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Implementation

Fall 2005
I made a rigorous selection of course material.  I used a recently published textbook that was well organized to help students better learn key concepts.  Students were also given key readings for each lecture. Because the course’s underlying philosophy was that one cannot understand modern Spain without knowing where modern conflicts arise from, I started with a presentation of modern Spain and pointed out key concepts we would work on throughout the semester. We then back-tracked to Spain’s past and began to analyze how history has influenced the present.   

For each class period, students had assigned readings, and they were expected to come to class with key ideas from those readings written down.  At the start of each class, students were asked a question which was related to the main theme of the class.  They had to write down the answer of this question during the first minutes of class.  During class the main ideas in the readings were discussed and/or presented in PowerPoint.  The PowerPoint showed “my selection” of the otherwise abundant material.  The PowerPoint presentations were included to reinforce themes and encourage discussion of the readings, and not for students to rely on them for concepts they should have gained from the readings prior to class.  Documentaries were also shown and students were asked to discuss the videos with questions I provided. 

Student writing was an important component of the course.  For the first day of class, students wrote a short in–class paper on what they knew about Spain and what they wanted to know about this country (see 2005 topics).  On the last day of class they then revised this paper.  In the model for the course I took over from my predecessor in fall 2004, students had to write individual papers based on Internet searches.  Although some students did fine, most of them turned in papers full of information literally copied from the web.  I decided to give students the same assignments but more direction.  Giving all students the same assignment made class discussions easier – both before and after the assignment.  I also felt that I could give better guidance and help students perform better.  In fall 2005, students also had four writing assignments; two of them were analytical papers and two were informal tasks.  For more variety and to accommodate diverse learning styles, two of the assignments were text based and two were visually-based.

Fall 2006
The changes I made for the third course offering were based on my personal evaluation of what went well and what could be improved.  These changes were motivated mainly by my desire to provide a very clear structure and as much guidance as possible.  There is now less credit given for the two knowledge-based tests and more credit for the four writing assignments, which demonstrate deeper understanding of the material.  I changed all papers to have equal weight to give the course a clearer structure.  In addition, I handed out the rubric beforehand and designed some guidelines for oral presentations, to clarify my expectations and to help students perform better. In 2005, asking questions at the start of class helped student engagement, but in 2006 I graded those questions to ensure the students were prepared and had completed the readings.  I also did this because in the past, students tended to rely a little too much on the PowerPoint presentations, while I viewed PowerPoint as a way to present already known material (they read it first) in a slightly different order to promote discussion.  In 2006, I handed out the rubric and the instruction sheet for oral presentations to students ahead of time when I was discussing the assignments to help students learn what was expected and how to improve their papers throughout the semester. 

With having a smaller class, we went a little faster through the material.  The result of this was that I had to develop extra material (mainly short reading tasks with sets of questions).  I developed some new engaging in-class activities since discussing photographs, paintings, and short newspaper articles proved very fruitful the last course offering.  I also decided to incorporate more recent developments in Spanish culture and society. 

I kept the format of the class the same because I was still happy with the approach of presenting each theme in a number of ways.  The Spanish Civil War, for example, was presented by readings from the book and an overview article, by a PowerPoint in which I used posters from both sides of the battle, and by showing a movie.  When students were able to participate in a more general discussion afterwards, and in the best case could make some connections to works from the period that they read in other literature classes – and the better students indeed could – I felt I had achieved my teaching goals.

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