Boot Camp – Went fine, but people said there was a lot of overlap with the All-Day GSI conference. This makes sense, since Aaron and Josh taught the GSI conference and made it go essentially like the AY300 bootcamp. Not sure what to do about this, because the Physical Sciences cluster at the conference will not always be run by astro people.

Design A Demo – For some reason, incredibly painful. Perhaps if there is an equal share of Ugrads and grads, require that each group has one of each. The group of Ugrads had some trouble with actually doing anything, and one person felt that they ended up doing most of the work. Perhaps limit groups to sizes of <4.

Worksheets – Also seemed painful. Everyone put it off until the end.

Special Topics – Good addition. Keep them as interactive as possible.

1. Stick with 3 group members max? Seems like there were problems with groups of size 4 in terms of whether everyone contributed. (Aaron&Therese)

1. Assigning someone each week to recap and get the discussion going worked well. This class was very willing to share and discuss, but I want to attribute some of that success to the method. :) (Aaron)

• As usual, one of the most useful things for the students
• Primarily me talking and little student work

• Generally favorable

• We should try to make this more interactive, as Jeff suggested last year–get them up in front of the class to feel that feeling

• I didn't spend much time on this
• Didn't like previous year's model of dissecting worksheets and designing new ones..
• I did have them put a worksheet (original or substantially modified) on the eBRB

• Would have liked more

• We should spend some time improving this, if for no other reason than to keep fresh ones coming to the eBRB

• Time-consuming for me, but will be more manageable with two of us.
• I thought it was instructive for me as well as the students seeing themselves teach
• Hard to get them to actually watch the videos when not being forced; not sure if we can/want to try to address this
• I think it's important and useful–“parent-knows-best” kind of situation I think

• Hated seeing themselves on video, wouldn't review independently
• Balked at the idea of a second video-taping

• Keep it for sure, maybe add a second go-round to show improvement
• This could be moved forward if we want to do it twice, or later if only once

• I felt like these were largely a chore both for me and the students
• Nonetheless these are very useful in future teaching semesters, so they will be kept

• ??

• I would like to think about whether we can make this seem more relevant throughout the course of the class
• Perhaps we could have them exchange them and read each others, then discuss how others' sections went in class once a month?

• Of the two, I think they got the most out of the EGSI visits, though I did not have a lot in place to structure their post-game analysis
• This required little to no work for me, but I could've done more
• Did this early and I believe it should be kept there, i.e. Week 2 or 3 (the first weeks of real section teaching, not ice-breakers, etc.)

• Liked the EGSI visit

• I think if we do the above suggestion with the teaching logs, then we could get rid of the peer visitation (maybe)

• I think I did a poor job with this one, but it's mostly the students' responsibility

• ??

• Depending on class size, we could have them actually lead the demo with the class as if they were teaching

• Following recommendations, not everyone got up to do these. I think this was a good idea to save time.
• On the other hand, not everyone got that practice in.. hard to say which way to go

• ??

• We should spend some time thinking about this

• This all felt like a pain in the ass last year, but that was my fault in the implementation
• Felt forced, maybe because I didn't ask for specific enough responses to the readings

• Generally negative

• We should read all the stuff from my year, and maybe the year prior, and cull
• Whatever we keep should have a clear purpose, and if we assign something, it should address that purpose

• It was definitely useful keeping in close contact with the Head GSIs, we might even formalize this to a weekly/bi-weekly meeting/lunch
• I still had a hard time helping them implement group work, and the sense I got from the videos was that some are just better than others, and it had little to do with my course
• Both they and I enjoyed discussing the previous week at Celia's happy hour towards the end of the semester, but I like the idea of having a more general pedagogy discussion with the dept. too
• Visits from the profs and GSIs for advanced courses were useful, but again I could have done more to structure the discussion I think. Alex went off on his tangents, and Marc had some pretty pessimistic ideas about teaching…
• Mid-semester evals remain a positive/important part of the curriculum

Things to do before the semester starts!