First day of class
Today was the first day of school, and I taught the first meeting of my section of Education 391, Educational Psychology and Human Development. It’s interesting teaching prospective teachers, because there’s both the need and the temptation to engage in quite a bit of “meta” discussion about why one does or does not do something.
There are six sections of this course being taught at the moment, and the team of instructors are trying to work together to the maximum extent possible. We had our usual share of first-day glitches, and probably there were some I haven’t heard about yet.
Mine were:
- the clock in the room was 5 minutes fast, which meant that I start class before some people were there who were not, technically speaking, late. It seemed important to start on time, because we had a lot to do, but that was too bad. Michigan has the phenomenon of “Michigan time” in which everything starts 10 minutes after the nominal time. I guess the clock in the room is a compromise between regular time and Michigan time.
- I had some trouble getting Quicktime movies to work from within PowerPoint, which meant that I had to leave PowerPoint to show them, which meant that a “secret question” for one of the examples, from Dan Simons’ work - – turned into a “prime” telling them what to look for.
I decided to focus much of the class on what the “thin-slice” research of Ambady implies for teaching. This work shows that people form lasting impressions from extremely quick and impoverished information. It’s consistent with something that Evelyn Satinoff said many years ago – that when you’re teaching, students need to know right away that
- you’re happy to be there,
- you’re happy that they’re there,
- you know what you’re talking about.
I showed an interesting video clip about a new teacher’s first day (link probably won’t last long) that is potentially very rich.
It was, as some of my co-teachers had suggested, probably too much to start off with that discussion, but it does raise issues that we will be revisiting, about the beliefs that one quickly forms about others and the data on which they’re formed.
The students in the class are a cohort who will become secondary English teachers. They’re seniors and have had a semester of taking courses together, so they seem pretty cohesive as a class. It’s odd doing introduction-type tasks with people who know each other well, but there are always some surprising responses and it’s useful to see the sense people make of their own educational experiences.
Should be an interesting semester.