This was the first time that I taught this course.  I tried to use my experience teaching personality in the previous semester.  I used more lecture, and fewer activities and class discussions.  Students preferred lecture, but I don’t think they understood the material as in-depth as they did when I used more activities. Activities require student to put more effort into class, and some students resented the effort required.  I had a more difficult time making connections with students this semester because the semester began with multiple snowstorms, and I presented much of the beginning material in online Tegrity lectures so that we would not fall behind in the course material.

I followed my plan for information delivery based on my self-evaluation of the personality course I taught the previous semester. I decided that I would use an outline form for my lecture slides and provide students with an empty outline.  I thought that this would help students to maintain the organization of their notes and help students identify and distill information to write down. Students did not use the empty outline provided, and thought that the outline form was confusing because PowerPoint slides can only contain a certain portion of an outline.  Without the empty outline as a guide, the slides appeared disorganized.  After speaking with students, I realized that if I was going to continue to use PowerPoint slides, I will have to revise the form and rely more on PowerPoint’s section headers for organization rather than a classic outline.

Students also complained that there was too much information on the slides.  In my effort to provide form to pieces of the outline, I often included too much information for students to digest at one time.  In the future, I plan to add progressive addition to slides so that students can see how information fits within the overall information scheme, but at the same time not overwhelm students with too much information.

To improve upon my development next semester, I am focusing on reorganizing my slides based on the tools provided by PowerPoint and adding information to slides progressively to help students understand how information fits together.