Ann Sanford

I love using group activities in my classroom! For some of the classes that I currently teach, many of the students are freshmen and still getting used to college life. By putting students in groups, many shy or unconfident individuals have more confidence in their own answers and speak up! As much as I love group work, I ALWAYS have an individual assignment so that I can hopefully reach a wide variety of learners.

As an instructor, I would really like to improve my communication skills in the disciplinarian arena of education. I think my biggest weakness is dealing with discipline issues. I welcome suggestions!

I believe that evaluation methods can be the most difficult part of the teaching process simply because numbers on a single line deduce a student's educational profile. That's why I also do invididual conferencing throughout the semester/quarter. In fact, I do at LEAST three of the course of the semester/quarter and I find that to be a very effective method both for me as the instructor and my students.

Back-up plans are a must! I did not run into an issue with this area of education until my second year of teaching. Past experiences typically left me with too little time, NEVER too much time. Fortunately, I was able to recover, but that was the first and ONLY time I will walk into a classroom without a back-up plan!

In my past classrooms, I have used very few Powerpoint presentations because I traditionally use discussion, group work, and individual activities in order to conduct my curriculum. However, I am planning on becoming more familiar with the software in order to use them more often in class. As of now, I require each student in a business class that I teach to give a PowerPoint presentation and follow-up those presentations with question and answer sessions. This method has seemd to work well in my classroom.

I think, if possible, a combination between a guest speaker and field trip can be quite effective. First, introduce a speaker from a particular business into the classroom and then to further reiterate and reinforce your objectives, take the class to the place of business your speaker was from. Then they can both hear and see the workings of a particular business.