The end of every semester is a time of reflection for me.  I think about what went well and what I need to change the next time around, and long before the last final exam is graded, I’m already busy planning for new classes and new students.

This semester was a memorable one for many reasons, not the least of which is the record number of discussion postings in my online introductory statistics course.  Over 4000 posts were made throughout the semester!  This is amazing to me, and I’m really proud right now of my students and how hard they worked.  I’m not sure why there were so many more posts this time around, compared to previous semesters.  I did have a large class (42 students), and I also added one extra discussion assignment.  This might explain the large volume of postings.  I also tried out some new discussion assignments.  In the end, it was a lot to keep up with, but, at the same time, seeing how involved my students got in discussion and the interesting questions that came up along the way reminded me why I love teaching online.   I never cease to learn so much from my students, and this semester was no exception.

I’m working now on developing a new online course, and I recently had a discussion with a colleague about how certain discussion activities should be structured.  My own preference is to use asynchronous discussion (where students post messages in discussion forums and can come back several times to reflect on and respond to what their peers post).  My colleague wonders if synchronous discussion (where students meet in chat rooms to complete the discussion activity in one sitting) might be a better way to go.  As we talked about this, I brought up the fact that I love that using asynchronous discussion allows me–as the instructor–to witness what goes on from start to finish in every single discussion group.  My colleague said that synchronous discussion might be more akin to what goes on in a typical classroom where lots of discussion takes place that the teacher never gets to witness, and where students finish discussions relatively quickly without having to worry about reading long posts and returning to a discussion board multiple times over the course of a few days.

There are certainly pros and cons to both asynchronous and synchronous discussion, but there is something I find so special about being able to see discussions as they evolve, and I think I would miss that if I resorted to synchronous discussion assignments.  Yes, I know it’s not the same as what goes on in the classroom, but to me, that’s what makes online teaching so very exciting and different.  I get a chance to connect in different ways with my students and learn more from each and every one of them as I witness how they respond to different discussion questions and the struggles they have along the way.  I love that teaching online allows me to keep up with what every group is talking about, and to chime in–if I need to–if any particular group is getting off track or needs some extra assistance.  I worry a lot that if I use more synchronous discussion, students might spend their time discussing the WRONG things, and it might be too late for me to intervene if I don’t learn about this until after the discussion is over.

I agree that in a classroom, a teacher cannot possibly listen to or participate in all discussions, but a group who is lost or needs extra help can easily call the teacher over to get assistance.  How would that work if students are using a chat tool and the instructor is not available during the time they are chatting?

I get very easily overwhelmed.  Because of this, I often feel that I set myself up for failure.  I make lists all of time of things I want to do or that I need to do, but when it comes time to trying to accomplish all of the things on my list, I am often paralyzed, and I don’t know why.  Do I just not have the energy I should?  Am I unrealistic?  Do I not know myself well enough to know what I can easily accomplish and what is just a pipe dream?

I decided this summer that I wanted to change my mindset and my way of operating.  I have been riding my bike a lot in order to get into better shape, and I can feel that it is working.  Not only is bike riding helping me in a physical way, but it is good therapy for me.  Whenever I can, I try to start the day with a bike ride in order to clear my head and plan for the day ahead.  Because we live in the country, a lot of my rides are very quiet and peaceful, and I’ve enjoyed this time to be alone with my thoughts.  It’s made me think about what is important and what I need to focus more on, and it’s made me realize there is so much more to life than work.  I’ve felt so good during my rides because finally, I feel I’m achieving more of that work-life balance.

I think part of the reason I get so very overwhelmed with life is that I focus way too much on the whole and not enough on the parts.  I’m now reading a book that Joan Garfield recommended to me called Bird by Bird (by Anne Lamott) and it’s all about writing.  I love it.  Lamott suggests trying to write a little bit each day (and focusing not so much on the whole report about birds, but on each individual bird).  She also highly recommends the “shitty first draft.”  Joan recommended this book to me because we were talking about a paper I am writing that I have been working on since March.  I have a good chunk of it done, but I’ve been dragging my feet because I feel it has to be perfect before I send it off to a journal editor, and I never feel like I have the time I need to sit down and just write.  I now realize it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time around, and my new goal is to send to to a publisher by my birthday in October.  Not long ago, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Erin Templeton wrote about the “Rule of 200″ and described her goal of trying to write 200 words a day.  This seems like a reasonable goal to set, in addition to being a way to break things into manageable “bird chunks,” and I want to try to do that.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/the-rule-of-200/26343

I also think that sometimes my teaching load overwhelms me, not because of the work involved in teaching my classes, but because I never feel I have the time to make changes I would like to make in my classes. I also don’t feel I’m as organized as I can be in terms of keeping track of just what I want to change, or what should be changed.  Another article came out this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education that recommends using Post-it Notes to improve one’s teaching.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/simple-post-its-for-teaching-improvement/35863?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

In this article, Heather Whitney describes a professional development event she attended where:

“…a panelist, very new to the professoriate herself, mentioned that immediately after each class, before she does anything else or even touches her computer, she takes a large 5×8″ sticky note and writes down what did or didn’t work well in that class period. She sticks that to her papers from the class and then uses that note the next time she teaches the course to improve her teaching.”

This too is something I would like to begin doing.  I do often jot down notes all over handouts and in various notebooks, but my problem is that I don’t always look back at these notes, and they aren’t written in a way that makes them “pop out” at me.  I think using Post-it Notes might solve that problem.

