Wikispaces: One-stop shopping for digital learning

In the past several years, I have come to rely on Web-based website builders quite extensively in my teaching. I typically use Google Sites for the bulk of my Web content with my classes, and it has always been very reliable. I have noticed lately that the editor doesn't always load in the newest versions of Firefox. This isn't a big deal because I can jump over to Safari and finish whatever edits I need to do.

Anyway, what started as a way to write lesson plans without having to move files with me wherever I went has evolved into a complete lecture management tool. I started using SeedWiki circa. 2005 because I found myself planning my lectures at odd times, using a host of different computers. Using a wiki was a perfect solution because I could log in from anywhere and pick up where I had left off. I also liked the wiki because I could paste links and other resources directly into the page. It was a great tool.

Eventually, I started giving my class the link to my lecture notes in SeedWiki, and it wasn't long before I was using the wiki as the hub to my class meetings. I got this idea, in part, from someone else, and though I have switched tools I still use this method for managing class meetings. Some of the basics methods that I use a wiki for include:

• Time management: I would organize each section of the class meeting using cells in a table, including the amount of time I thought we would spend on each section. Each section of the class meeting has relevant links, embedded videos, documents, etc.
• Collaborative Learning: Keeping track of group work and collaborative learning can be a nightmare. One area of my teaching that I noticed was in serious need of improvement was keeping the class on track during group discussions. We've all seen this technique used, and it did not come naturally to me. What I noticed in many instances was that the students would spend about 60 seconds discussing the topic, then they would digress into conversation and have nothing to show for their work. Essentially, group discussions lacked accountability and there was no incentive for staying on task. What I began to do, and do to this day, is determine ahead of time how many groups the class would be divided into and create that many pages as part of the class wiki. Each group would then summarize their discussion on the assigned page. I was able to get creative too, throwing in such tasks as finding a random picture on the web, or finding a movie clip that corresponded to their main idea. As soon as the group clicked save, I was able to display their summary to the rest of the class. I had a built-in record of what each group talked about, and because anyone could edit the page, no sign-in was required.
• Lecture Archive: Because everything that we covered, as well as what we did in class, was saved to the wiki for that day, I had a detailed archive of the class meeting. More detailed than I could have created on my own because the class helped me do it. So, when a student would come to class and ask that question that all professors love to hear ("Did we cover anything important last week?"), I could point them to the wiki and tell them that EVERYTHING on the page for that day is important.

About the time that SeedWiki went under, Google Sites (which used to be JotSpot) came around. I was already a big Gmail and Google Docs user at this point, so it made sense to start using Google Sites to manage my lecture notes. The tool itself is very stable and easy to use, but it was not ideal for collaborative learning. Students had to have Google Account and be added one-by-one to the Site before they could log in and participate in the learning activities. This may not sound like a big deal, but there were just enough moving parts that it became a nuisance. Remember, college students are basically high school students with no curfew and more access to beer, and many of them are not good at keeping track of their information. Just to give my students permission to co-edit the class Site, they had to:

1. Open a Google Account
2. Send me the e-mail address they used to open the Google Account
3. Respond to my invitation to join the class Google Site
4. Remember their log in information

When you go to start a class activity and half the class can't access the Site, it gets pretty frustrating. UVa eventually moved to Google Apps for student e-mail accounts, so this reduced some of the friction, but it was still very clunky. In Google Sites' defense, I don't think they ever intended for the tool to be used in this way, and restricting editing access to only those with permission is a security measure.

Recently, I rediscovered Wikispaces, and I think the tool has come along to point where I will start using it exclusively for all of my lecture management needs. I typically use Wikispaces about twice per semester with each of my classes, but I am starting to see how it is much more effective than Google Sites for use in a learning environment. First of all, the teacher can add users to a wiki in bulk. All you do is create  a spreadsheet with usernames and passwords, and upload it to the wiki. Students then have access to the wiki, and they didn't have to sign up or respond to a confirmation e-mail. This option is superior to making the wiki editable by anyone, as you will see later.

Second, you can create Projects within the wiki. These projects are partitioned off from the rest of wiki, making it much easier to manage each activity. Otherwise, the list of your wiki's pages gets to be pretty burdensome and hard to manage. Every time you create a new project, you can drag-n-drop the names of students into different teams, or you can let Wikispaces randomly assign students to teams. This is great for mixing up student groupings and getting students out of their comfort zones. The alternative is letting the students always pick their own groups and essentially work with the same people all semester.

