Page 318 - Beyond Methods

306 Monitoring teaching acts 13.1.3 Select any one of the classes you teach. This is the class you
are going to focus on for the purpose of monitoring your teaching.
13.1.4 Select a particular time of day when you can spend ten or fifteen minutes writing your log. A good time to do that is at the end of the selected class, or at the end of the day. Whatever time you choose, make sure you do it at the same time each day to make it a habit, and do it before you forget what actually happened in the class. You may find it useful to take notes in class that you may use later to write your log.
13.1.5 The next step is to write. To make daily entries in your log, create a questionnaire template with the items shown in Figure 13.1 (and any other item you may wish to add) and complete the question- naire every day that week. Be as specific as possible in your response.
On a general level, you may focus on any pedagogic issue(s) you were forced to confront in the classroom, or anything (or anybody) that forced you, directly or indirectly, to change your way of teaching or your attitude toward teaching. On a more specific level, you may use the M & M scheme to focus on aspects of your teaching that you think needed some attention. For instance, you might ask questions such as: Did I initiate all the topics or did my students initiate some? Are most of the questions display questions or referential questions? Are there learner-learner exchange of ideas? What macrostrategy could have been
Class: Date: Time: 1. One good thing about my teaching that I noticed today.
2. One big weakness about my teaching that I noticed today.
3. One thing I really wanted to do in class today but couldn’t do.
4. One reason why I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in class today. 5. One lesson I learned from keeping this log today.
Figure 13.1