Watsatree_reflection+April+6

Reflection for April 6, 2010.

Nicholas Eastham was the guest speaker of the class tonight and he gave us valuable ideas about dissertation. I think his topic is very interesting in my opinion and also, I believe, will give a lot of benefits to education in the future, especially for TAs. In terms of TA, I really understand that there are many teaching problems that TAs need to face and I know that it is very hard for someone that never have any teaching experiences before they start working as TAs. One of problems that I faced is that many students in the class do not really respect TAs (compare with teachers). They do not believe answers from TAs because they feel that they TAs are students like them, not a teacher. How can TAs handle this situation? How can they find a way to solve this problem? Where can they get any advices? These questions obviously link to Nick's dissertation topic in my opinion, which is create "something" in order to help TAs for solving these problems.

For the group project presentations, I saw incredible ideas from each group in terms of combining various ideas together. I really like the idea from Manal, Suzan, and Teklab group. It is simple but effective for teaching objective-alignment.

I also glad that we will do a big project together for the whole class :) I feel that we all have great ideas. I believe that it will be a good idea if we can create "something" that combines all of our great ideas together. I learn a lot of things from the group project. This time I feel that I am following and using instructional models for doing projects. Additionally, I feel that I apply information from the book into real life situation. These things make me feel good and more deeply understand the core concept of instructional design as well.

Watsatree