Background

Two issues, class participation and content relevancy, concerned me regarding Teaching and Leadership (T&L) 598, a one-credit course that met 50 minutes a week. The 35 students in T&L 598 were junior who were pursuing a teaching license in health/physical education or music education.

I saw little student involvement, and I also did not see evidence that the students bought into the relevancy of this course to their future teaching. The class was predominately lecture based with little interaction from students. They would come to class and leave without much discussion or involvement.  Some students never took notes, and some did not respond to teacher-generated questions. Despite my attempts to stress the importance of this class for their future career, students commented that the material presented was not relevant and they felt the class was not worth their time.

I also wanted to address application of learning in order to assess class learning.  In prior semesters, the course had two assignments.  The students read an article that connected to their field and wrote a short paper about it by mid-March. The final team project, due at the end of the semester, was intended to help them bring information together and see the connection between their subject matter and literacy.  Although the course was structured with attendance points, I thought the students had less than desirable class participation and infrequent feedback.  Thus, I wanted to strengthen the accountability created through these assignments.

Implementation

I decided to evaluate the course content for relevancy and merge content, and when I looked at this, I specifically developed literacy materials for three class periods instead of five class periods. Next, I rearranged the course content. For example, students had to find and summarize their content literacy article early in the semester--by week three. The goal was to promote greater buy-in and relevancy for the students when they saw articles about physical education or music teachers who integrate literacy.

I presented the course information through lecture and then allowed processing and application time in small groups during each class period.  The student involvement, I hypothesized, would do three things:

1. Provide me with information about their understanding and application of information.
   
2. Promote higher order thinking skills.
   
3. Allow the students to become active participants rather than passive recipients of information.

Finally, I added a course exam to the requirements. I believed this would help the students take the information presented in class more seriously and serve as a measure of student knowledge.

Student Performance

I had two intellectual goals for this course: first, to help students store new information in their schemas and second, to help them use higher-level thinking skills when interpreting that information.  While our class specifically talked about application, I attempted to encourage the students to think critically about different activities.  I collected evidence for these goals through informal responses.  It appeared that students left class every day having learned something new. It also appeared that students thought critically when asked an essential question that required a verbal response.

I kept a weekly monitor on the small-group assignments that students worked on.  At mid semester, the students seemed to understand the relevance of the class, the state of illiteracy in America, and their responsibility to understanding the development of literacy as it related to course material we had covered.  One assignment, the article response paper, indicated to me that 90% or more of students were able to see how a fellow content area teacher incorporated literacy into his or her physical education or music classroom.

Reflections

I changed the course a fair bit this year. Previously, students responded once a month to course content of their choice. I was disappointed in that method of accountability, so i added a question for each class period. This end-of-class activity was better than the once-a-month responses, and I believe the student work was improved over previous semesters.

The response article assignment was actually better this year because I made the requirements more specific and required multiple skills, such as summarization and application.  Also, I created examples to use as models.

Throughout the semester I worked to make the class fit student needs, and I created a short, mid semester response from the students regarding the efficacy of the class.  I asked four short questions:  the things they liked about the class, the things that they would like to see changed, a general rating of their learning, and additional comments.   Their reflections were helpful, even though they sometimes wrote about aspects of the course I had no control over:  the building we held our classes in or the amount of time for each class period.  At the end of the semester, I combined those comments with a final reflection paper to get an idea of the overall impact of the course.