Teaching guide

Hey guys,
I'm writing this as a general outline for all of you, on how to teach your classes, and other little things.

This is just a set of guidelines, and really it all comes down to how you choose to teach, but this will hopefully give you what you need to run your classes.

So, the first thing i want to talk about. As some of you will know, most of this year's classes have fewer people in them. This should really change the way you teach, so that instead of teaching to a 30 student class, you should change it to suit the numbers. So there are two different ways to do this.
A) "Does anyone know the answer?" Jess asked the class, looking around, wondering who would answer first
B) "John Smith, do you know the effects of the confundus charm?" Jess asked

Obviously, B is the better technique in teaching. So it should become alot more personal, sort of like tutoring, and a more one on one experience, and classes should be a bit shorter.

Points. Ah, the good old points system. When you finish your classes, or your out of class topics, you need to report your allocated, and taken points from that topic. There are two ways to do this, both work, and both end in the same way
A) You can take a tally for the whole time you do it, tallying the points with every post you make, and then at the end of the topic, posting the points Here
B) You can finish the topic, and trawl through every post you made, tallying all the points you gave or took from the students, then going and reporting them Here

Both work, but as long as the points are posted, whatever you do is fine by me.

During your classes, you should be nice to the students, something lots of people don't seem to acknowledge is that alot of the people playing students are just like you or I, and they're here to have fun. Try and be nice in your classes, and keep your classes fun.

Homework. Once again, it relates to being nice. These people are just on here to have fun, and being landed with a 7000 word essay on the effects of bezoars isn't going to be fun. try and keep them to questions, or summaries, as they're things that relate to the lesson, and don't need to be too long.

You should also have tests at the end of each term, or whenever you deem necessary, keep the results in your vault and use them to assess at the end of the term how your class is going. Also, make sure that the tests only have content you've covered, don't ask your basic potions class how to transfigure things, is basically what i'm getting at.

And also, do your final marks on the O, E, A, P, D, T scale, and use your own judgement for the matter, don't stress over it

Finally, the behind the scenes stuff.

Firstly, you're all moderators of your class forums, and you can all write announcements throughout hogwarts. The way you write an announcement is as follows.

1) Look underneath the "Preview" and "Send buttons" A short bit below it should be a header labeled "Options," possibly shortened, so click the white extend button on the right.

2) You'll see a box filled with options, at the bottom of the box you'll see a section called "Post topic as:" Choose Sonorus for announcements, and it'll be at the top of the forum

Secondly, you all have vaults for your subject here in the staff room. Here you can post what you've covered in you classes, draft your tests, and make general notes on your classes. You can only see your subject's vault, and no one else can see your subject's vault. Use it, or don't, it doesn't bother me.

Finally, have fun, don't do it if you don't want to, no one will force you, and i hope you enjoy being a teacher!

Hope this has helped, Jess.

Hope you don't mind if I add something, Jess, but just as a suggestion from being in this first week of classes; start the lesson in your first post.

If you wait for people to turn up, we end up with an entire thread of people apologising for being late, whereas if you write something like "Professor McGonagall looked at her classroom full of fresh faces and looked forward to another year of illuminating these minds with the wonders of transfiguration...." it's kinda implied that everyone's already in the class and you can get straight to the point.

Yeah, that too, i've noticed as they've started that a lot of classes are moving excruciatingly slow, also, make sure you know how many people are coming, if you've got about half of your students, start, don't wait for more, or you could be there all day, particularly with the smaller classes.