Finally, there is a Discussion tab for each page, which you can use in several different ways. You can have students follow up with group projects by discussing key questions in a back channel. I haven't used this particular feature much, but I plan on using it more.

There are many reasons to use a wiki to manage your class meetings, some of which I have discussed here. What are some other ways you have used a wiki as part of your teaching?

When do preservice teachers become professionals?

This semester, while I consider it a success in almost every way, was very challenging in terms of dealing with students. I have been teaching at this level for 12 years, and there is very little I haven't encountered to this point. I have seen everything from students getting put in jail to deaths in the family to a student in my class passing away in the middle of the semester. Each of these circumstances, and everything in between, is very sad and a burden to deal with. I dealt with the same thing when teaching elementary school, so I know that this was part of the deal when I signed on.

It is not uncommon for me to get a message from a student during the semester that this or that issue is going on and they will either need to a) drop the course past the deadline, and need my permission, b) won't be able to turn in an assignment on time or c) will need to miss one or two classes.  I actually had a student this semester go to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy, and her mother e-mailed me TWICE from the hospital waiting room to tell me her daughter would miss two weeks of class. Remarkably, she only missed one week and was back on track in a matter of days! So, I get it that life happens.

Well, there was a whole lot of life happening this semester. A whole lot. Some of the circumstances were real, and I was able to work with those students. But many of the circumstances were very vague and handled inappropriately, and in many instances, could have been avoided. I won't go into detail about some of the more entertaining excuses I got, but needless to say, dinnertime chatter between my wife and I was very colorful this semester.

What really gets to me about these many, many life issues is that I had no idea they were occurring until several weeks after the student had stopped coming to class. From my vantage point, here is what typically happened:

• Student misses class
• Class involves activities that are either for a grade or necessary for completing an assignment
• More weeks pass
• I e-mail student to see if he or she intends to complete the class
• Student e-mails me and says they have not been in class because of "family issues" and wants me to "help them get caught up"

Please forgive me if you think I am being unreasonable for being suspicious when this particular scenario plays out about 4-5 times with different students in two different sections.  One time? Sure, I will probably take the bait. But when it happens repeatedly, I start to detect an odor. Here is what I think is happening from the student's vantage point:

• Student misses class
• Student finds out from a classmate that the missed class session involved activities that were either graded or necessary to complete an assignment
• Student intends to contact me and let me know why he or she missed class
• Student proceeds to miss more class
• Student takes a reflective look back at the last few weeks and analyzes which, if any, events in his or her life could legitimately be called a "family issue" that needed intense and unwavering focus, to the extent that all forms of electronic communication were simply not possible until this very moment
• Student contacts the professor and vaguely states that he or she has been dealing with "family issues," and wonders if there is any way to make up the activity, either through a special appointment (which he or she is totally willing to do based on my schedule, as long as it is on Tuesday between 1-3 or Friday after noon but before 5) or extra credit (which I will have to create, chase down and grade based on criteria I will need to, you guessed it, design)

This all comes down to Fundamental Attribution Error. Everyone, not just college students, has a tendency to justify and explain their own circumstances in a way that is favorable toward themselves. That is human nature, but what about professional behavior? I mean, assume these excuses were coming from teachers with students showing up in their classrooms everyday. Would this same approach to handling life's circumstances stand up? Even in the worst cases, a professional would have to let someone know what was going on so the school could arrange to provide supervision (a substitute teacher) for the students. I mean, I had a teaching partner give birth over lunch break and she called from the L&D room to let us know she wouldn't be back to teach that afternoon! So, is it unreasonable to expect college students to handle their affairs, especially when it comes to their professional training as educators, as professionals?

As a form of catharsis, I wrote came up with the following list of professional behaviors that I think preservice teachers should be expected to demonstrate:

Professionals …

(Meetings) Are not late for meetings Come prepared for meetings Are actively engaged during meetings Don’t make appointments that conflict with meetings Let people know beforehand if they have to miss a meeting, and why

(Projects) Meet their deadlines Are proactive Don’t make excuses when deadlines are missed

(Group Work) Do their own work Do their part

This list is not exhaustive, but I am trying to get some traction on the set of behaviors I should expect from my preservice teachers. These are behaviors that will be expected of them during field experiences, student teaching and in the workplace, so why is this not the case for their classes? Perhaps I am being unreasonable and this blog post will cause an uproar. I actually would welcome that. If I am in some way off base, I would like to know so I can determine the correct way to respond and interact with students when it comes to their personal affairs.

