First day of classes. Students seem nice. They asked lots of questions, always a good sign. Got through first lecture OK. Gotta work on my voice, though — it takes a bit of warm-up to restore Teacher’s Voice, especially when you’re not loud to begin with.
Here’s a good vocal warmup exercise for you!
Throw a few of the students to the
zebrafishpiranhas. That usually gets the remaining students’s attention, but to be sure, alsosacrificediscard some B Ark “cargo”…I’ll be teaching a new batch of med students fairly soon. Any tips on keeping students engaged during a basic science talk? I’m seriously thinking of scrapping the didactic Neuroanatomy refresher lecture and have students read the relevant material in advance. The talk would be applying the knowledge they have read to clinically relevant cases. The talk will therefore be more Q&A a la Socratic method. Mind you these are 3rd year students who have already had their core Neuroanatomy lectures during their first year. Thoughts?
It takes me a while to warm up my Teacher’s Voice as well. Going to karaoke or just singing in the shower for a while beforehand seems to help, although I like The Other Lance’s suggestion @1 as well. Maybe your cat will like it and calm down when you do it so you then have to sing every time strangers come around!
Med students WANT the didactic approach — the easiest way to get bad student evaluations from pre-meds is to try and get creative and force them to think. “We want an hour of words we can memorize & regurgitate!” is the usual unspoken mantra.
I try to mix it up. Lots of stuff where I’m standing there telling them how the world works, but then every 10 or 15 minutes you stop and ask them to think about and apply what you just told them. “Hey, if that ATPase is driven by a proton gradient, what would happen if you added acid? Base? Punched holes in the membrane?” Force ’em to anticipate what the answer is before you give it to them.