2.5 Letter to Student ~1 hr

Joerdis Weilandt and Kristi Thomas

Explain your teaching intentions and motivation to your online students

PURPOSE OF THE TASK: This task is designed to help you articulate to your students what motivates your online teaching approach. By sharing these insights with your students, they  more easily understand why you teach the way you do and prepare for successful participation in your online course.

TECHNOLOGY: You will post your document on a Moodle forum, which for this activity will be used as a shared space.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Write a letter to your students that can later become part of your online course syllabus. Indicate the answers to at least 2 of the following 8 questions. Your text can be brief (a paragraph about 250 words). Type your letter in a Word.doc and then copy and paste it to this forum by clicking on this link.

  1. Why do you teach the way you do?
  2. Why are you a teacher?
  3. What motivated you to select a career path that includes teaching?
  4. What is your personal definition of a great teacher and what experience formed that definition?
  5. What do you believe about teaching and learning?
  6. What do you want my students to gain from my classroom?
  7. Why do you choose the teaching strategies/methods that you use?
  8. Why do you select particular assignments/experiences for your students?

TEACHING INTENTIONS:

Communicating through letter writing is a powerful reflective activity. Reflection allows students to “demonstrate their metacognitive awareness, and build connections to prior, current, and future learning contexts” (Allan & Driscoll, 2014, p. 39).

References

Allan, E. G., & Driscoll, D. L. (2014). The three-fold benefit of reflective writing: Improving program assessment, student learning, and faculty professional development. Assessing Writing, 21, 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2014.03.001

 

 

License

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FLOf - Facilitating Learning Online Copyright © 2019 by Kristi Thomas and Jördis Weilandt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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