Frontloading Wonderment

Now that would be a good blog name, "Frontloading Wonderment."

I love teaching. And I'm always looking for new things to try, new ideas, new ways to present information. I need to break myself of the powerpoint, even though I have good reasons for using it the way I do. The reason, actually, it still good (to give the students an outline of the lecture so they can pay attention to the content and not to copying stuff verbatim)... but perhaps the format for that is wrong. Maybe I'll bust the outline stuff into a separate word document they can download for class, and liberate my powerpoint... Terminal Degree has a post about Using Powerpoint Effectively. The class liked the study guide questions? Huh.

Powerpoint Liberation will have to wait, though. If my class runs this summer, it will be Very Small (as in, PERHAPS 10 students, vs. the 30 I usually have). I hope it runs; I would love to teach this class (even though it's a 101 Drive By Intro to one of the Anthropology subfields) as a seminar. I'll get to try lots of different things, starting with ditching the powerpoint, I think...will see what happens.

Inside Higher Ed recently ran an article about effective lecturing. There is some good stuff in there for me; I especially liked the idea of "Frontloading Wonderment." It's the hook that gets them paying attention (fait attention!). I need to frontload more wonderment in my lectures.