Through the eyes of a child

They say that nothing makes you look at the same old things differently like having kids. Our daughters are grown and now we have little grandchildren, one boy and one girl. We get to spend a lot of time with both of them and I have revisited a lot of the books, toys and activities my daughters enjoyed. I’m back to playing with Little People; reading Cinderella, Snow White, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty over and over; making tents; zooming trucks around the kitchen and building castles with Duplo blocks. When our daughters were young, these activities became old and I lost my enthusiasm for them. Now that we have new little people, the excitement is back.

The same can be said about teaching the same class over and over. Have you lost the excitement or enthusiasm for the subject matter? Are the assignments, discussions and assessments the same as when you first started teaching this class so that you can teach it in your sleep? (I’ve heard that from fellow instructors!) It’s time to inject something new into your class!

The question now becomes “what can I do?” A quick spark would be a new discussion topic or two. I have some “canned” discussion topics that always seem to work and that I recycle in my classes, but I also incorporate new and more current topics every semester. I hide the upcoming topics from student view so that if I want to change the topic, the students have not already seen it. (Click the Edit pencil next to the topic name, scroll down a bit and you’ll see a checkbox for “Hide this topic”. Remember to “Make the topic visible” when you’re ready to open it to students.)

Or go bigger and incorporate new technologies that enhance student learning or offer students the opportunity to present their knowledge acquisition in different ways. In one of my classes, we include a student wiki project where the students choose the topics and build the content rather than having the textbook or instructor give them the content. This took some planning and it is still a work in progress but overall, it’s been successful.

Go ahead…look at your class through the eyes of a child and add some new excitement for you and your students.