So, let me hear from you. How do you deal with these kinds of circumstances with students? What are your expectation for professional behavior in your classes?

Inspiration is for amateurs

This time of year, when there so much to do, I find it hard to get motivated to do some of the things (e.g., grading) that I don't want to do. This morning as I was driving to work, I was reminded of an interview I once saw with Chuck Close, a professional artist. He has these words for anyone who is emerging with their profession:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

This is a popular quotation, and for good reason. If I treat motivation (inspiration) like it is something that I must have before I can do anything meaningful or productive, I will end up wasting a lot of time. I have experienced this first hand recently with my writing, where I have been much more systematic about chipping away at manuscripts than I have in the past. There have actually been studies about this, and they show that writers who set aside smaller chunks of time each day for writing actually get more done that writers who set aside larger chunks on a couple of days or who set aside a whole day. This seems counter-intuitive, but having squandered many  a "writing day," I guess it wouldn't hurt to try it. After I get this figured out, the question will shift to, how do I get my students to adopt this philosophy?

A (mis)Conceptual Framework

I am in the process of wrapping up yet another semester of teaching preservice teachers how to use technology in their classrooms. It is at this point in the semester, when all of the projects except the final portfolio have been graded, that I start thinking about what went well and what didn't go so well. As someone who is very self-critical, I look at each project and think about ways to improve it for the next semester. This semester, I have been thinking more about how the whole class is structured rather than how to improve each of the projects. I actually think that most of the projects and class activities went well this semester, but the course in general was just a collection of disjointed assignments.

I have also been struck by some of the things the students have written in their assignments this semester. I'm not surprised or shocked because I was an undergraduate once and it takes time to get your head around the complex world of learning, students, schools and education. I don't think anyone ever totally gets their head around it. (Sorry, Arne.) But, for some reason I was able to see past the grading of these assignments and start to see some themes emerge. These "themes" emerged as misconceptions about how students learn, classrooms interact and schools operate. There were a lot of assumptions without a lot of support for their claims.

So, for once I am going to keep the projects and class activities, but I am going to rework the framework within which I present them. Rather than framing the course around technology tools, I want to frame the course around educational concepts that directly address preservice teachers' misconceptions about learning, teaching and technology. A similar approach has been tried before quite successfully by one of my colleagues, and I am ready to get out of the box a little bit. I have started a draft of my (mis)conceptual framework for teaching preservice teachers about how to use technology as part of their teaching. The general idea is that I will talk about a major educational concept (e.g., scaffolding), introduce a major misconception associated with that concept and address that misconception through a technology-based project.

This may end up being the worst idea ever, but it may also work like a champ. I have redesigned this course about half a dozen times or so, and I am not afraid to try something totally new. I'm sure I will be writing something around next December reflecting on how this new approach is working. Do you have thoughts or experience with this approach? I would love to hear your ideas.

Implementing Digital Fabrication

As I mentioned in my last post, there are a lot of aspects of digital fabrication that I really like. Students being able to design, create, evaluate, re-design and re-create objects that they conceptualized on the computer. Students being able to physically hold something they designed in a virtual environment. There are many elements of this kind of teaching that represent many of the hopes people have had for infusing technology into teaching and learning: direct application, real-world importance, creativity, etc. Until recently, most of my experience designing and fabricating objects had been done in my office on my one machine that is connected to my computer. There was no waiting for other people, no transferring files from one computer to another, no having to think about how and where to save files so I could resume my work at a later time. In the back of my mind I knew that the experience I had fabricating objects would be much different than the whole-class experience my students would have, and there were several technical aspects of this process I had not anticipated until I released it into the wild with my students.

I had some ground rules for myself when deciding how to introduce this activity:

1. I wanted to give the class 1-2 authentic tasks to do. I did not just want to just have the students using the software for the sake of using the software. That has never turned out favorably for me.
2. I wanted them to be able to finish in one week. That means one class meeting for one section and two for another.
3. I wanted them to have fun and like what they are doing. This all gets back to my belief (and that of many other people) that one way to change attitudes toward technology is to provide people with engaging, meaningful and yes, fun activities that include technology. People, teachers in particular, tend to abandon technology because they have had bad experiences with it.

So, I set out to design an activity that met these criteria. I had the students complete these activities and submit their work when they were done. The first activity was used to introduce the software (no printing or cutting involved), and the second activity was for application. Overall, my students were very gracious and rolled with the punches. They seemed to like the second activity more than the first (Really!?!), and though I have no data to support my claims, I truly believe they understand digital fabrication more than they did after reading an article and watching a video. Here are my reflections (both technical, pedagogical and philosophical) from the experience.

