Here you can see my teaching philosophy at the end of the Fall 2016 Semester teaching ISUComm 150 at Iowa State University. For my original, mid-semester teaching philosophy, click here.
Being between majors for half of my college career, I ended up finding inspiration for my teaching style from my professors that predominately made up my junior and senior year courses. This was after I had changed majors from History to English Writing. Fittingly then, I had an almost equal balance between creative writing and literature courses and saw many of those classes taught by the same professors in a similar manner. This history of mine, coupled with interest in literature and creative writing, made the teaching styles favoured in those classes my favoured style as well. Said styles emphasized class-wide discussion where the goal of the class was set out by the instructor but its interpretation and exploration was in the hands of the students. Something worth noting, which I’ll focus more on later, is that the classes almost never used group work/group discussion unless it pertained to the overall discussion theme for the class. Needless to say then, I ended up bringing this focus on conversation and freeform engagement of ideas (alongside skepticism of group work) to my classroom for ISUComm 150, though the extra dimension of group work would come later, and not without trials.
I think I had put somewhat undue pressure on myself throughout the semester, which has come back to frustrate my plans occasionally but also let me see the benefits of my current teaching style. More specifically, since, as mentioned before, I tended to thrive in discussion-based classrooms in my undergraduate, I wanted to bring that kind of communal melting-pot feeling to my class. However, in the waning weeks of the semester, I found that my students were relying evermore on me to provide them with conversation starters or strict directions, as if a right answer could be achieved from our discussions (oftentimes I simply wanted them to wrestle with ideas, not find some magic bullet to achieve the answer I wanted them to arrive at); a direct example of that (though, it is also one that definitely worked out for the better) is shown in my second lesson plan showcase. Still, my students deferred to my judgement and knowledge more than I would have liked, especially since that tendency was more prevalent at the end of the semester than the beginning. Not only did I feel that this dependency cheapened parts of the learning process, such as understanding self-reliability where would they take learning into their own hands. Plus, the old mantra of, “teach students how to think, not what to think,” is very large part of who I am as an instructor, so if they lose on out on the chance to be autonomous with their thinking, only contributing to the class discussion with what they believe I want, that is another disservice to them.
And yet, I would not, by any stretch of the imagination, say that this semester was a failure for myself as a teacher; my qualms and doubts are more like directional indicators to where I can improve, rather than black splotches on my record. Indeed, I don’t believe I would be paying so much attention to the nuanced flows of conversation in my class if such dynamics did not figure strongly into my pedagogy and teaching style. As mentioned before, I’ve been heavily influenced by the literature and creative writing courses late in my college career. Said classes were heavily focused on learning in a class-wide discussion environment where individual thought and creativity was emphasized. These classes were hugely influential on how I teach. In an extension of the maxim that professors should teach students how to think, not what to think, I personally want to show my students where the water is, but not lead them to it. The favourite response of mine during class discussions is the simple, “Why?” or “How did you arrive at that point?” Even if the student’s answer is incongruent with the goal or what other students have said, I learned through my favourite courses and from my favourite professors that new knowledge can spring from anywhere, even if it is simply inspired by an incorrect examination or understanding of a piece of work/idea. So, especially after reading articles like Sara Jane Coffman’s Ten Strategies for Getting Students to Take Responsibility for Their Learning, I was relieved to see that my ideas of asking questions of my students that they may not have been explicitly ready to answer about the “hows” and “whys” of thinking had some scholarly weight behind them. More specifically about the Coffman article, she says, “… classrooms can be a place for young people to learn to defend their views, hear alternate perspectives, and redefine their belief systems. Use discussions and questions as often as possible.” (Coffman, 3)1
I truly do believe that college is meant to be a cauldron of ideas, with egalitarianism offered at every opportunity and contention is not only healthy, but necessary. And, if students are to participate in this society, itself a rarity in the outside world of pithy social media “news” articles and tweets and growing partisanship, students must first believe that they are in an environment that nurtures their voices and their creative thoughts. Even if I was only teaching a basic communications course that all students of all majors need to take (or at least test out of), I felt obligated to begin instilling that confidence to speak up as well as the intuition to look inward and ask those seemingly-simple questions of “how” and “why.” And, though I honestly couldn’t say that I understood this goal of mine in such concise and clear terms, I had set out from the beginning of this semester to give my students that kind of autonomy to think for themselves and, perhaps just as importantly but much less natural for many, talk to each other without fear or condescension. So, fittingly, this will continue to be a goal of mine. And yet, the “how” of establishing that environment and achieving the end result of independence and open communication is clear to me only at this moment. I feel that each class will require a different key to unlock their potentials, though, for now at least, I think I have a way of reaching out to students that has worked thus far.
