Revising My Teaching Philosophy, Part II

Whereas teaching philosophies generally develop from your experiences as a teacher, my revised teaching philosophy has emerged from my experiences facilitating various professional development activities and working one-on-one with faculty designing, developing, and/or revising their courses. I found myself needing a way to get folks to think about how and why they were designing research & writing assignments as well as using technologies in their courses. In short, my teaching philosophy is now:

Courses need to be organized in modules that provide a variety of content delivery activities, content learning activities, and learning assessment activities; these activities all need to be aligned in terms of their learning outcome as well as in the complexity of skill and thinking.

Stereotypical math teachers, you know, the ones that don’t exist, provide the best and worst examples of this philosophy. I’m sure most know of the stereotypical way of math instruction:

• the teacher delivers the content by demonstrating a few examples of a formula on a chalkboard ,
• she provide the student with opportunities to learn the content by assigning 20 problems for homework, then
• the students demonstrate their learning by taking a quiz or test.

And then the stereotypical way that this philosophy falls all apart is when the math instructor only demonstrates formulas, only gives formulas for homework, and then asks the students to do word problems on the test. The delivery and learning activities were out of alignment with the assessment activity.

This teaching philosophy accounts for a variety of learning styles; instructors need to make their materials accessible for different learning style as they deliver content, facilitate learning activities, and assess learning. Similarly, faculty should also try to follow guidelines suggested by brain research, things like engaging multiple senses and needing to repeat. However, my favorite part of this teaching philosophy is the explicit category of “learning activities.” Whereas the math and science instructors are generally pretty good about making sure students have low stakes activities to practice new concepts and skills, sometimes those of us in the humanities and social sciences forget to provide these learning activities. I also like that if faculty are transparent with this teaching philosophy, it places learning accountability into the hands of the students.

I’ve started developing some multimedia to help tell the story of my new philosophy…

June 27 2010 | Posted in