Reflective Summary

My participation in the CoAT and PTP at NC State gave me the opportunity to get valuable teaching experience and facilitated my growth as a teacher. The teaching workshops and seminars provided me with information and support to improve my teaching in several areas, including creating effective assessment techniques, motivating students, keeping students engaged with in-class activities, and effective questioning strategies. Additionally, other PTP seminars involved professors from NC State and other universities sitting down as a panel and discussing issues in faculty life such as navigating the tenure process. Those discussions provided me with insight into what life as a faculty member would be like and I will use that information when making a final career choice.

Before this teaching experience I had always wondered what it was like to be a teacher in a college class, while sitting in college classes I always had thoughts in my mind about what I would do different if I were given the opportunity to teach. Through this experience, I realized that some of the things I thought I would be able to do were idealistic and not really possible from a workload standpoint, like every day in-class quizzes. However through this experience, now know that there is a place for in-class quizzes in the overall scheme of the course, but every day is just too much. During both Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 I received constructive feedback from my teaching mentor Dr. James. R. Wilson, from a peer observer, and from students. I was able to gain an understanding of some of my weaknesses as a teacher, such as my tendency to present material at very fast rate and sometimes loose the students.

I am not sure what the future holds for me as it pertains to future teaching experiences. Ideally, I would like to teach simulation as an adjunct faculty member at a college or university and be a simulation consultant. Keeping ties to academia and teaching would allow me to remain current on academic advancements in simulation, and consulting would provide real-world experience that can be taken into the classroom, a win-win scenario on both sides. In closing, this experience has been very valuable to my development as a teacher, and I have discovered that I really enjoy teaching simulation and interacting with intelligent college students om a daily basis.