I believe that in order to expect that kind of frankness/openness from a class’ discussions, a good rapport must first be established. Without the assurance that the professor is kind, caring, and open to all ideas, students will be hesitant to voice their opinions. After reading Staben and Dempsey Nordhaus’ article, Looking at the Whole Text, I was able to see why, especially when it comes to ESL students who may not be as confident in readily speaking up in class. Nordhaus wrote, “If you simply tell ESL writers that they need to put a thesis sentence near the beginning of the essay… you are not helping them understand what you know instinctually…” (Staben & Dempsey, 76)2 After reading that article, I was paying especially close attention to my English Second-Language learners during discussions; I wanted to ensure that my ESL students were not only getting useful feedback in peer review sessions and during class discussions but were also able to communicate their own perspectives just as well. My ESL students have consistently performed near the top of the class for virtually the entire semester, though I rarely heard their voices in class in the first few weeks. However, as I established a rapport with my students over time, my ESL students became steadily-more open with not just myself, but with their other classmates. It was from watching my more introverted students slowly open to each other first and then to the whole class that I realized the real effect a rapport can have: it can establish cultural norms for the microcosm that is the classroom. So, by being an open, sociable, and laid-back professor, it signaled to the rest of my class that such behavior was acceptable, or even encouraged.
Granted, this rapport has also come back to haunt me on occasion; sometimes my students will, to put it bluntly, be typical young adults. They would chat with each other, laugh, whisper, etcetera. To be honest, none of that was exactly surprising to me, and while it’s still a bother in class, I would much rather my students be comfortable enough with each other to speak openly, in some cases as friends, than to be wholly silent or, even worse, uninterested in any given class period. Still, this is where some my doubts about my rapport-heaving teaching style spring from. I do worry about a class that is either formal or stiff beyond cracking with some charisma or vivacity, two things I pride myself on when in front of the class. Additionally, I fear that a class that sees my rapport as something to be taken advantage of, rather than respected, would attempt to trample over my instruction because they think, incorrectly, that just because I am friendly and open with my class that I will be lax on the rules or easy in grading. Naturally then, I want to keep an eye on how teaching skills as they mature in the future, still using my class as a barometer to see how comfortable they feel at any given point so that our conversations can remain lucrative and my students will come to know their own ideas better.
Perhaps this is unsurprising, but I had learned the most about teaching and what kind of teacher I was from my own class, via our class-wide discussions. Naturally, I still read and thought upon the reflections my students provided to me about their assignments and their own views on the class, but gauging the energy, openness, and interest of the class served as the best barometer for how well my methods of teaching were working. Having come to classroom teaching with just a bit of experience (about nine months of English/Reading/Writing ACT Tutoring), I was most interested, upon starting teaching, to see how my predispositions about what made a good classroom and a good professor in action. I had come into to teaching convinced of the greatness of my aforementioned professors and their teaching styles, and while I still don’t doubt the effectiveness of their methods, I do realize now that my favourite professors taught predominately high-level classes in literature and creative writing. Still, I thought that my infatuation with those two types of courses could be translated verbatim into a basic-level communications course. However, I found that there was much more I could do to reach out to and teach the wide variety of students I would be put in charge of; as a point of interest, the students that responded the most immediately and enthusiastically to my teaching style were the students in liberal arts fields which mostly included psychology, design, and theatre. So, it was through gauging my class’ engagement, energy, and thoroughness in our discussions and their reflections that I determined that I needed to adjust my pedagogy to better reach out to the diversity of majors and personalities in my course. For that, it was my ENGL 500 class and the discussions/readings we used in that class which proved the most useful to improving my teaching style.
Having studied extensively in creative writing classes that centered around workshopping pieces of writing as a class, I decided to adapt my experiences into group peer review. Given how small my creative writing classes were, it was a surprisingly easy transition to working with peer review in my own classes. However, I wasn’t actually aware of the intricacies of peer review that would be required to accommodate the papers more suitable to a Communications course and not the creative writing classes I was used to. For instance, when talking about peer review, Fiona Paton mentioned that she had, at first, assumed that her students would not only know how to do constructive peer review in groups, but also understand the intrinsic merit behind it. However, she said that, “[The students] were often less than enthused, viewing the process as busywork with no tangible benefits.” (Paton, 291)3 Because peer review was so vital to my own education, I too had forgotten just how strange working with college-level writing in groups of strangers can be. Which is why I chose to take Paton’s advice, in which she says, “…[Paton] find[s] it helpful to give students a brief overview of the pedagogical rationale behind group work, partly to move them beyond the negative association with busywork and partly to emphasize that group work is a skill that needs to be learned like any other.” (Paton, 291)3 After my first round of peer review, which I detailed here with a reflection piece, I followed up by using a class construction to better facilitate peer review by cutting group sizes in half and assigning specific jobs (mostly First Responder and Recorder) to the group members. By beginning the class with a discussion over what went well or not so well, the class was already primed to better understand the rationale behind good peer review.
