Class yesterday went very well again. It is a lot of fun to see the students working in their groups -- pointing out cool tidbits from history that they are finding in their research.
Google Drive continues to be a challenge for some of my students. I have maybe 7-10 who have not been able to share their mission log with me yet. With that small number, it may be easier to just make the copy on my end and share it with them. Ken Bain (author of What the Best College Teachers Do visited SUU at the beginning of last semester, and he mentioned that to be a great professor you have to be willing to start slow so that you can lay the necessary groundwork for your students. This feels like a bit slower start than I had anticipated in some ways, but I know that this foundation is critical.
This week, students continue to work on their time period descriptions. They are basically writing a kind of Wikipedia entry about the year in which their character was born. I think that some of the groups really have a good grasp on what they are doing.
I started class fielding questions as I usually do. Soon (perhaps not soon enough) I realized that we could spend the entire period just on that. So I broke them into groups and started to work with people individually as they had questions. If something came up that I wanted the whole class to hear, I would stop them, explain something, and then get back to work. This format seems to work better than being at the front. I think I am going to try to implement it more in all of my classes.
I made the Core Rulebook documents public so that all of the students could access and edit them easily. I think that it was good for them to see where they are going to be writing this stuff.
I think that the next step is for students to get in the habit of declaring their missions to me, completing those missions, and then reporting to me when they have completed their mission.
One recent modification to the class is that in order for a student to receive credit for completing a reading mission, they must write a brief response/summary of what they have read. This should be 150-300 words if they have read a book chapter, and 300-600 words if they have read a book. They will add a sheet to their mission log where they will write these responses.
Last night when class ended, I had a few emails from students declaring missions either started or complete, so I think they are getting the hang of things.
For next class, I hope that each group has made significant progress toward finishing their time period descriptions. By Tuesday of next week I would expect these to be pretty much complete so that we can move to different groups. This is important, and I don't mind spending time setting the groundwork, but I also don't want to stagnate.