Sociology 5615

Teaching Sociology

Spring, 2005

Professor Sara Steen

Ketchum 205

Email address: steen@colorado.edu

Office phone:  303-735-6658

Home phone:  303-449-3817

Office hours:  Thursday 1:00-3:00 pm, or by appointment

Course website:  https://webct.colorado.edu

Course objectives

1. To promote a high standard for college teaching.

2. To provide an opportunity for you to formulate personal values, approaches, and styles of classroom instruction that can grow and be refined over your teaching careers.

3. To create a community in which teaching is actively discussed, and to promote the idea that teaching can be a collective enterprise.

4. To increase skills in a number of specific teaching activities (e.g., organizing content, lecturing, leading discussions, managing classroom dynamics, and evaluating).

5. To help you to design a course that you can teach as a GPTI.

6. To help you to develop a teaching portfolio that you can use when you go on the job market.

Course meetings

The class is scheduled to meet Thursdays from 3:30-6:20.   We will have a short break (15 minutes) at approximately 5:00.  We will frequently devote the final segment of the class to working with a particular teaching problem (e.g., how to deal with disruptive students).  Because this is a practicum course, rather than a typical academic course, you will often be expected to complete exercises (both active and written) outside of class, and weekly writing assignments will often be shared and discussed in class.

Course readings

The following books are available at the University Bookstore:

Bean, John C.  1996.  Engaging Ideas.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass. 

Brookfield, Stephen D.  1990.  The Skillful Teacher.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass. 

Browne, M. Neil and Stuart M. Keeley.  2004.  Asking the Right Questions, 7^th Edition.  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Pearson Prentice Hall.

Lowman, Joseph.  Mastering the Techniques of Teaching.

McKeachie, Wilbert J.  2002.  Teaching Tips, 11^th Edition.   Boston:  Houghton Mifflin.

Weimer, MaryEllen.  2002.  Learner-Centered Teaching.  San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass. 

I have desk copies of all of the books.  If they are beyond your means, please let me know and we can make some arrangement for you to borrow a copy or make photocopies.  All are outstanding books that should serve as useful references in the future, so I highly recommend purchasing them if you are able. 

There will also be several articles and book chapters required throughout the semester.  They will be available at the course WebCT website for you to download (the course website can be accessed at:  https://webct.colorado.edu).

Finally, each of you will also be responsible for reading one issue of Teaching Sociology, which I will provide to you during the first week of class.

Course requirements

The primary goal of this course is to provide you with a forum to think seriously about how you want to teach.  Once you become a faculty member, you may find that you are not able (or perhaps not encouraged) to spend a lot of time reflecting on teaching or enhancing your teaching techniques.  Because of this, I hope that you will take this opportunity very seriously and make full use of the resources of the course, including the readings, class assignments, myself and guest speakers, and your classmates. 

Attendance and participation:   Given the course goals, it is absolutely essential that you be present and actively engaged.  If you must miss a session, please contact me ahead of time to let me know why you won’t be there.  If you miss more than two sessions during the course of the semester, I recommend that you drop the course and take it during a later semester.

Readings:  The readings should be completed by class time on the day they are assigned.  The purpose of the weekly reading assignments is to introduce you to other people’s ideas about teaching.  Some readings will provide very practical advice about particular techniques, while others will focus more generally on the purposes of teaching.  If you are looking for more information on a particular topic, I have many other resources, including several bibliographies on teaching (some are available on the course website), that I would be happy to share with you.  One of the best resources is the journal Teaching Sociology, which is available in Norlin Library (call number HM45 .T43).

Developing your teaching style:  To teach with purpose, it is essential that you enter the classroom with clear ideas about what kind of a teacher you are and what kind of a teacher you would like to be.  

Peer reviews:  Part of the process of developing a teaching style involves identifying elements of others’ teaching that you find particularly appealing.  To work toward this goal, I will ask you to complete at least two peer reviews during the course of the semester.  Peer reviews involve attending someone else’s class and watching for teaching techniques (rather than listening for substance, which is what we generally do).   For one of these peer reviews, you should team up with other students in the class so that you teach one class in front of a classmate during the semester, and also visit one class taught by a classmate.  For the other peer review, you will attend a class taught by someone else at the university.  This can be someone in the department who you have heard good things about but never witnessed in the classroom, or someone outside the department with a reputation for good teaching.  You will do a write-up for each review, based on guidelines I will hand out early in the semester.

Videotaping:  A second part of developing your teaching style involves taking inventory of the particular talents and skills that you bring to the classroom.  To accomplish this, I will also require each of you to videotape one of your classes in consultation with the Graduate Teacher Program (this can be the same session you use for the previous exercise, though that is not preferable).  After filming, you will watch the tape with a consultant, discuss your teaching, and write a reflection paper on the experience (more details to come). 

If you are not teaching your own class this semester, you will either need to find someone else’s class in which you can guest lecture (both for the videotaping and for the peer review), or work with me to identify another way we might accomplish these learning goals. 

