstrate competency.
Synthesis
At this level, students should "tie it all together." This is the level of efficacy I will push students toward in their assignments. Not only will they need to meet the expectations outlined in their rubrics, but they will need to demonstrate through effective oral performance, listening, and reflection that they have internalized the concepts of the course and applied them to their own abilities to speak, listen, and critique.
As I begin constructing assessments and outlines for student lessons, I will keep in mind this chart to remind myself what I should be dedicate class time toward--as well as what students should be doing on their own.
This is excellent. Thanks, Michael!
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