Starting Winter Term 08-09 (ARW, TW, AASP)

Just finished the first week of ICU's winter term. I have Academic Reading and Writing, Theme Writing, and Advanced Academic Speaking as my three courses. For ARW and TW, this is my third time. Only AASP is a first timer, and I am coordinating six teachers as well as teaching that.

Here are some personal goals for each of them:

ARW Winter:
I want to make each class discussion about the readings as meaningful as possible in terms of an opportunity to improve their mastery of academic vocabulary and discussion skills. I want almost all students to be prepared and excited about coming to discuss their ideas about the reading. My experience has been that, without an evaluation of "preparedness" students tend to lose their motivation to prepare well. Coming to a class full of unprepared students is discouraging for the well-prepared students, not to mention detrimental to the unprepared students themselves. The only method I know right now that keeps students on their toes is to require the submission of "discussion preparation notes" to prove how well they prepared. For the past two or three terms, I have required submission, and have taken time to rate them. Is it worth the effort? I think it is, as long as I can rate them very rapidly in a fair way...which is difficult. I'm still looking for a good solution on this.

Theme Writing:
In this research paper course, my main focus is how to keep struggling students meeting deadlines so that they don't fall out of communication...one important step will be meeting with them one by one at the topic selection stage next week. Struggling students have a negative cycle of 1) failing to come to class to hear advice or coming but not understanding, 2) writing their paper without really understanding what is expected, 3) feeling discouraged when they receive low evaluations on their work. I want to break that cycle somehow, and I think one key element is to provide information about our expectations for a "passing" paper in Japanese or at least in an extremely easy-to-understand, highly visual presentation so that there is no misunderstanding. The info ideally will be interactive so that students can demonstrate that they "got it" after the presentation by clicking on a quiz and/or sending their instructor some kind of email. I wonder what would be a good platform to do that...could it be a TW Blog with embedded Google Presentations and Google Spreadsheet Forms that will go into a spreadsheet to show level of understanding...automatic feedback would be nice. Moodle? Other online applications?

AASP:
This course focuses on discussion skills, and I did a survey of my students' self-identified needs on the first day. Many feel a lack of confidence with how to "lead" a discussion, especially because that requires the skill of understanding and summarizing what other members have said. Others feel that they just can't say what they want to say due to a lack of vocabulary or fluency. In Lesson No.2, all of them will have 10 minutes to present an issue and lead a discussion. That will give me a better idea of where they are in terms of their discussion skills. Hopefully, even though the class only has eight meetings, each of them will gain some confidence in their discussion skills.

As coordinator, I'm trying to lead a collaboration on making the course more satisfying for the students. I hope students feel the class meets their individual needs for improving spoken confidence in academic discussions - we'll see how that goes! As the final evaluation, I hope I can observe the improvement of each student in terms of how they set up a discussion with a topic they bring and lead the discussion. This type of evaluation has difficulties since the participants affect the leader's performance, but hopefully it will be a meaningful, formative, evaluation opportunity including a self-assessment and goal-setting for future improvement.

The program would really benefit from a recorded "model" discussion for students' to listen to and learn from. Can I get a few teachers together to do that (in my office - myself and three others on Monday?)