09 Aralık 2020, Salı saat: 01:18 TEACHING IS DONE FOR THE SEMESTER!!! I finished grading the reflection papers, and I think they came up with a lot of good thoughts/ideas for the seminar redesign in the spring. I did an initial skim through, but I think I will now set them aside until early January when I sit down to actually plan. I always want to start working on course planning at the very end of the semester. Still, I KNOW from experience that my brain is just too tired and too entangled in the concerns of that particular semester to do the necessary take-a-step-back meta-thinking. When I sat down this summer, I really wanted to prepare a syllabus that will help them learn the field more deeply, so I wrote clearer learning goals and made more informed decisions about what to teach. I spent a lot of time researching and gathering different types of model projects, so I could give them (and myself) lots and lots of ideas of what their work could look like and developed consistent project tracking systems that gave students a lot of flexibility but still required some accountability and created a point of regular, weekly communication between us even if we weren’t meeting. I think I successfully did those things!! Like I think you could ask any of them to talk at length about any of the concepts on this "bizarre and foreign religion," and they would be able to do so eloquently, with the ability to reference specific examples from the semester and to articulate specific applications in their own independent country projects. That is WAY more than I could say for many of my fellow countrymen. So even as I nitpick and think about what I could do better next semester (you can always do better next semester!), I actually am pretty proud of the big changes I made, and I can see a direct path from those curricular changes to the significantly higher quality research students did this year. Before I close the mental book on the teaching part of this semester, though, I do want to just take a minute to reflect on what worked about this course design. I feel like often when I do a dramatic overhaul of course structures, I am trying to solve a particular problem - and then over the course of the semester, if the structures work to solve that problem and it becomes less pressing in my daily teaching life, I gradually forget what the original issue was and start noticing only the aspects of the course that aren't quite working or that could be improved. But I DO think it is important to go back and remind myself of what I was trying to fix, and then to take some time to like, appreciate the effectiveness of the solution before I jump into thinking about what could still be better. Now, for the next semester: Last year when I taught the capstone seminar for the first time, I think I did an okay job of teaching, but I was kind of thrown into the job with zero guidance and no existing curriculum to build on. and because I had to integrate the special connections and archives into the class, I didn’t have time to do the usual guidelines on how to do research to map out the major steps & concepts within this broad field (history, religion, politics, international relations). I also had never advised the kinds of independent semester-long projects that students do and did not inherit any guidance or clear expectations for what they were supposed to produce, so I was kind of flying blind and felt like I was always only a step or two ahead of them in anticipating problems. I also made the regular research meetings semi-optional, which meant that every semester there were some students I met with super consistently vs. some students I had to spend a lot of time and energy tracking down. There are definitely things I want to adjust in those systems for next semester, and I think I will need to do some careful planning work around smaller milestones on the lead-up to the big project. I also feel like I can curate a much more coherent syllabus, which will enable me to make more tailored recommendations to each student based on their particular research interests. I have a clearer sense of the common stumbling blocks that students are likely to encounter in doing this kind of research, so while I am a tiny bit concerned about my ability to do this last part (successfully coach their projects from the design / initial build stage to completion and presentation), I think that some of the things that made that so difficult last year will not be an issue this spring. and I think, again, with careful planning, I can predict some of the likely obstacles and identify the students who seem like they are going to have the most trouble finishing (because the scope of their project is too ambitious or because they are underestimating how much labor it will take to actually build the thing they want to create). I often remind myself, when I find myself comparing my teaching to other people’s teaching and seeing only the ways that I fall short, that no class can be all things to all people, and that the more useful metric is: how effectively does my teaching satisfy the goals I’ve set for myself & concretely embody/enact the teaching values I’ve chosen to ground my work in? If I measure teaching effectiveness that way, I can see how well I’ve done at meeting the goals I’ve set for myself, and then I can reflect on whether I want to rethink those goals/priorities to achieve different outcomes. I think something similar applies here too. If I measure the effectiveness of a course I’ve taught or a program I’ve coordinated against the best, most idealized, most perfect class or program imaginable, I will only ever see the ways in which my design doesn’t measure up. but if I look back to the practical problems I identified and the solutions I designed to try to solve those problems, then I can gauge my effectiveness much more accurately & fairly, without getting caught in that perfectionist’s spiral. and then I can get back to the drawing board to identify new problems, articulate new priorities, and design new or more elegant solutions. Onward! larissa