Charu's Reading Notes #1

After going through this week’s readings and glancing over the other chapters really makes me think that both of these books are really descriptive in listing and explaining almost all of the teaching strategies that a teacher should know in order to impart best knowledge to the students. Davis’s book really has an in depth, accessibility, and practicality to all of his concepts. 

I totally agreed with the part where Lang says the foremost thing to think about while you are creating your course syllabus is to think what knowledge or skills students should learn in your course, and then thinking about the best ways for them to learn that knowledge or those skills ⁽²⁾. I believe that listing the course objectives in the syllabus would really help me in answering students questions for instance, why am I taking this course or what skills or knowledge I would learn from this course that will help in my future career. And a part of this would really me in making the students realize that yes my course is also relevant or important as your other courses are. 

One thing that I highlighted in my first class was that Public Speaking is also important, as most of my students had this notion that this class is only a requirement for their major. But stating and explaining the course objectives and the outcomes really made it more relevant to the students.

I would really like to know some of the tips that will help me in designing the course schedule. In addition to the tips, I would like to know some of the methods which will help me to determine the effectiveness of my course schedule; should I just cover all the chapters from the textbook or just cover the ones that I think would be helpful for my students to learn the skills or knowledge, which I listed in my course objectives.

Some of the concepts explained in both of these books were very thought provoking for me. While I was going through these concepts/ideas they started hitting my mind and I started to relate them to my own personal undergrad experiences.

The other thing that I would really like to discuss is about implementing different learning styles in the class. As I already mentioned in my preliminary essay that a teacher needs to instill in his/her students the value and importance of education and motivate them to do their best in the classroom. So I would really like to know what are the different ways in which a teacher could accommodate these different learning styles that will create an atmosphere that helps students in learning the concepts in an effective manner.