Along with that, I adapted the idea of smaller groups for subsequent group review sessions; not only was it, by my observation, superior to large groups, but was encouraged by my mentor and through more of our readings in my 500 class. More specifically, in Shimazoe and Aldrich’s article, Group Work Can be Gratifying: Understanding & Overcoming Resistance to Cooperative Learning, they say, “CL advocates agree that groups should be kept relatively small… based on our experience, we believe the ceiling on group size should be four, given that the chance of shirking/social loafing among group members will exponentially increase with group size.” (Shimazoe and Aldrich, 54)4 Thus, after only one class period of working with peer review, I had decided to cut down the average review group size from around eight to three (the lesson plan is linked here for more elaboration). Unfortunately, due to absences and the like, some groups would eventually do their reviews in groups of four, but the efficiency and effectiveness of peer review ended up improving exponentially afterwards.
Something else I ended up working with in terms of peer review was working providing guiding questions for my students. Because I prefer to drift around the classroom while my students are working, I’ll listen in to their conversations and add plying questions as needed to facilitate the continuing and deepening of the group discussion. However, I found that, as I referenced earlier with my qualms about not letting my students be as autonomous as I’d like to them be, I would oftentimes provide (sometimes very long) discussion questions on the board for students to reference. However, I fear that I demanded too much too suddenly of students without formally breaking down the rationale behind those discussion questions (here is a link to an example of these questions from Assignment #3), so my students would oftentimes ignore them, rather than work deeply with them until I posed them personally to whatever group I was speaking to. In Keri Franklin’s article, Thank you for Sharing: Developing Students’ Social Skills to Improve Peer Writing Conferences, she mentions that Peter Elbow said, “’Plain sharing leads to better responding. It helps writers become more comfortable reading their writing out loud because they don’t have to worry about how to respond’ (42).” (Franklin, 82)5 By simplifying the criteria for my students during peer review sessions, I’ve seen them start to get to the heart of the matter as they understand it, rather than how I want them to understand it. Naturally, I still do insert myself into conversations or simply listen in into every group at least once, so while I was more content to let my students have more autonomous control over their peer review, I was still able to help direct them if difficulties or questions arose (which, thankfully, they do— learning from mistakes, to me, is just as valuable as learning from successes after all).
After having experience and critically observing my students at work in their peer review sessions, I found myself using similar grading and feedback strategies which I had learned from my creative writing classes and professors. In particular, the two most influential professors on my styles of writing, teaching, and reading, Michael Theune and Kathleen O’Gorman, inspired me to create my feedback style (for a specific example of a few feedback examples, click here). As a result, my feedback style focused heavily on in-text feedback which centers on asking questions of the students and their thought process with final thoughts expressed in a single short paragraph. In a re-examination of Nancy Sommer’s Responding to Student Writing, Sommers writes, “As teachers… we comment students’ writing to demonstrate the presence of a reader, to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves.” (Sommers, 246)6 I internalized that mentality to truly emphasize my use of questions, so as to direct the process of learning back on the students; as they read through the feedback scattered throughout the paper, positioned to be like reactions as I read the piece, students will not only be thinking more on the role an audience plays as they write, but also they will be more likely to re-examine their own ideas and thought processes. In other words, my central teaching philosophy centered on autonomous thought and learning though engagement with ideas, especially ones with answers left open to interpretation (hence why I ask questions rather than give answers), has even pervaded this aspect of my teaching. Sommers also mentions later in the same article, “If our comments move students forward as writers, they do so because such comments resonate with some with some aspect of their writing that our students are already thinking about.” (Sommers, 250)6 Again, I chose to adapt this mindset to turn feedback on student papers into a kind of micro-lesson, one where students can take what they have learned during the unit and entire class and learn more about their own individualized thought processes and writing styles. And yet, while working with individual thought processes and papers, I didn’t have nearly as much experience with group work during my undergraduate— fittingly then, throughout the semester and even going forward, I had my worries about the merits of group work.