1. You have to print from the same computer you will use to cut the shape.  If you print from a computer that does not have a Silhouette connected to it, the software will put the wrong orienting marks on the paper and it will be useless for cutting ... unless you want to cut it by hand.
2. The trial version of the software does not let you save your work. You must have a licensed version to save a project on one computer and open it on another.
3. The printing and cutting step of this process is a bottleneck. I have 24 students in each class. They worked in groups of 3, and I brought 2 fabricators to the lab.  Under ideal conditions, everything went pretty smoothly. As soon as there was a hitch, and there were a couple, the line got a little backed up.
4. The more fabricators you have, the better. However, the trade-off is that the more fabricators you have, the noisier your classroom will be.
5. I received a couple different versions of this comment, "I have a hard time envisioning myself doing this activity with my class." It's hard to situate an activity within an instructional context AND create obvious connections to other instructional contexts. When you give preservice teachers a task, they tend to focus on the task. A seasoned teacher may do a better job of seeing those connections because she will have more applied experience than a novice teacher. In other words, I could have done a better job of facilitating what Salomon and Perkins call high-road transfer. I think requires some application and reflection, which we didn't really do.
6. Related to the previous observation, there needs to be more emphasis on creativity in teacher education programs. Rather than being a thing a person either has or doesn't have, I think of creativity more like a muscle that needs to be exercised in order to grow and stay healthy. The older I have gotten, the more purposeful I have become in my creative pursuits. As for my role in the creative development of my students, I think the best way to do this is for them to create a digital fabrication activity in their preferred content area. It's one thing to be able to do my activity. It's an entirely different level of creativity to be able to create a learning activity for a group of children. I may do this at some point.

Overall, I would say this was a good activity for my first attempt at a new concept and new technology. I have a completely different vision for how this will look the next time I do it, which is evidence of learning on my part.

Learning Management Systems: Hub or Silo?

North Texas has literally been shut down for the past 3 days, with a 4th day impending. We had an arctic front blow in on Monday night, leaving a sheet of ice and snow, and sub-freezing temperatures to keep it intact. Every college, school district, private school and many businesses have been closed since Tuesday.

For the first day of this freeze I was feeling smug because I had already planned an online class for both of my sections of "Computers in the Classroom," at UNT. I had most of the materials ready to go, so it was looking like I would just need to make them available to my class and spend the rest of the day hanging out with my family. I released the materials late Tuesday night, and I didn't think about it again until Wednesday when a student e-mailed to say she couldn't access Moodle. I went to Moodle, and she was right. Nothing.

In addition to cold weather, North Texas was experiencing power shortages caused by over-burdened power plants. In response to this shortage, the state implemented rolling blackouts. We lost power 3 different times on Wednesday for about 20 minutes each, which was only a slight inconvenience. These same rolling blackouts also cut power to Discovery Park, where the Moodle servers are housed. The servers went down, and as of this writing no one has booted them back up. This experience added another chapter to my love/hate relationship (mostly love) with LMS software.

I have been using Learning Management Systems (LMS) since 2005 to help me teach my courses, most of which have been face-to-face. Over the years I have had mostly good experiences, some bad experiences and many teachable moments. I have use Moodle, WebCT, Blackboard, Toolkit (homegrown at UVa), Collab (built at UVa on the Sakai platform) and eCollege. Each of these packages has its own affordances and constraints, and I haven't found any of them to be completely idiot proof. What I have learned is that LMS, no matter which one you are using, make a great hub but a lousy silo.

Silo: a self-contained, secure, private space in which only those with credentials may enter. As in, missle silo.

Hub: a central place that brings together many different pieces from several different places.

People who use LMS as a silo upload everything and post all of their content to the LMS. If they teach more than once section of the same course, they do all of this twice. If a document needs to be updated, they take it down from both sections and upload the updated document. Twice. You get the picture.

People who use LMS as a hub, as I do, keep the content from their course in a place other than the LMS. Rather than uploading files and adding content directly to the LMS, the content is all linked to third-party tools. Here is what this looks like for me: 1) all course documents are in Google Docs and linked to the LMS, 2) all course materials (PDFs, videos, etc.) are hosted on Google Docs or YouTube and linked, and 3) my lesson plans for each class meeting are in Google Sites and linked.

