Summer is on our doorstep.  Welcome, summer!  And welcome, listener, to this very reflective edition of Teaching & Learning Matters.  I am Dr. Garvey Pyke, and today I want to discuss how we can step back and reflect on what has happened over the past academic year.  

Take a moment.  Savor it.  The semester is over.  Ah, summer.  

OK, back to reality.  For most of us, summer is not downtime, exactly, but it is a time when we do shift gears a bit.  It’s a time for research, grant projects, and for some of us, teaching.  And even if we are teaching, the pace is different.  Our biggest challenge for the summer, though, is getting ready for next year.  August will be here sooner than we think, and amongst all the “recharging” and “recreating” we do throughout the fun summer months, we spend a great deal of time planning for the fall semester.

The best thing to do, right now, to start your planning is to engage in some reflection.  This is an important part of professional practice—to step back for a moment and take stock of what has occurred over the course of the academic year.  I have three simple questions to guide your thinking, and you should go ahead and write them down.

1. What went well?
2. What didn’t go well?
3. And what would you do differently next time?

Again, that’s what went well? What didn’t go well? And what would you do differently next time?

As you begin to formulate ideas and think about these some more, jot down your answers.  Which projects, tests, papers, or other assignments did students excel in?  Or struggle with?  How was the grade distribution?  What questions did students ask you over and over again?  Et cetera.  Think about everything—assignments, room setup, calendar, office hours—you name it.

Think of this as “free-writing.”  Don’t worry about organizing your thoughts—just get them down on paper in any order.  Once you have done that, your next step is to see which things link together.  Make an outline if you need to.  You should start to get a sense of accomplishment by examining your teaching this way.  And this will ease your planning for next semester a great deal.  You can now tell which course activities were a smashing success and should be repeated, which ones should be fine tuned, and which ones should be scrapped altogether.  

This process could reveal where the holes might be in your syllabus.  Remember those 29 emails you answered before the first paper was due?  You don’t want to answer those same questions again: time to tighten up the language in the assignment section in the syllabus.  Likewise, did you have students with tardy problems or other issues?  Put those in the syllabus, too.

Another effective method is to find a colleague to share your ideas with.  Ask them to engage in the reflective practice with you.  Or find an online community of instructors in your discipline, or perhaps find someone to speak with at summer professional development events (e.g., in such places as Center for Teaching and Learning events and so forth).  By collaborating and engaging in collegial discussions, it will help organize your own thoughts about your teaching and open up possibilities to explore new ideas suggest by others.

Ultimately, by doing a little bit of planning work now, your next semester should be that much better for you and your students.  And you can try this again at the end of the fall term, and fine tune once more for spring.  Every semester, repeat the process.  For some people, reflection is simply a regular and ongoing part of the professional development process, and I’d encourage you to try to make it part of yours, too.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about this or other teaching techniques, please stop by the Center for Teaching and Learning at UNC Charlotte, and we will talk about strategies that fit your style, your students’ needs, and your subject area.   

Thanks for listening, and please tune in next time. Until then, so long, and remember, teaching and learning matters.