From my undergraduate experiences as a writing center consultant to teaching middle level learners as an early career teacher and write up to my current work as a teacher educator, I continue to learn with and from my students. For more on my teaching philosophy, please see the essay below that I crafted in 2019.
Philosophy of Teaching: Introduction
From middle school students in my early career to the undergraduate and adult learners I work with now, I have taught students in a variety of settings and at many stages of life. In my current role — as a professor who is primarily responsible for teaching educational technology courses — I balance the needs of online and on-campus learners, from honors freshmen to doctoral candidates. And, in all of these contexts, I return to three key themes that guide my teaching practice: engagement, collaboration, and authenticity.
These three themes permeate all that I do, from modeling classroom instruction for pre-service teachers to facilitating online doctoral seminars with Zoom. Woven into my out-of-classroom practices, too, these ideas help me prepare meaningful assignments and provide feedback to students.
So, as I recognize the value in collaboration and in creating engaging and authentic activities, I also know that, sometimes, my attempts to innovate fail. I leave students asking clarifying questions because my instructions are unclear. They are not sure what to do for a group task, or how to engage in substantive research. I feel both joy and tension in my teaching, finding moments where my flexible and open-ended style works well for students, and other times where they expect more traditional methods, timelines, and rubrics.
Over time, I have come to recognize that varied types of guidance — for group activities in class, inquiry outside of class, or pieces of writing that they produce — is essential. And, over many years of teaching, I have become more adept at designing experiences, both inside and outside the classroom, that keep engagement, collaboration, and authenticity at the core of my approach, providing opportunities for students to learn with flexible structures for doing so, as I will outline below.
Building Rapport with Students
Since relationships are at the heart of teaching, I work from our individual bonds to build community in the classroom. Knowing that they will have opportunities to share their ideas, puzzle through open-ended questions, and clarify their thinking without fear of being judged “right” or “wrong,” I rely on collaborative learning structures and both self-selected as well as random groups to keep students engaged with one another.
For face-to-face classes, I will often use structures such as a “turn and talk” to process an activity, or a “visible thinking routines” to help students articulate their ideas. Depending on the topic and the time available, I will sometimes allow them to pick partners and sometimes I will mix them into pairs, trios, or other team sizes. To ensure fairness and make sure that students are communicating with others with whom they would normally not work, I will use a deck of playing cards or, more recently, an online random name generator.
With online classes — in addition to the typical discussion forums on Blackboard and setting up opportunities for Zoom video conferencing — I have also tried to integrate other forms of regular communication that allow for more immediate opportunities to connect. For instance, in a recent graduate course on educational technology, we chose to use a group chat to share voice, images, and text. These conversations can be more authentic and timely, as students engage with ideas from our readings and other course materials in an informal way.
In all cases, I work to actively to listen to students, and demonstrate that listening through paraphrasing and summarizing. I make connections from student to student, encouraging them to converse with one another and recognize the ideas of others. While I can’t guarantee that they will always come together as a learning community, many students do report that they have collaborated more — and in more substantive ways — in my courses than they have previously experienced.
Building a Sense of Community
Since relationships are at the heart of teaching, I work from our individual bonds to build community in the classroom. Knowing that they will have opportunities to share their ideas, puzzle through open-ended questions, and clarify their thinking without fear of being judged “right” or “wrong,” I rely on collaborative learning structures and both self-selected as well as random groups to keep students engaged with one another.
For face-to-face classes, I will often use structures such as a “turn and talk” to process an activity, or a “visible thinking routines” to help students articulate their ideas. Depending on the topic and the time available, I will sometimes allow them to pick partners and sometimes I will mix them into pairs, trios, or other team sizes. To ensure fairness and make sure that students are communicating with others with whom they would normally not work, I will use a deck of playing cards or, more recently, an online random name generator.
With online classes — in addition to the typical discussion forums on Blackboard and setting up opportunities for Zoom video conferencing — I have also tried to integrate other forms of regular communication that allow for more immediate opportunities to connect. For instance, in a recent graduate course on educational technology, we chose to use a group chat to share voice, images, and text. These conversations can be more authentic and timely, as students engage with ideas from our readings and other course materials in an informal way.
In all cases, I work to actively to listen to students, and demonstrate that listening through paraphrasing and summarizing. I make connections from student to student, encouraging them to converse with one another and recognize the ideas of others. While I can’t guarantee that they will always come together as a learning community, many students do report that they have collaborated more — and in more substantive ways — in my courses than they have previously experienced.
Creating Clear and High Expectations
Over many years, I have been working through different accountability systems, aiming to set high expectations while allowing for flexibility, holding students accountable while providing them with options. Moving along a continuum from strict rubrics and deadline for every assignment to a very open-ended form of “contract grading,” I have shifted back and forth, working out effective ways of having students submit work, then offer them feedback, and, when necessary, require revisions of them.
