Dr. Gwen Deger – College

As an assistant professor at the university level, I typically built my lessons around lecture. But even though I was working with college-aged students, I found that the traditional “teacher talk, students take notes” approach actually had become something of a barrier to fostering the sort of creative, dialogic environment that I was hoping to bring out in my classes. And the more I lectured, the more I found that many of my learners were still struggling to become engaged in class discussion. And on those days when it felt like my students were barely sleep walking through our course material, I likewise found myself disengaging with the content I was teaching. 

I wanted to be more creative but was lacking inspiration, and I felt like I was at a loss at how my students would succeed in their special education certification exams because the content is just so cramped in 10 weeks. 

During Spring 2022, I was struggling with getting my pre-service to engage in content during my lectures. This concerned me as they weren’t able to answer specific instructional design questions which are crucial as a teacher. I went to observe one of my student teachers who was working with Dr. Jen Toney. Her lesson was about opinion writing but it was different. Students were excited to go into the opinion outback to convince their traveling robot to visit their imaginary island. I had never seen 30 students all actively engaged with writing and also editing their work. My student was worried that I didn’t like her lesson when I literally had this confused look on my face. But I told her that I simply needed a minute to process what I was seeing. There was a palpable difference in the classroom, and I had never seen anything like it.