Antarpreet Kang

I am always early to class and have the material ready (handouts, etc) but this course has taught me to evaluate myself, my personality and my teaching style as well. This will assist me to provide a better  and positive learning environment in my class room. The analogy of the classroom being an orchestra was very interesting and made complete sense. I as the instructor need to manage my classroom well so the orchestra made nice music and not chaotic and annoying noise. 

Lots of good and useful information for new instructors. Remembering names of all students specially when you have 70 students every 12 weeks has been my biggest challenge. With the consent of the students, I take pictures of the two sides of the classroom and write the names of students as per their seats and then put their faces to their names and it helps me to remember their names quicker than anything else. 

 From my past experience, setting the behavioral expectations in the very beginning of the class mostly helps but there are mostly couple of students who are the trouble makers in the class and pose very challenging for the instructor. Majority of the times, a lot is going on in their lives at the time in addition to them being students. The workload is very challenging and time consuming but they are in denial that they have way more on their plate than that they can handle. This is what gives rise to take the short cut ways and these students… >>>

Comment on Shelley Freshman's post:  I totally agree with Shelley. Use it wisely seems to be the strategy that that will work best with the challenging students. I have already tried moving around in class and it works momentarily. Assigning seats for students and then rotating them also works to a certain extend.

Overall, this course has taught me many interesting and useful strategies to deal with challenging students.

It was a very helpful course for me. Great to learn that the instructor teaching an adult group of students needs to pay attention to many other aspects like diversity of age, ethnicity, career goals, student needs, fears and frustrations in addition to just delivering the lectures and knowledge, in order to be successful and improve retention of students. Involvement / participation of students in the class is very significant to keep them engaged and lead them to be successful.