14 September 2006

Learning How to Teach

When you work in the public sector, you've got to take advantage of perks whenever you encounter them. This week, I've been sitting in on some professional development seminars offered by the Centre for Learning and Teaching at work. They've kindly allowed me to participate (at no charge), even though the course I'm teaching next term is at another university here in the city.

Luckily, they have lots of informative sessions for would-be lecturers and teaching assistants, handily scheduled around lunchtime so it's easy for me to attend. Yesterday's session was on "Leading Classroom Discussions", and it was excellent - very practical, with lots of useful advice which got me thinking about different ways to get my students talking. Then today's session was on "Tips for First-Time Lecturers". Not a whole lot of new information there, but it was quite reassuring to find that my worries about this course are entirely common and normal.


There are a couple more sessions scheduled for later this autumn, which I'm looking forward to since getting off to such a great start this week. And when I got back to my office today, I found that my desk copy of
this book (which will most likely become my course textbook) had been delivered. Sweet!

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