The spot instructor adjustments to student interests

This study uses a new methodological technique to evaluate how instructors in a quarter long professional development course designed for new instructional assistants (IAs) modified their lesson plans in response to revealed student interests. Ethnographic data collection revealed to researchers that there was significant variation in student interests across course subjects. It also revealed that the instructors leading the professional development program made numerous adjustments to their original plans -- some of these adjustments occuring within the same class period. This paper builds on these insights to demonstrate that instructors respond to both implicit and explicit student cues about what students are interested in and engage with. It further provides a typology of potential instructor reactions. When students reveal their interests, instructors can choose (1) not to modify; (2) to change their examples to those that students will find relevant; (3) to reallocate their agenda for the class; or (4) to incorporate student interests into future lesson plans. This work seeks both to broaden the literature to incorporate new techniques for collecting student information and to encourage future work about how instructors use of this information.