4C/ID model in practice

This week my students were working their first individual project, creating a website from sketch. At first, since we have been going through this process for about five times, I planned to demonstrate the whole process again at the beginning of the class. Then let them do it by themselves. And then I realized that I underestimated the complication of this task. They had some difficulties when doing it independently. Although my students went through all the steps for several times, they did it by following my demonstration, and they have never gone through the whole process in one time. So there is a gap. According to van Merriënboer's 4C/ID model, the scaffolding should be removed corresponding to students' progress. Apparently, I removed the scaffolding to fast. So I created a job-aid to help them through this process and tried to use it in another section I taught. This time students' reaction was very positive, which indicated that this intervention really helped.

1. Controlling of the tempo of the class is kind of challenging. Sometimes students would asking questions while I was talking. My first reaction was always stopping and answering their questions. On one hand, I felt this kind of immediate feedback really helped students. On the other hand, I felt like this kind of interruption was breaking the tempo of teaching. Sometimes I would forget where I was before the questions. And the experience of students might be affected by the interruption. And I noticed some experienced instructors wouldn’t answer students’ questions when they were on important topics. And they would come back to the questions right after they finished their topics. This is what I need to learn and apply to my class.

2. Since the major component of this class (R341) is group work. There are 8 group assignments/projects throughout the semester. How to make sure all the students contribute evenly and fairly to the group is always a challenge. Different situations happens to various group that have this issue. For example, for one group, one student had really passive personality and just waiting other group members to assign job to her. However, other group members didn’t really know her and didn’t assign anything. After one group project, both sides complained. For another group, a technique issue (Google Drive didn’t work) happened on the weekend before the due day. Without enough communication between group members, all of them were working on their own parts and other ones’ parts. And they all complained they couldn’t get responses from others and did more than what they should. From these cases, we can tell the complexity of group work. You never know what will happen to a group. But the most important thing is to encourage group members communicating with each other frequently.