Developing a course plan:  By the end of the semester, each of you will have a syllabus and course materials for a sociology course that you anticipate teaching in the future.  For those of you who are already teaching your own courses, you should choose a new course to design.  The required work for your course design includes weekly writing assignments and a final project. 

Weekly writing assignments:  Most weeks there will be a short writing assignment in which I will ask you to think about various pedagogical issues and/or aspects of course design and organization.  These papers will frequently serve as the basis for our seminar discussions, and are due at the end of the seminar period.  On occasion, I may ask you to post your assignments on the class website and to comment on others’ posted assignments (more on this later).  These papers and the feedback you receive on them from me and classmates should help in the preparation of your final project.  I will collect writing assignments at the end of the class period on the day they are assigned.  While I strongly recommend that you complete all of the exercises, you may miss two without penalty (your grade will be based on ten out of twelve total assignments).  Because the assignments will often be the basis for our seminar discussions, I will not accept any late assignments. 

Final project:  The final project for the course will be your course design.  What you hand in will be structured as a mini teaching portfolio.  Your syllabus should include statements of course objectives, themes, topics, assignments, and evaluation techniques.  In addition, I will ask you to provide me with materials that tell the “story” of your course.  Specifically, I would ask that you explain your reasons for making the choices you did in designing your course, along with some of your reflections about the benefits and drawbacks of your choices.  I will provide you with more information about this assignment as the semester evolves.

Course Evaluation

Your grade for the course will be based on the following elements:

	Points	Percentage of grade
Weekly writing assignments (10 of 12)	100 (10 each)	50%
Peer reviews (2)	10 (5 each)	5%
Attendance and participation in seminar	30	15%
Final project	50	25%
Completion of video assignment	10	5%
	200 points

When the Semester is over…

When you are ready to go on the job market this class can serve you in two concrete ways.  First, your final project for the class can serve as a basis for a teaching portfolio that you can send out with job applications.  I would be happy to work with any of you in revising and reworking your portfolios when the time arrives.  Second, when you teach the class that you design in this seminar, I would be willing to observe you teaching, talk with you about your experiences in the classroom, and write a recommendation letter for you reviewing the training you received in the teaching seminar and summarizing your performance and promise as a sociology instructor.

SCHEDULE OF WEEKLY TOPICS, READINGS,

AND WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

Week one (1/13): Course introduction; Integrative course design

Week two (1/20):  Understanding and working with classroom dynamics

General readings:  Weimer ch. 1

Weekly readings:  Lowman ch. 2 (ch. 3 optional), Weimer ch. 2, 4, and 7

Online readings:  Finkel and Monk, Tompkins

Writing assignment due:  Assumptions about students

Week three (1/27): Making decisions about learning goals

General readings:  Lowman ch. 1, McKeachie ch. 1

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 23-26, Brookfield ch. 4

Online readings:  Link ch. 3 (skim, focusing on section on learning goals)

Writing assignment due:  Develop learning goals

Week four (2/3):  Making decisions about feedback and assessment

General reading: Brookfield, ch. 1, 2

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 6, Bean ch. 2, Lowman ch. 9, Weimer ch. 6

Online readings:  Link ch. 3 (focus on section on feedback and assessment)

Writing assignment due:  Develop techniques for feedback and assessment

Week five (2/10):  Making decisions about learning activities

General reading:  Elbow (online) “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process” 

Weekly readings:  Bean ch. 7, McKeachie ch. 14, 15, 16, Weimer ch. 8, 9?

Writing assignment due:  Develop learning activities

Week six (2/17): Making decisions about course content

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. , Lowman ch. 7

Online readings:  McGee et al., Newman

Writing assignment due:  Integrating learning goals, techniques for feedback and assessment, and learning activities

** The remainder of the semester plan is strictly tentative.  Around this time, we’ll do some checking in, and I will try to determine, based on your expressed desires and needs, what the best plan for the second half of the course is.  ***

Week seven (2/24):  Making decisions about teaching strategy

Week eight (3/1):  Effective lecturing

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 5, Lowman ch. 5, Brookfield ch. 6

Online readings:  Frederick

Week nine (2/24): Facilitating (not leading) discussions

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 4, Lowman ch. 6, Brookfield ch. 7-8

Week ten (3/3): Creating opportunities for cooperative learning

Weekly readings: Brookfield ch. 9, Bean ch. 9-10

Online readings:  Rau and Heyl, Wright

Week eleven:  Teaching critical thinking

Weekly readings:  Browne (skim book, focus on assigned chapter)

Online readings: Richard, Browne and Litwin, Nelson

Week twelve (3/17): Designing writing assignments

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 13, Bean ch. 5, 6, 11-12

Week thirteen (4/14): Responding to writing and assigning grades

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 8, Bean ch. 13-15

Week fourteen (4/21):  Evaluating our teaching

Weekly readings:  McKeachie ch. 27, Lowman ch. 10

Week fifteen (4/28):  Overcoming cynicism and teaching with joy

Class meeting this week will be held at my house, 5131 Ellsworth Place.  Directions to come later…

Online reading:  Newman

Final Course Paper Due Tuesday, May 7th