Sports History in America: Teaching Ideas

Today I received an email confirming what I had long known. I will in fact be the Teaching Assistant for my advisor and his course History of Sports in America. My advisor told me that he was hoping that I'd be assigned to him, but did not lobby for my service. It turns out he did not have to.
This appointment is very exciting to me. I have been working for the past month or so on writing test questions, outlines, and developing a curriculum handbook to accompany the second edition of his textbook. My project is meant to be a right-out-of-the-box simple guide that will allow any one with limited experience to purchase his text and have a course ready to go with almost zero effort. So as you can imagine, I am already quite prepared and excited to help teach the course and perhaps even implements my ideas this fall. Not to mention I took his course last fall and helped proctor the tests for the undergraduates.
After hearing the good news, we corresponded via email tonight and plan to meet to discuss my role and what we'll do tomorrow afternoon. He told me to come prepared with some suggestions. At present we have an enrolment of 58 students, but there is strong possibility that more may add (we are allowed a maximum of 100). There are also two graduate students (although I doubt I have to do anything for them). Last year we had a big issue with attendance and many students received poor grades which indicates a lack of reading. Below are some of my ideas and thoughts on how to change and possibly improve the course.

• Implement weekly quizzes that I would grade and write since (I've already written a ton of questions for this handbook).


• Develop media/picture slide-shows to accompany the lectures (my advisor is old school and simply lectures for an hour from his mind, with no A/V, no notes, etc).


• Take attendance via a sign in sheet or something.


• Provide research assistance via office hours and email to students.


• Create discussion questions where we can have "break out" discussions of some sort.


• Implement a "Media Review" assignment where students review either a book, film, or website -- according to a format I create -- so I can create a comprehensive "Sports History Source Book" website down the road. (This is definitely my pet project that I will do someday).


• Develop a class website on Blackboard with resources and they syllabi, discussion questions, and assignment info sheets (again to embrace the technology trend).

So there are most of my ideas which come from my experience writing curriculum, in education classes as an undergrad, and from just taking a lot of classes over my last 6 years in college! Feel free to add ideas or thoughts on what you would do.

Source: http://admcgregor.blogspot.com/2010/08/sports-history-in-america-teaching.html