{"id":10363,"date":"2016-11-21T10:00:11","date_gmt":"2016-11-21T16:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cat.xula.edu\/food\/?p=10363"},"modified":"2020-05-07T09:25:24","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T14:25:24","slug":"on-innovation-and-procrastination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cat.xula.edu\/food\/on-innovation-and-procrastination\/","title":{"rendered":"On Innovation and Procrastination"},"content":{"rendered":"

By J. Todd<\/p>\n

When I first started teaching, as a graduate student, I would would plan my classes in excruciating detail. These classes were largely lectures, interspersed with the occasional individual or group work. Often, I would even write out a joke or some irrelevant comment I wanted to start the class with. I still have the legal pads that I filled up with this extensive planning. Meanwhile, I had friends who could walk into the classroom without any real preparation and lead a successful class.<\/p>\n

\"Post-It<\/a> I've always been a planner; although, now those plans are just outlines with approximate times -- things to help me keep the class on track. But I've also always been a procrastinator; I do much of my best work under a quickly diminishing deadline. These days, I do most of my daily class planning the night before class.<\/p>\n

However, recent innovations that I've become involved with are\u00a0challenging me to plan in different ways. There are plenty of great and potentially powerful pedagogical innovations available now. Two new ways I'm dealing with this semester are inverted teaching and collaborative teaching. Both of these, I'm slowly learning, mean that planning for class<\/i>\u00a0is not simply getting ready to teach class on a given day. As a result, I'm (very) slowly coming to accept\u00a0that I have to do significantly more planning significantly\u00a0earlier.<\/p>\n

Inverted Teaching<\/h2>\n

While video lectures are not a necessity for inverted teaching, they are one effective way to deliver content without using up class time. The videos, to be honest, are killing me. I suppose, as is often the case, this will get better over time, assuming I decide to reuse\u00a0the videos from this semester the next time I teach this class. (Although, given my propensity for making significant changes every time I teach a class, I probably won't.) I had grand plans to record all the videos for my grammar class this past summer, to have them done and ready to go throughout the semester. Then, once the semester began, and I hadn't recorded any of the videos, I developed a plan for recording each video at least two weeks in advance. Here too, I failed.<\/p>\n

Aaron Sams, one of the pioneers of inverted teaching, tells stories of recording videos for his Chemistry classes late at night in the laundry room, so as not to disturb his sleeping family. This past Saturday morning, I recorded a lecture on rhetorical grammar in my car while my son was at his Tae Kwon Do class. The video needed to be watched by my students before class this\u00a0Monday. Granted, it's only a 15 minute video (I know, I know. It should be under 10 minutes.), but still, it feels like cheating to tell my students in class on Friday, \"Please watch the video on Rhetorical Grammar before Monday's class. It's not done yet, but when it is, be sure to watch it.\"<\/p>\n