Month: February 2018

I’ve never taught a class before nor do I currently teach. I just know that if my career path leads me into the academic world of research, I better be prepared to teach, and do it well! I showed interest in wanting to gain some experience by teaching and I have been told multiple times that having teaching experience isn’t necessary as a researcher, even if I end up at a university! Maybe some people whose passions lie in research might agree, but this always frustrates me because I have had some BAD classroom experiences in my life and definitely don’t want this cycle to continue. This is where Sarah E. Deel’s prologue really resonated with me, how she talked about receiving very little guidance about teaching during graduate school. Even if I am not in a “classroom”, as a researcher I will likely be a mentor and having some of these teaching skills is very important to me. Anyway, I knew I had to figure out the foundation of my teaching style & voice so here I am taking this Contemporary Pedagogy class as an elective, although I know that my authentic teaching self will evolve over time.

Like Sarah E. Deel discussed in her paper, I often think back to the teacher’s I’ve had in my lifetime, the good and the bad, and try to figure out what made them that way and how I could use that information to become a better teacher. The discussions we’ve had and ideas we’ve shared in class so far have really been helping me visualize how I would want my classroom to look. For instance I want to implement an assessment techniques that would not require grades. Some of the ideas I really like are things like focusing on doing more experiential and mindful learning in the class that would help remove the wrong type of motivation that come with grades. I still struggle when I think about how I would get students to be interested in the learning if I am for instance teaching a required course or teaching a class of 100 students. It’s really hard for me describe myself as a teacher because I just haven’t been in that role yet, and I don’t want to limit myself to a description I set for myself now. I think every class that I teach will be different. Until I get to that point, I hope the one or two guest lectures I might get the chance to do, I can practice some of these concepts and start to build my authentic teaching self.

Authentic teaching is something I have thought about in the past when I am in front of students. I have never taught a class before and teaching is not something that I hope to pursue in the future. However, within my field I will be facilitating workshops. I resonated with Deel’s reflection “Finding my Teaching Voice”, because I usually feel like I have imposter syndrome when I am in front of students. I am not a “edu-tainer” and do not conduct myself as someone who attempts to be comedic. What I care about is getting information across to students in a way that allows them to be engaged in their own learning process. However, this is something that I struggle with. Some of my peers and colleagues are able to make their presentations, workshops, or classes engaging through activities. Creativity with activities continues to be something that I am working on. Thus far my approach has been to provide hands-on learning and provide opportunities for questions. I have no problem repeating an exercise or attempting various ways to explain a concept. I do often wonder if it is enough. Sometimes activities seems like a time sucker and do not convey concepts in a memorable way.

Like Deel, I hope students will find me to be approachable, but I want them to use critical thinking skills. I want students to be able to learn information and gives them an opportunity to question what they are learning. In one of my classes a successful tool was team quizzes. Every student was required to do an individual quiz and team quiz to master readings. I do not agree with individual quizzes because I feel like they do not do a good job of measuring success. However, team quizzes were useful because peers rely on one another to come up with the correct answers. If students got an answer wrong they always had the opportunity to appeal and provide evidence to support their answers. Formal teaching in a classroom is not something that will be part of my career, but I consider myself to be an educator and will find my own way of authentic teaching.

As someone that is endeavoring to go into the student affairs side of higher education, I won’t really be engaging students in the traditional style of “in-classroom” learning as often as others in this particular class. However, I have had the opportunity to engage Resident Advisors in a leadership building class, where we discuss challenges they face as a first year RA working with their residents.

When I think about my personality, I consider myself more of a casual and laid back person and I used that style while facilitating this class on a weekly basis. As my first time in this type of setting as the facilitator, I never thought about being anything else but myself going into the class, so this idea of posturing that Professor Fowler brings up was never a thought that crossed my mind. I can see how this could be something that a new professor may struggle with as teaching does not always come natural to everyone and can be something that needs to be developed over time with practice.