This may not seem like a big deal until your servers go down and you have 48 students trying to access Moodle at once. For me, it meant the difference between postponing class and having each student finish the activities in the allotted time. I was able to send the students the links to the docs and lesson plan, and not one student missed a beat.

This does not mean LMS don't have their place. They are essential for posting grades and giving feedback to students. They are excellent for facilitating discussions within the class. They are also a great hub for content so that students only have to look in one place for course materials. In my experience, they don't even know I am linking to everything from a third-party host.

Other advantages to using third-party tools are:

1. When I want to update a document for multiple sections, I only have to make the changes in Google Docs and they automatically show up wherever the document is linked.
2. If I want to reuse materials for another class, I know where to find them. No searching archived courses to find rubrics, lesson plans or assignments. I just update the materials and link them to the current course.
3. I have access to my course materials if the servers go down, and I can easily send them to my students if necessary.

This has been quite the learning experience, and I am glad I came out of it on the positive side. What tricks and tips do you have for using LMS in your teaching?

It's the pedagogy, teacher.

This was a phrase that got tossed into our conversations from time to time in grad school. It's a silly play on the famous phrase from the 1992 Presidential election. When you spend the majority of your time talking and working with other Instructional Technology doc students, it's easy to get sucked into the technology black hole of creating and tweaking new technology tools for teachers and students. There is definitely a time and place for new innovations, but sometimes the most appropriate solution to an educational problem lies in an innovative use of an existing tool. Almost every one of our conversations came down to this point: It's not the tool so much as what you (the teacher and/or students) do with the tool. Along these lines, the concept of repurposing resonates with me. Anyway, I read a post today by Dan Meyer that reminded me once again that technology is really only as good as the teacher who is using it. I won't recap the entire post, but the conversation just goes to show that a teacher can find ways to make a very long video of water being poured into a tank engaging to the students. This also reminds me of the Clark and Kozma debate, though the conversation highlighted on Meyer's blog is much less about the technology and more about how teachers use media and their students' responses to it.

The take-away message for me? Don't underestimate the art of creative and innovative teaching.

Puzzle or Mystery

I have been reading What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, a collection of essays he wrote for The New Yorker. In one of the essays he discusses the downfall of Enron, using the metaphors of Puzzles and Mysteries (originally coined by Gregory Treverton)  to compare how different people (financial analysts, prosecuting attorneys, undergraduate students, etc.) described the circumstances that led to one of the largest U.S. companies to declare bankruptcy and thousands of people to lose millions of dollars in investments. According to Gladwell, a puzzle is sender-dependent. That is, someone has a missing piece of information that, when shared with others, makes all the other pieces fall into place. He uses the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden as an example. Bin Laden is out there somewhere, and there are people who know where he is. When (or if) one of those people gives a clue as to where he is hiding (if in fact he stays in one place for any length of time) it will greatly facilitate the task of locating him. Mysteries, on the other hand, are receiver-dependent. While puzzles are defined as having too little information, mysteries have too much information and it is up to the person to filter, categorize and organize that information into a framework that can be understood. He cites the propaganda surrounding the German's development of the V-1 "Buzz Bomb," as a mystery because the Germans were giving an enormous amount of clues about the V-1 project through their propaganda as a way to maintain the country's morale. It was up to a group of experts who knew how to decode such messages to determine if (a) the bomb was even real or not, and (b) how urgent it was to find it. In this case, there was a lot of information about this weapon being sent out over the airwaves, but the common listener was not able to make sense out of it. Along these lines, Gladwell's evaluation of the events that led to the Enron collapse is that they were a mystery, rather than a puzzle. The prosecutors argued that Jeffrey Skilling was withholding vital information from shareholders in order to make them think the company was making more money than it really was. In fact, what Skilling and his accountants did was create vast amounts of convoluted information through thousands of extremely complex investing schemes, each of which were legal (though not very ethical or wise) and openly available to anyone who wanted to read them (if in fact one finds reading thousands of pages of legal jargon fun). The issue was not that Enron withheld data; the problem was in the fact that there was so much data that no one could make sense of.

