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Busy office hours |
pedagogy |
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Here's my second reflective post for Imogen Dunne's final year project (you can find the first here).
We are now at the end of Week 4 of the course and I'm glad to say that I think overall things are going well.
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My office hours have gotten very busy. This is awesome. Students are coming to see me, genuinely having struggled with concepts and this is often a result of myself or another tutor identifying specific issues in a lab session and saying something like:
I'll give you the tick for that but come and see me during office hours to talk about it as I think you're a bit confused there.
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I think students are understanding now that the role of the 'ticks' is to help identify difficulties. I need to do a better job next year at explaining this from the offset. It might help to put it at the top of every lab sheet... I'll think about this...
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Imogen's focus group went really well with 15 students participating. I still need to carefully reflect on the particular issues that were raised. I feel again that some need to be addressed through a better communication on my part (for example students wanted to have a list of alternative resources, there is such a list on the class site and I thought I'd mentioned it sufficiently but I will need to do that better).
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There are a large number of tutors now and with that comes the tricky task of ensuring they understand their role. Jason was mentioned in Imogen's focus group as doing a great job as "he didn't just give the answer but pushed students to identify their difficulties". I need to think very carefully about how to get this across to all the tutors (I think this has been addressed for the current year).
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I've been thinking about the resources and am thinking that I might create a second set of videos. This would be a large quantity of work (3/4 weekends probably) but I think I could really help student further. In a way it seems logical to do after having run the course twice. This would further 'flip the class'...
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On another good note not entirely irrelevant to the class: code club is going well! The last session was a very busy one and students are actively participating which is great. Some first years are starting to work on the Euler problems and other formed a bit of a revision group for the upcoming class test they have... You can see the site (that has been really nicely stylised by the students): http://cardiffmathematicscodeclub.github.io/.