Pedagogy Lesson #1

This is my first term teaching a college-level class entirely of my own design. I have several years' experience with teaching, but the whole construction of a course, top to bottom, still presented new challenges. It's also my first term teaching at my current institution, so I'm learning as I go about the students, classroom culture, and expectations of this particular place.

I gave a pop quiz recently to keep students accountable on their weekly reading assignment. The quiz is meant to be easy – facts, characters from the narrative, no analysis, no tricks. A student who did the reading should get a 5 out of 5. Much to my dismay, students fared rather poorly on the quiz! Only 1 student got 5/5; even the students who made it clear in the rest of class that they had done the reading missed points. The problem was clearly my quiz.

What to do? Pop quizzes were included in the syllabus, and I had run them through a sample pop quiz in the previous class so that they wouldn't be surprised by the format or type of questions. It turns out that the students were having trouble identifying what was important in the long, ancient poems I assigned. They spent too much time trying to memorize the details of planting crops in the agricultural calendar (which I think is not very important) rather than focusing on the mysterious animal fable (which always fascinates me).

Solution: I now post a list of terms on our course website for every reading. The list includes the names of figures, important events, locations, etc., that determine the shape of the narrative. Students who fill out the terms list as they complete the reading will then be prepared for future pop quizzes. And I will let students drop their first quiz grade, if it turns out to be their lowest.

Result: I administered another pop quiz today. I'm pleased to say that the majority of the class did very well. Not only are they doing the reading, but they're demonstrating it through my assessments. Hurray!