The Freire reference about teaching being directive and as a teacher you aren’t on the same playing field as your students I think helps a new professor start to gain the confidence that they are the instructor and the tone of the class is started with them. One the same note, I think that thought also goes hand in had with the banking theory concept, which should be balanced if you are truly to recognize your students as both learners and teachers in various moments.

In my class, we always started off asking each RA how their week was and if there were any issues that arose, we allowed other RAs in the class to offer tips and suggestions on how to potentially handle the situations. Then as the instructor, I can offer additional input if needed. This helped to create an environment where all thoughts and opinions felt valued and considered.

As a future instructor, I am fascinated to think and figure out who I will be as a teacher before I stuck in teaching my first class after graduation. What was said by Professor Fowler, first,  I need to answer these questions:

1. How can I be genuine, sincere, and fully present in the classroom?
2. How do I avoid posturing?
3. How do I convey authority without being a strict authoritarian?
4. How do I build rapport among all participants?
5. How do I structure class sessions for optimum engagement and coverage?

Most of us start building our future teaching approach based on our experience through all these years as a student: what did we like the most? What did we hate? What did help us in learning the content? About all encouragement and motivations! And about discouragement and stresses! We want to empower the strength of our previous teacher in our teaching style and eliminate all weakness. All of us know that bad teacher can affect and hinder students’ education for years, and this is what we don’t want to be! Nevertheless, the question is how to achieve this goal?

Sarah E. Deel well said it is beneficial to search and obtain more information about techniques for developing and facilitating good communication skills between you and among/between the students with whom you will be working, but these techniques are not sufficient to make you a perfect authentic teacher. To be an authentic teacher, we should cultivate our teaching style based on our personality and skills.  Professor Fowler emphasized this point by mentioning that we “Must work to discover who you are as a teacher and choose the techniques that work in concert with being authentic in the classroom.” Thinking and exploring my personality and capabilities, I am sure that I do not want to spend or (I can say) waste my energy and time to be someone I am not or pretend how cool I am (that I am not at all!). I must decide what types of strategies or teaching techniques work for me rather than simply spend my time and energy to be someone else and employ all techniques in my classes.

Therefore, although I hope and am doing my best to get an academic job at land-grant universities which my teaching responsibility will be far less than research responsibility, I believe that my teaching matters. I came to believe that being a good teacher is a continuous process that we need to re-evaluate ourselves to develop and refine our pedagogical approach.

The reading about Satra E. Deel experience about how to teach had many good points. She touched on some topics that almost all of us more or less are dealing with. I personally believe that the first important step is to give students a brief pedagogical explanation about what subjects are going to be covered in the course. Justification of the reasons why a student should or should not take that specific course we are teaching, would help them along the long run to have a clear understanding why each topic is brought up within the course. It is like a couple of scenarios, either to give somebody pieces of puzzle and not even tell him/her what the puzzle is about and what is the expected picture, or tell the same person the whole picture of the puzzle first and help him/her to complete it. Therefore, with in the course, students always have the big picture and some sense which help them not to get lost and stay on the right track.

Another important issue is to try to share the true yourself to the students, and describe what kind of a person you are. This makes them understand that the teacher is not only an honest person, but also trustable enough, who genuinely would try to help them. For this, some of the actions that seems odd at first place for me would have been so much easier to understand or justify if the teacher told me about his/her personality so that I could relate the actions in the classroom to the actual personality of the teacher better. That is one of the reasons why different strategies for teaching would be as much as effective to the same extent because students would understand and appreciate the differences between various teaching philosophies.

I agree with the idea that there are many ways to be an effective teacher and build a nice environment with the students. Based on the Palmer’s ideas the more you bring yourself to your teaching, the better teacher you will be and it’s better to remember that kids don’t remember what you try to teach them some times, but they definitely remember what you are [Jim Henson]. I know graduate students are given little guidance during their studies in the school about teaching and the type of issues that Satra also mentioned about through her experience of teaching. So, the right teaching methodology is as important as what we have learned in our fields, if not even more.