Spring 2022 Course Evaluations

What aspect(s) of the course or instruction could be improved?

I wish we had a little more structure during the second half of the semester. ’-Some weeks where we had guest lecturers there was a lot of reading to do. We already spend hours lesson planning, commuting to teach, and going to the seminar. I don’t think we should need to spend a ton of other time prepping for the seminar. -We spent 90% of seminar time throughout the year it seems like listening to other fellows debrief how their teaching was going. I don’t think that was useful. I didn’t need to hear about how other fellows were having a hard time with their host teacher, as that did not really effect me and my own class. We did journals to reflect and that did not have to also all be done orally. I think debriefing can be done on journals or with Prof. McLaurin individually, or incrementally. But almost every class to spend 45 minutes doing this seemed excessive. I felt that the class was less structured in the second semester, which was sometimes a good thing but sometimes I wanted more structure. For example, it was nice to not have to worry about reading long cases or preparing too much for the classes leading up to and directly following the moot court competition, since the competition itself took up so much time. After the competition, though, I would have liked a clearer syllabus and more structure to the class. I recognize that that might be difficult to do, since many of us were teaching different things to our students, but having a more cohesive focus and seminars tailored to that would have been preferable for me. I also felt that sometimes our debriefs went on too long. It often wasn’t particularly beneficial for me to listen to other Fellows complaining about what was happening at their own schools. Some of this is useful for sharing ideas, but it might have been better to have some individual debriefs with the professor and each group of Fellows, rather than have everyone together for those sessions. I understand this may be a preference, but I was expecting more lessons on teaching and adolescent development. I walked into the program thinking a significant portion of time would be spent learning pedagogy and deeply discussing the issues in schools. I understand that may be hard to implement earlier in the year because of the competition, but I would have liked a bit more of that at the beginning of the year instead of a deep dive into constitutional law at the law school level.

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