If you go to the main page of UThink blogs, you'll find that a lot of the blogs nowadays are course blogs. They're less interesting than the personal blogs, because people are doing asssigned writing, rather than writing about something they want to share. (Plus they are pretty oblivious to spelling, grammar and punctuation conventions, which makes my little distractable brain wish it had an electronic blue pencil...)
But I read something quite interesting yesterday - a person who complained about a recitation section being 3/4 quizzes, logistics junk, and the opinions of ill-informed classmates, all moderated by an indifferent TA. I've been there before - I was in a grad seminar with a prof who'd obviously been to a seminar on "pair-and-share," and it was such a waste of my time to have to hear and respond to my colleagues' poorly-thought-out comments about the readings.
This made me think hard about something I've already been dancing around with lately: I really don't understand the purpose of recitation/discussion in general, as a pedagogical tool. How can I guide students to learn productively, from themselves and from each other? My students say a lot of pretty insightful things, but it doesn't seem that their peers value their comments. And they always seem to be trying to please me, rather than share their unique take on an issue.
How can they engage each other? Should it take super amounts of knowledge and preparation on my part? I don't find a strong correlation between the amount of time I prep and the "success" of the discussion (at least as I perceive success) but then again, my most "successful" sessions are always the ones about material for which I have deep knowledge and enthusiasm, regardless of the artificiality of prep time.
And more, how can I make students really value the recitation time and feel they are really getting something out of it, as opposed to showing up just because participation is some component of their final grade?
Posted by otto0114 at February 17, 2006 10:00 PM