As I wrapped up my class on teaching, learning and assessment, these metaphors came to mind again. Is teaching and learning a puzzle or a mystery? Are the solutions to the problems in education (lack of student engagement, lack of a "thinking curriculum," performance gaps between different groups of students, just to name a few) still out there somewhere in Plato's "world of Forms" waiting to be discovered? Has the right genius not yet entered his or her doctoral program (ask a first-year doc student what he or she hopes to accomplish in grad school and you will see my humor in this)? Has the right technology or reading/math series or game or teaching strategy or professional development just not been invented yet? Or is it that teaching and learning is not a puzzle at all? Perhaps teaching and learning, collectively, is a mystery. The human condition is so complex, filled with competing relationships, environments, conflicting messages, emotions, struggles, beliefs, values, attitudes, desires and needs. If each of these factors interact with each other and lead to self-identity, isn't it safe to assume that these same factors will influence what my students and I bring to the learning table and what takes place between us? My message to my students was this: You have learned some skills that will help you teach, but don't underestimate the importance of your ability to make sense out of your teaching environment. I threw around terms like "scaffolding," "differentiation," "formative and summative assessment," "student engagement," and "student- and teacher-centered instruction," but I couldn't realistically expect each person to leave my class able to do those things proficiently (it was the first time most of them had ever heard those terms or attempted to operationalize them). What I hoped would happen is that defining, talking about and grappling with these concepts would make my students aware that the need for these concepts exists. In other words, I was trying to make these concepts part of the perceptual filter they will take with them into the classroom. They will develop their ability to differentiate, scaffold, etc. over time, but they must first recognize these as tools that will help them make sense out of a complex learning environment. Otherwise, they will, at best, be constantly chasing after the next great idea, and at worst, teach as they were taught as the world evolves around them. Teaching and learning is indeed a mystery, and teachers must know how to decode and work within their environment in a way that is sensitive to the students they are serving.

Voice in the Academy

I recently was asked by a relative over the Thanksgiving break about the aspects of working at a university that I found most surprising. What he was really asking was, "What weren't you prepared for?" As someone who had the good fortune to be involved in a graduate program with a considerable amount of transparency, I thought I was well prepared for the realities of being a tenure-track faculty member at a university. I will not go into details, but trust me when I say I was not nearly as prepared as I thought I was. During my four years at UVA, I taught between 1-3 courses each semester, and this doesn't count my teaching experience in my Master's program or my 8 years of teaching public school. This gave me an unbelievable head start in terms of learning the ropes of course planning, teaching and dealing with students. I had written several syllabi from scratch, crafted many, many projects and tests, and heard just about every excuse under the sun from students. Even so, I had a ton to learn this semester as I taught two courses for the first time in a new university.

I left class last night with a sinking feeling that I had failed as a teacher this semester, and I was obsessed with the fact that two of my biggest projects were just not planned out very well. As I skimmed blogs in my reader this morning, I ran across this post by Female Science Professor (yes, that is her Web identity). In general, her blog has quickly risen near the top of my favorites because of her insight, wisdom and humor. On more than one occasion, she has addressed topics similar to things I was struggling with, and today that was the case. I have no idea how my evaluations will turn out, but it doesn't really matter because I have always been harsher on myself than my students or colleagues. Anyway, the main points I took away from this post are that A) planning and teaching a new course for the first time is hard, and B) it takes 1-2 semesters to feel comfortable with it. I have already jotted down some changes I plan on making next semester, fearing that if I didn't do this I would get back in January and forget what didn't go so well.

This brings up my last point, which is that to succeed in any kind of teaching profession, a person has to be reflective. We constantly have to think about our craft and thoughtfully consider the feedback we get from other people.  I gave a mid-semester evaluation in my classes, which helped me shift things around a little before the semester completely got away from me. I also plan on recruiting some colleagues to evaluate my course by sitting in on a couple of sessions, looking at my course materials and maybe even reading my course evaluations. This will require a high degree of humility if in fact my evaluations come back less than stellar, but I think this will be beneficial in the long run.

Similar to this, I recently got accepted to present at a conference. I was very excited to get this news, but I was shocked when I read the reviewers' comments. They absolutely tore my paper apart. It was borderline humiliating, but as I thought about it, I realized it was the best possible scenario. Had I gotten accepted with no real feedback, I might have tried to submit these findings to a journal and been devastated to find out they weren't as glorious as I originally thought (or was led to believe). But I got the best of both worlds: I got into the conference AND got blistering feedback. So, now I have a roadmap for how to make my paper even better.

My teaching is  the same in this regard. Critical feedback might just be what I need to hear in order to grow and continually develop my craft.

Mercy is new every morning

After a night of self-reflection (and loathing), I find the words of Ira Glass very encouraging and full of hope. I feel much better now and I'm ready for the next class meeting.