Kiki's New Teaching Philosophy

I'm in the process of applying for jobs, which entails writing individualized cover letters, shifting around the order in which I present teaching and research information in my cover letter to suit the college for which I'm applying, and compiling all sorts of other documents. I had no idea it would be this time-consuming, and I've only officially applied for one job so far! In the process, I had to revisit my teaching philosophy. The first teaching philosophy I wrote can be seen here. Of course, my philosophy has changed since I've had more teaching experience. I haven't the stomach to read my old teaching philosophy; I feel I've changed so much it was written. But, I've included my new philosophy here, and if you are so inclined, you can compare the two yourself. Keep in mind that my new philosophy was written for a job teaching at a community college. Community colleges are very focused on developing excellence in teaching, and I tried to tailor my philosophy to the unique missions of community colleges. Please feel free to comment on my teaching philosophy; I'm always seeking to improve.

Much of my teaching philosophy is grounded in my research on college student retention. I find that faculty can make impressions on students that affect students’ departure decisions. If faculty can have such a profound affect on something as important as a student’s choice to continue pursuing education, then it is my duty as an educator to ensure that the impact I have on students is positive. Not only do I hope to encourage students to continue in college but I also wish to ignite in them a passion for learning and to equip them with the tools necessary to be life-long learners.

In addition, particular aspects about teaching that influence students’ departure decisions include students’ perceptions that faculty are passionate about the material they teach, care about the students they teach, and are physically and psychologically accessible to students (Lundquist, Spalding, & Landrum, 2003). Physical accessibility can easily be achieved by spending extra time in my office on campus and by responding to students’ emails and phone calls in a timely manner. Psychological accessibility can be achieved through an expression of willingness to talk with students about their needs. I endeavor to emanate an attitude of openness towards students and an eagerness to value their intellectual contributions to class. Furthermore, I highly value interacting with students inside and out of the classroom. Student-faculty interactions outside of the classroom have enormous benefits on students, including increased retention, academic achievement, satisfaction with college, intellectual and personal development, and career and educational aspirations (Lamport, 1993).

I believe I have succeeded when all my students can demonstrate learning and improvement. For example, I endeavor to foster critical thinking in students. Students do not need to be cajoled into engaging in critical thinking. They will do so if I model critical thinking as I teach, if I present material in an engaging manner, and if I foster openness towards students’ expression of their ideas. Subsequently, I find that students frequently ask me questions in class or offer critical evaluations of material we discuss in class. In order to allow students to demonstrate their critical thinking and knowledge in writing, classroom assignments include research papers and forms of evaluations include essay questions requiring application of theories and concepts.

Finally, I endeavor to engage students with the material I teach by occasionally infusing humor and real life examples into lecture content, and by including applicable demonstrations, assignments, and activities. I taught neuroscience to high school students participating in the Frontiers of Science Institute, a summer program for students interested in pursuing careers in math and science. After a unit on neuron communication and neurotransmitters, I had students take their chairs outside and line the chairs up to represent the synaptic cleft. Students took on the role of neurotransmitters and re-enacted the various neurotransmitters actions that occur during neuronal communication. My students reported that they understood the concepts more thoroughly after participating in the activity.

Building rapport with the students, interacting with students outside of class, and making a lasting educational impact on students are facets of teaching that I highly value. I welcome the opportunity to teach, advise, and mentor the students of your institution.

Advising

Ahhh! I love it when students contact me and request to meet with me to talk about their grade and their progress in the class. :) Warm fuzzies. If only more students would do that. If they realized how much brownie points they'd earn with me, I'm sure they would!

Another Quote on Teaching

"Teachers err, I believe, if they pretend that what is by nature difficult can be made easy through clever pedagogy. Any subject can be made easy by trivializing it, but doing so only perpetuates the superficiality and shallowness that we are supposed to be eliminating" (Leamnson, 1999, p. 61).

Leamnson, P. (1999). Thinking about teaching and learning: Developing habits of learning with first year college and university students. Sterling, VA: Trentham Books.

In Response to the Previous Post: Teaching Feedback

So I have finally begun the arduous journey of conducting an historical research project for my History & Systems of Psychology class (yes, I'm aware the semester is halfway over already). I changed my topic and now I'm writing about the history of measurement, beginning with the first form of mental measurement, intelligence testing. But, I've started by first reviewing relevant chapters of the book, The Mismeasure of Man, by Steven J. Gould. This book was written in response to the infamous book, The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein and Murray. I have read neither, but the gist of it is the debate over the nature of intelligence, whether it is innate and unmalleable, or whether it is unmeasurable due to the complex, multidimensional, and malleable nature of the construct (in such case, we cannot deem to derive a linear quantification of the construct). The impact of the former stance on social policy is what drives the contention with The Bell Curve, I believe (since I haven't read the book, I prefer not to elaborate).

But, just by reading the first few pages about Binet, the person who developed what later became the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, I've decided that Binet is my hero. I admire him immensely. He cautioned against using the scale to rank and label all children. Rather, he saw the purpose of the test as solely for identifying children who needed remediation. His intent was to help the children and he believed that the test should not be considered a measure of intelligence, which is nothing but a reification that leads to false notions of a linear and quantifiable construct. But, those who brought the test to America (Goddard and Terman) fell prey to the fallacy and used the test to categorize and label children in order to impose limits on them. Such an approach to intelligence and its measurement has pervaded the American psyche ever since.

