I believed that the goal of students buying into the class would show up through participation and student work. I planned to monitor the course effectiveness by the subjective means of looking at these two items, and added to that, the objective interpretation of their mid semester comments. To measure the larger picture, I put these comments together with their end of the semester comments. The final comments required students to write a short response on how they would apply the materials we covered to their teaching situations. For some students who were not clear on what they would teach, this provided a chance to clarify the direction they would take.
Having students comment on the class allowed them to see that I respected their opinions, plus it gave me general insights about the class progression. More specifically, I was looking to see if the learning had value for the students and if they were finding it applicable. I also checked for patterns in the responses, but because sometimes one student’s answer would contradict another’s answer, I had doubts about drawing general conclusions. For instance, two to three students said the pacing of the class was too slow, while a different student said the pacing was too fast, and yet another labeled the pacing “great.” What their comments on this area did do was lead me to consider the pacing over the latter weeks of the semester, and while thinking about it, I anticipated what they would say about it on the end of the semester comments.
Overall, I was pleased with the final test and don’t plan to change much at this point in time unless an outsider has some suggestions, which I am open to hearing! I did type up the student responses for the final question, number 15, which asked them to detail the most important thing they learned. I have not tallied these answers, but the dominant themes were the stages of development, instructional ideas they can use, and the idea that literacy is easy to incorporate into their classrooms. Their answers were at the heart of the class and thus reflect their learning and my attempts to teach these concepts.
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