In recent semesters, I have settled in on a pattern where about 60 to 75% of a course grade will come from “pass/fail” assignments and the remaining 25 to 40% will be determined from items that will be graded via rubric. For the pass/fail assignments, students are invited to submit their best work and to know that — while they will receive feedback — I am more interested in their attempt to take intellectual risks and be creative. These assignments provide students with opportunities to explore new ideas without fear of failure. For the graded assignments, I again ask them to submit their best work, and to know that they should be mindful of very specific criteria. For instance, I will create rubrics with specific elements about the organization and depth of their writing. Here, the expectations are higher and the grading more rigorous, and again appropriate feedback will follow.
These two kinds of assignments are sprinkled throughout the semester to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to earn at least a B, so long as they are putting forth an earnest effort. In both cases, I provide them with opportunities to “revise and resubmit,” noting that work is “never done, just due.” We are all on a journey of learning, and these are just snapshots. By capturing their best efforts, over time, the student and I are able to move forward in personal, meaningful ways as individuals, and these interactions guide my instruction for the whole class as well.
Increasing Students’ Knowledge
Knowing when, why, and how to use educational technology is a slippery goal. And, in embracing these more abstract goals of engagement, collaboration, and authenticity, it is difficult to measure learning through a traditional quiz or test. To know, with certainty, that I have increased the knowledge level of my students, I rely on both process and product-related demonstrations of learning. This can best be explained through an assignment that I do with one of my graduate courses in educational technology, EDU 807.
With the EDU 807 course, one of the assignments that I have designed invites students to fully explore a new educational technology tool, moving through subsequent rounds of revision. They initially write a brief blog post about the tool (in week one), then compose a more thorough review (in week two), and finally, in week three, record a screencast. Then, I provide feedback each week, helping them think about new possibilities for using that tool in various teaching contexts.
Throughout that process, I try out the tools that they are sharing and give them feedback on what they have written, all in an effort to make the next stage of their process even stronger. This reciprocity is beneficial for my doctoral students and for me as well, as we usually ask questions of one another and continue to push our creative thinking about the use of the tool in new directions. In particular, in asking them to move beyond a typical “how-to” instructional video, I encourage my students to develop a specific pedagogical approach with their screencast. They need to teach us, as fellow educators, how to use the tech tool to meet a specific, academic goal, and make connections to content area standards.
This is one example that illustrates how I increase students’ knowledge and skills, relying less on a one-time demonstration of mastery and, instead, shows an intentional, scaffolded approach that builds their competency and confidence over time.
Engaging and Inspiring Students to Learn
To promote engagement — which leads to opportunities for genuine collaboration and sharing one’s work in authentic contexts — I employ a variety of teaching strategies and assignment designs.
First, I provide students with weekly announcements (via Bb) and an agenda for each class session. While I will sometimes rely on an element of surprise in a lesson to make a point clear, it is never because I am trying to be intentionally confusing, or at risk of falling too far off track. Even in the midst of teaching — especially courses for my pre-service teachers — I will sometimes pause and “step out of character,” asking my students to think through the activities in which we had recently completed. We debrief the moves that I made, as a teacher, and discuss how they, as learners, were thinking and feeling during different activities.
Second, I use strategies that are variously described as “active learning” or “high leverage practices.” For instance, during any one hour class session that an observer might watch — whether face-to-face or online through a Zoom meeting — they would see that my students are likely to have at least one opportunity to pair/share with a classmate, and to have a few minutes to process their experience with a writing-to-learn activity. Often, we use collaborative technologies like Google Docs to create a resource for the class, reflecting on our learning and providing links to additional resources.
Third, to encourage engagement, I know that choice matters. To the extent that I am able, I always offer students choice in at least one aspect of their learning whether that might be the specific topic they are studying or the format in which they represent their work. For instance, in my EDU 290 (WI) and HON 206 (WI) courses this fall, I have provided “learning pathways” in which students can choose different readings, tasks, and technologies for sharing their work, and they have risen to the occasion to produce podcasts, infographics, videos, and websites.
Applying Content to Real Life
In both my technology-related methods courses as well as writing-intensive courses about social structures, the applications of both writing and technology skills are, to my good fortune as an educator, boundless. The “content” of these courses is less about specific genres of writing or educational technology apps, and more about what students can do with the content once they have learned about it.
In our everyday lives, we see a variety of text types flash on our screens, ranging from the written word to photographs, videos, infographics. In all my courses, I am constantly thinking about how to make aspects of the writing process more present, including explorations of the genre and media, as well as invitations to share with audiences outside of the classroom. As a specific example, my HON 206 (WI) students explore their own interests through digital authorship. Exploring what it means to lead a digital life, they create a variety of projects including short video narratives, by all, and by individual choice, may create interactive maps, websites, podcasts, infographics, and other multimodal projects.
For doctoral students in my EDU 807 course, their final project in the semester is to lead a webinar about a chose set of tools with a specific pedagogical goal. Through the process of preparing — and then delivering — the webinar, these students must thinking critically and creatively about how to utilize the tools in a manner that other educators can understand and apply for themselves. Rather than simply writing a paper about the tools, I ask them to actively demonstrate what they have learned to other educators who can benefit from their knowledge and experience.
Again, the “content” of my courses is often elusive, and students have a great deal of flexibility in the ways that they demonstrate mastery of that content. In whatever manner they choose, my goal is to have them move beyond a test, taking what they have learned and making it accessible for others.