I’ve often thought it would be so neat to be able to take a year off (with pay, of course) and travel the country just observing other teachers.  How cool would it be to be able to sit in the classrooms of all the statistics educators I so admire, just to see them in action?   I like to think we could all learn a lot about teaching if we had more opportunities to observe our peers.  I do learn a lot from my peers when I attend conference presentations, or when we share ideas and resources, but it’s not the same as being able to see exactly how they implement their curriculum, or how their students respond to different activities and teaching approaches.

Of course, realistically, I don’t know that my desire to be a “fly on the wall” in other statistics classrooms will ever come to fruition.  I’m not as fond of traveling as I would like to be, and it would be very hard to be away from home for so long.  So, for now, I’ll just have to be content dreaming about the possibilities. 

My summer classes are over, and I am now thinking about the classes I will teach in the fall.  I’m thinking a lot about what worked well and what did not, and I’m also contemplating making changes.   Class prep would be so much easier if I could just be satisfied with the status quo, but I never am.

One thing I’m thinking about is the project I ask my introductory statistics students to complete.  Students have to gather their own data, and the data must lend itself to either a paired or a two-sample t-test.  I’ve been using this project for years, and I’m generally happy with it, especially now that I require each student to submit his or her project in parts rather than turn in the whole thing near the end of the term.  A lot of students have commented that the project was beneficial for them and even an enjoyable way to apply what they learned about in the course, and these are definitely very good reasons–in my opinion–to continue using this assignment.

My concern is that time and again, I see similar types of struggles on this assignment, and it’s made me question how I structure the assignment and guide students along the way.  Two common issues are that (a) students do not include all required components of the project, even though these components are laid out in a very detailed grading rubric, and (b) some students require much more feedback along the way than I am able to give (i.e., they want feedback on each section of the project and then want even more feedback–before they turn in a final draft–just to make sure they have incorporated my initial feedback in the right way).  It’s possible that my grading rubric could be improved and simplified (in order to tackle the first issue), and I’ve tried to address the second issue by telling students that I will only look at one rough draft of their work.

More and more, I find myself wondering about providing students with a “model” project to serve as a guide for them as they complete their own work.  Several students have asked me over the years if I could provide a model for them, and although I did provide models when I first started teaching, I soon abandoned them because I worried that seeing a “model” project would stifle creativity.  I worried that students would simply copy the model and replace certain words, phrases, or numbers with information that matched their particular projects.  I didn’t want my students to come away thinking there was just one “right” way to do things, and I hoped that by having to struggle a bit to figure out just how to present their data and share information in particular ways, my students would learn much more in the process.

Ironically, I know that I learn well by having models to follow.  My husband often gives me a hard time because he says that I need step-by-step directions and guidance in order to do certain things.  This is true.  I need structure because I don’t want to make silly mistakes or head down the wrong path and then feel like I’ve just wasted my time.  I’m sure many of my students feel like this as well, but I still question whether–in this particular situation–models will do more harm than good.

Am I worrying about this for nothing?

Living far from campus means I have quite a bit of time to think about things when I’m driving to and from work.  On the days when I’m teaching, I often go over what I plan to do in class when I’m driving to campus, and then I go over how I think things went when I’m driving home.

Almost every day this summer, I’ve left campus wishing that things had gone differently in my intermediate statistics course.  I don’t know why, but I often don’t feel I’m doing what I should be doing in that course.  I’ve struggled a lot to find the perfect book (and I’m still searching), and I often think that the activities I use could be improved upon and changed.  I think about different data sets I could be sharing with the class, or data we could be gathering and exploring as a class.  I think about the many activities I use in the introductory course that involve food of some kind (often a hit with the students) and the lack of such activities I have in the intermediate course.  I constantly question the amount of detail we should be going into on different topics, and I wonder if the order of topics is appropriate.  I wonder if there are certain topics (like analysis of covariance and repeated measures ANOVA) that I should omit from the course, and I wonder if there are other topics (like maybe logistic regression) that should be included.  I wonder if SPSS is still the best software to use in the course or if I should begin transitioning to something else, like R.

I find myself feeling filled with a lot of doubt where this course is concerned, and I never know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.  In a way, I suppose it’s good, because my doubts often motivate me to make improvements and “do better” the next time I teach the course.  I never settle for the status quo, and I’m always on the look out for new activity ideas and new ways of explaining things.  I’ve even started bringing in journal articles to the course for students to read and discuss, and I like to think that has added an important element to the course.  I want students to have opportunities to see how the techniques they are learning about are used in real studies and how the authors of these studies present their findings.  I also want my students to have opportunities to question the findings reported in these articles and to apply some of what they are learning in class as they attempt to make sense of the findings.

Although I continue to have my doubts, I noticed something very interesting yesterday when I was driving home:  I actually felt content for the first time in weeks.  I didn’t question what had gone on in class because I felt that overall, things went pretty well.  Prior to that class, I found myself trying to share too much with the students about multiple regression and trying to delve into things that were more advanced and that really went beyond the scope of the class.  There was so much I was excited to share with them and that I wanted them to know and understand, but it was clear that they were getting bombarded with too much information, too quickly.  I knew my students were feeling confused and uncertain, and my resolve, on Monday, was to try to backtrack and ensure they understood the “big ideas.”  We went through a couple of activities together and also talked about a journal article where multiple regression was used.  I felt good about how things went, and I got a lot of good ideas for how I might better structure that unit in the course the next time I teach it.

Of course, I’m very biased here.  Even though I felt class went well, it’s not always easy for me to “read” my students, and I’m not sure if they share my enthusiasm.  I’m hoping they too were feeling good after class, but I suppose only time will tell if the pieces are starting to fall into place for them.