For those of you teaching an IF sponsored course this Fall (2010) semester, we’d like you to post blog entries at least 4 times during the semester.  We invite you to use these blog posts to reflect upon and share some of your course experiences. We hope that the blog format will allow for an expanded conversation about these topics. For your first entry, to be posted by this Friday, October 1st, please tell us how you are setting up your student discussion groups.  As you think about how you are creating these working groups, you might find it helpful to review Section Four of the Guidebook for Student Centered Discussions. Here are some of the things you might want to write about:

• How are you grouping students together? What mixes of students are you looking for, or what kinds of attributes are you using to group the students? How are you discovering these attributes?
• What tasks or roles are you assigning in groups, and how will students be accountable for these tasks?

If there is some other issue or topic that you would prefer to write about, that is fine.  The blog posts often function as a “trouble-shooting” lab, and we hope that Fellows and faculty who are not teaching an IF -sponsored course this semester will post their thoughts and feedback.

If you are teaching a First-Year Seminar course using the IF format, we would be especially interested in hearing about challenges you are facing in conveying the expectations and format of an IF course to first-year students.

Thank you for taking the time to reflect upon and share with us what is happening in your classroom.  We learn a great deal from each of you– and we hope that you also learn from one another.