Take Two: questions for our Alum Teachers

Hopefully, even if your group didn't come up with many questions for our alums, you've had some time to think about this and have perhaps come up with questions on your own. It's important that folks are asking at least some common questions across our class, thus, on Thursday, in class, we will need to finalize our list of questions. And before we do that, we need a robust set of questions to start with that we can combine, narrow, focus, edit, tweak into a list of 5 to 7 questions you can email your alums and then, either via email or zoom or FaceTime or what have you, get some answers for. 

To begin, let me remind you of what you came up with in class on Tuesday: 
Draft/possible questions for alums

• How do you differentiate within the same class? 
  
• How do you manage behavior?
  
• What are some challenges when transitioning from student to teacher? (LT: I think this is a really powerful question)
  
• Suggestions for classroom management?
  
• Tactics for handling individual needs?
  
• What do you do when students are clearly uninterested/bored in the lesson?
  
• How do you motivate a student who does not care/is not motivated?
  
• How would you assess the first day of school/teaching and then beyond?
  
• How to get the students AND other faculty to take you seriously as a new/young teacher?

There is a lot of repetition here and I think that when all is said and done there are really one or two questions that will come out of it. 

Here is a question that I always include in this assignment and will again this time. I post it here to give you a sense of of how you might shape your questions in order to elicit more than a few sentences and/or yes/no answers--which will not be helpful to you as you write your paper. Good questions are at the heart of all research, and, in particular, qualitative research (which an interview is). 

"if you had to tell one story that summed up your teaching career--one story about a student, about a class, about a year, about a professional experience--what would that one story be and why does it sum up your career?"

WHAT TO POST: Please post one question you want to ask an alum. If you think someone else has posted a good question, you can simply post whose question you think is a good one. Remember, we want roughly 5 to 7 questions to begin with. No need to do anything else and there is no word count. Simply post your question. We'll review and make final selections, word-smithing decisions in class on Thursday.