By this time next week, another semester of classroom time will be complete. Yes, I'll still have finals to give, but the majority of my work for the semester will be done. This hasn't been an easy semester by any stretch. Teaching a new course is extremely time consuming; teaching two new courses is doubly so. Still, I weathered the storm and I'm mostly intact.
Generally, I consider myself an excellent teacher. I know my material, I'm prepared for class each and every day, I provide a good mix of lecture/discussion/artifact analysis, and I'd like to think I'm entertaining. Most of the time. One of the new classes I'm teaching landed with a resounding "thud." About half way through the semester, I could feel myself and my students getting bored, bored, bored with the format. Unfortunately, as the syllabus and related work had already been assigned, there wasn't a lot I could do. The course turned into lecture, lecture, lecture, and more lecture. Boring. Boring. Boring. It's boring for the students and it's boring for me. There's nothing worse than a boring class.
I take my teaching very seriously. When a class doesn't go well, I think about it. A lot. All the time, actually. I don't ever want to be the professor about whom students say, "Ugh. Avoid that guy. Boring." So, I had a chat with my students today, took responsibility for the boring end to the semester, threw out some ideas for retooling the course, and solicited suggestions. In the course of about 5-10 minutes, we came up with some excellent ideas for making the course more interactive and scintillating. When I unveil the revamped version of the course next spring, I think the students will be pleasantly surprised. One of the major changes will be the amount of teaching done by the students themselves. Each day, for about 10 minutes or so, pairs of students will be responsible for setting up the context for the following lecture/discussion. I'll still prepare as if the students weren't teaching the class--you never know when students will simply drop the ball and put together a terrible presentation/discussion. The students also asked that we do more in class analyses. No problem there, either. I like hearing what students think about material I've perused dozens of times. I'm generally suprised by how many things my students see that I've somehow missed.
A fizzled course becomes an opportunity to learn and grow as a teacher. That can't be all bad, I think. That doesn't help the students who struggled through the class with me, but future classes should benefit from the experience.
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