Again, coming from a small (around two-thousand students) liberal arts undergraduate college, I had never had much chance to experience group work like the kind championed in ENGL 500 or through the myriad of articles I ended up reading during my time in it. Given the small class sizes and more specific focus I found in my literature and creative writing courses, I hadn’t fully seen in action group-based discussions in the classroom, so hearing from my peers and reading the various academic sources this semester on the subject helped me understand the strengths of that teaching method. For instance, in Cheryl Glenn and Melissa A. Goldthwaite’s book, The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, Glenn and Goldthwaite says about lecture heavy-courses, “Lectures in writing course, however, tend to be less helpful to students… the ‘practical knowledge’ of writing cannot be gained by listening to lectures… you’ll want to set up a learning situation that allows students to practice the skill.” (61)7 I had been hesitant to work with something I was personally unfamiliar with when teaching my class, but after reading the literature on group work and also hearing of success stories (and observing one them in action, seen here), I decided to try to incorporate more of it into my classroom. An important note, though, is that I, again referencing all of my time spent in workshop-style creative writing classes, very heavily emphasized group peer review, usually with students numbering four or more. However, I admit that, similar to how my rapport may have established an unduly nonprofessional air in the classroom, I ended up, more than once, caving to the desires of my class over my own ambitions for a given class period. More accurately, because my students were not used to non-peer review group work, they were also hesitant to begin working with something new nearly halfway through the semester. And, compiled with my own hesitations, I found that rather than attempt something new and potentially opening the way to a failure of a class period, which I thought was ultimately a failing on my part where I allowed my class to stagnate into our set ways, especially when I so often push the ideas of learning and gaining new knowledge from a variety of sources and perspectives.
And yet (I apologize if I’m taking a lot of space to talk about these small details, but that’s always where I’ve thrived, which is another trait I’d love for my students to pick up and wield for themselves), when I did begin to integrate group work more heavily into my classroom (click here for where I explore the class period and lesson plan where I started to make this change), I saw that class-wide discussions were more natural and open as a result. I believe, seeing some of my more introverted students suddenly turn into some of the more sociable and contributing members of my class, I realized that by allowing students to, so to speak, spin their wheels and sharpen their ideas and comfort with their peers, then they would be apt contributors to overall discussions. This became especially apparent after the aforementioned paradigm-shifting lesson plan and my students approached the work for Assignment #4’s subjective visual work and #5’s reimagining of an older work; their imaginations were spurred by their greater connection to each other. I noticed that even peer review work on papers and presentations grew more productive and independent of my input. In contrast to the earlier statement about directing peer review, I allowed (and am still allowing) my students to be more autonomous with their review work and not be so constrained by my admittedly-verbose guiding questions.
So, examining this semester as a whole, I think I can say that, for my first time in front of a classroom, I exceeded many of my own expectations and found reasonably-strong success in implementing what I find to be valuable in teaching, particularly in teaching writing. By connecting to my students in a friendly, albeit not unprofessionally so, and letting them become mostly-autonomous in their learning, I think I saw in action what I had been already appreciating for years. What comes now is a matter of refining and sharpening what has already worked or, perhaps, reconsidering the true merits of my style if the coming semesters present me with new and unexpected challenges.
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Sources Cited:
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Coffman, Sara Jane. “Ten Strategies for Getting Students to Take Responsibility for Their Learning.” College Teaching 51.1 (2006): 2-4. Print.2.
Staben, Jennifer, and Kathryn Dempsey Nordhaus. “Looking at the Whole Text.” ESL Writers:
A Guide for Writing Center Tutors. Ed. Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth. Portsmouth, NH:
3.
Paton, Fiona. “Approaches to Productive Peer Review.” Strategies for Teaching First-Year
Composition. Ed. Duane Roen, et al. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2002. 290-301. Print.
4.
Shimazoe, Junko, and Howard Aldrich. “Group Work Can Be Gratifying: Understanding and
Overcoming Resistance to Cooperative Learning.” College Teaching 58.2 (2010): 52-57.
5.
Franklin, Keri. “Thank You for Sharing: Developing Students’ Social Skills to Improve Peer Writing Conferences.” English Journal 99.5 (2010): 79-84. Print.
6.
Sommers, Nancy. “Across the Drafts” (part of “Re-visions: Rethinking Nancy Sommers’s
‘Responding to Student Writing,’ 1982”). CCC 58.2 (2006): 246-57. Print.