Hailey's Readings Notes #2

This week, I found Davis to be the most beneficial. I felt like much of the readings talked about things that we discussed in training for teaching the COMM 110 course. It reinforced what I’ve been doing in the classroom so far, and gave me some additional ideas as well. While I don’t teach a large enrollment course, I loved the idea of organizing the topics that you will teach in a meaningful sequence. (Davis, pg 137) One method that will fit well with my basic PR course that I would like to design is the sequential method. I think I will have students learn skills that will culminate in the final press conference. For example, they will learn to develop a working media list, create press releases and media alerts, understand how to pitch to the media, create a media kit and finally hold a mock press conference. This sequential preparation culminates in the final press conference where all the skills that were taught over the course of the semester can be integrated into a final scenario.

When we began brainstorming ideas for course objectives in the last class period, I realized a major challenge I will face is narrowing down what I will teach. Davis emphasizes the importance of identifying what are the most important things you want your students to learn (Davis, pg. 141), but I would enjoy discussing methods in class on how to do this.

Davis continues to discuss the importance of structuring your lecture to emphasize the most important points including: attention getter, brief overview of main points, detailed explanation, etc. (Pg. 142) I thought this was interesting because this is exactly how we teach students in COMM 110 to prepare a speech. Clearly, organization is important in all types of presentations, even class lectures.

One challenge that I have is starting small-talk with students before class. (Davis, pg. 149) This surprises me how awful and awkward I am with this because I consider myself pretty outgoing and able to relate to people and keep a conversation going. I think what makes me uncomfortable is I don’t know how much of myself to reveal to students. Where do you draw the line on information sharing?

I was surprised when Davis discusses how you should limit your PowerPoint slide presentations to fifteen minutes in an hour long class. (Davis, pg. 454) Does this apply if you are incorporating activities and class discussion into the lecture? Fifteen minutes seems insanely short.

One thing I loved in Lang this week was when he shared the story of a fellow instructor who requires her students to do weblog posts on the readings for the week to check if students are reading and to see if they are understanding the content. (Lang, pg. 50) What I immediately thought was, “Well this is what Carrie Anne does!”