My teaching is guided by two primary beacons: research on human learning and understanding and the very practical concerns of college student life today. As an undergraduate in the DePauw Education Studies program, I learned developmental and transformational theories of learning in adolescents specifically, as I was then studying to become a secondary education teacher. On the ground, my teaching philosophy at the college level has largely developed from this starting point, viewing the college experience (particularly in FYC) as an extension of the high school experience and a transition into professional life.
Meet Them Where They Are, Don’t Leave Them Where You Found Them
Several years ago, one of my PhD advisors told a class of composition students to “Meet your students where they’re at, but don’t leave them where you found them,” a philosophy that sums up developmental approaches to teaching. My doctoral research used the conceptual change theory of learning as its primary framework for understanding how students develop from first-year students of no major or program into experts of their fields in just four years, and that field of research struck my interest due to its foundation in Piaget’s theory of adolescent development. Specifically, Strike, Posner and colleagues describe conceptual change as a mechanism for understanding how an individual accommodates more refined, granular knowledge in specific areas as an adult (the “post-formal operations” stage Piaget was working on when he died).
In the classroom, using this theory means that students must do four things to learn a new concept:
- Identify some dissatisfaction with their current understanding of a concept, whether that’s because it is incorrect or just incomplete
- Encounter an intelligible alternative to their current understanding
- Find the alternative plausible enough to believe
- Find the belief of use of that alternative fruitful.
Every lesson, assignment and project is designed to elicit or advance these four steps on some scale. Courses designed to teach specific skills do this by regularly comparing our current assignments to exemplars, such as a technical writing course using formal National Transportation Safety Board reports as models to build towards. Courses with theory as their main object of study instead treat theoretical models as tools for explaining or predicting phenomena, with each new reading or new theory presented as a more fruitful approach to solving some specific problem.
As a result, I view grades as a representation of process and effort more than quality of products. As long as students are working to improve their skills or knowledge, I should not penalize them for attempting a larger task than they had the skill or time to complete. In this, I follow Bartholomae‘s advice that messy work with a lot of promise and room for growth is far more valuable to a student than pristine work that is safely mediocre. I make my rubrics available to students and explain them for each assignment to encourage some informed risk-taking.
However, as Aristotle would note, risk without reason is not courageous: it’s foolhardiness. I do not want to encourage students to tackle larger or more difficult challenges than they’re prepared for, but I do want them to stretch as far beyond their comfort zone (into Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development) as they are willing to. For me to understand where their work might have suffered as a result, I require annotations in all major assignments—comments or reflection memos documenting the major decisions made in the assignment, why those decisions should create a better product and what external factors may have negatively impacted them. Even though my teaching load has rarely given me the opportunity to sit down and talk through assignments and projects with every student, this process gives us a proxy of the same approach: when I return their work, I reply directly to students’ comments to work with them towards their goals, rather than simply judging whether or not they’ve been met.
What this looks like in the classroom
In practice, this aspect of my teaching philosophy looks like very lenient grading (or so I’ve been told). Emphasizing process as much as product and intent as much as result ultimately means that a student producing high-quality work that was already within their ability at the start of a course may end up with a similar grade to a student with a well-thought-out vision that turns out pretty rough around the edges.
FYC students and those in research-heavy writing classes typically complete something I call a “groundwork” assignment prior to beginning a large research paper. It follows the patterns of a traditional “presearch” assignment, something that many students are at least a little familiar with prior to beginning college. Because college-level research papers tend to be more involved than their high school counterparts, though, they often create dissatisfaction in students who have learned how to find resources but not fully evaluate them for connections to other references in their work. The groundwork assignment is designed to seize on that dissatisfaction and offer an intelligible and fruitful alternative: clusters of references that share an author, publication venue, prior research or other traits are likely to be easy to put in conversation with each other.
Working Together
As a teacher, I see myself as a partner to get students where they want to be (or, in the case of general education and other required courses, where the students’ programs want them to be). That partner role necessarily implies understanding the demands of college life: job and family responsibilities are increasingly common in college students, and course demands haven’t gotten any lighter as a result.
I believe in flexibility and transparency as a teacher: deadlines and due dates should serve a real purpose. Even if that purpose is allowing me enough time to provide feedback to work collected, students should know why due dates are set—and, as an extension of that knowledge, they should know whether they have any wiggle room.
Except in specific circumstances (e.g. the end of the term when my deadlines approach), my due dates are infinitely flexible if someone asks. I do not ask students to show proof that they need an extension, in the same way that they don’t ask me for proof that I need a few extra days to provide feedback on their work! As I currently teach in a school that styles itself “industry’s university,” I consider this approach to be workplace training for the world I hope my students will create, rather than enforcing rigid and sometimes arbitrary rules to mimic the workplace of the present.
This also means encouraging students to take ownership of their work and, where possible, the grading process. Assignments and major projects often begin with a preflection task, asking students to set goals and define what a successful version of the project would look like. They end with a reflection asking the opposite: describing the ways in which their project was or was not successful given their original criteria. The purpose of these assignments is not to punish someone who delivered less than they promise. Instead, the goal is to offer a chance to highlight practices and processes that led to success (or, in the opposite case, to provide insight into where things went wrong).
What this looks like in the classroom
Aside from due dates that are more of a suggestion than a rule, this ultimately affects the kinds of assignments I create. If I am a partner of every student trying to achieve their best in a given course under the circumstances of an academic term, then my assignments should value their knowledge rather than mine.
In grant writing courses, this means encouraging students to find grants or fundraising audiences that match projects that interest them—typically their junior or senior projects, a local project that interests them, or a professional problem they will need to solve after graduation—then helping them match their current knowledge or expertise to their grant’s demands or their audience’s expectations.
In design and technical communication courses, this means setting a broad goal, like “make a board game,” and letting students define their own criteria for success and failure based on product appearance and usability. My role is to find similar products and help students determine how current professionals achieve similar goals.