And now I think that growing up within this culture is what partly led to my response to the teaching feedback in the previous post. During childhood, I had plenty of experiences in which I fell at the bottom of the bell curve. For example, in 7th grade my teacher lined us all up at the front of the room and had us do mental arithmetic in our heads. He would increase the load until we couldn't produce the answer, at which point we had to sit down. I was always amongst the first to sit down. Such experiences reinforce the notion that we could be ranked by intelligence or ability. But, furthermore, the teacher never made any attempts to help improve the math computation ability of those who sat down first, which further reinforced the notion that our rank was unchangeable. Our own efforts at improvement would not change an innate math ability.

Thus, when affronted by such negative feedback, my first response was an acceptance of my lowly rank on teaching ability. My second response was a belief that I could not change my lowly rank by attempting to improve myself. I have set limits on myself based on a fallacy that is culturally pervasive! The next step is to see whether or not I can effect change in my own attitudes and beliefs towards the nature of intelligence.

Editor's Note: Eh! I'm probably exaggerating things a bit. It does appear that I like to make mountains out of molehills.

Meh!

I take life too seriously. A few undergrads in my class left after the quiz when they saw another student leave. The first student had told me about her reason for leaving, but I think the other ones got confused and thought class was over with. We still had 40 minutes left of class!! What were they thinking? So I somehow get the idea that it reflects poorly on me that students leave early. Yep, I internalize everything, take everything personally, and constantly criticize myself for perceived failures. Yay! Isn't my life fun?

This Semester is Difficult

I feel like everything that came before this semester was simply the warm-ups. I used to have fun with school and I thought being a graduate student was the bee's knees. But, now I feel like things have gotten more serious and the stakes are higher. I'm teaching this semester, writing my comps and dissertation proposal, assisting a faculty member with a research project, and working 16 hours a week as a GA. The GA itself is rather serious, too. This GA could constitute an actual job if they weren't getting a GA to do the work. It reminds me somewhat of my time as project coordinator. I start with a literature review, identify key elements to include in analyses, evaluate the most appropriate statistical procedures to use, and analyze data, among other things. This is a lot of responsibility, coupled with a lot of freedom to choose my own direction.

Plus, teaching is incredibly difficult for me. I am a novice, but I keep forgetting to allow myself the novice status. I think that I should naturally be good at teaching, or that I should be able to figure out this whole teaching thing with aplomb. But, no...I'm just happy I haven't crashed and burned completely yet. I've been reading a book about being a first-year faculty member and have discovered that first-year faculty tend not to understand where students are having difficulty with the material, and tend not to be able to utilize efficient strategies to address student's difficulty with the material. Teaching is a craft; it is a skill. And as such, it can be honed and developed with practice. Therefore, I don't have to be good at it. But, I can become good at it. Gee, I hope this little pep talk is working.

In addition, I have a tendency to put writing on the back burner. If I didn't have such a lack of confidence with writing, I'd probably have about two publications by now. But, no...up till now, I have been unable to teach, take classes, do research, and write all in the same semester. Now I must do all of that and more. I must write both of my comps projects, the first three chapters of my dissertation, and resubmit a grant proposal. But, I happen to also be teaching, researching, and working at the same time! How can I do it? How can I cope? Well, let's see...the coping strategy I usually rely on, denial, is not actually conducive to accomplishing my goals. If I ignore my writing demands and push them to the back burner, I'll never graduate.

No wonder first-year faculty members are so stressed out. I'm still a graduate student. I don't have to worry about tenure, advising loads of students, participating in committees, teaching 2 or 3 classes, applying for grants, publishing articles, and establishing a research program. But, teaching one class, applying for one fellowship, researching, and writing three major papers is plenty enough for me to feel stressed!

Lessons Learned

I don't think I'm going to give quizzes in class anymore (after this semester). I prefer the idea of giving them assignments to get them to read the book instead of quizzes. I keep trying to create short answer quiz questions that will work. But, today I gave out a quiz in which one of the questions was to write down which of the two sleep states corresponded to active, waking EEG patterns. Half of my students listed both sleep states!! What?! Why did so many of them misunderstand the directions? And now how do I grade it because they put the right answer, but they didn't distinguish between the two sleep states? Do I give them the same credit as those who only wrote the correct answer?

I think the problem is that creating test questions really is that difficult. I write them with my own ability and knowledge in mind. But, I keep forgetting that students don't' have that same ability and knowledge, and I can't assume they are going to read the directions or come to the same conclusions about the directions as I would. In measurement class a few semesters ago, we talked about making the directions as short, clear, and concise as possible. Our directions and even the stem of items can differentiate people based on intelligence rather than actual knowledge of the answer. I think I understand now how difficult it is to create items that reduce the cognitive load enough that all people will be able to demonstrate their knowledge. (Yes, I understand not everybody possesses the knowledge, but I would rather know that they got the answer wrong because they didn't know the answer rather than because they couldn't understand the question).

Teaching Takes Time

Why does it take me so long to prepare a lecture?!? Today, I read that one common mistake of new faculty is to spend too much time preparing to teach. Some spend upwards of 26 hours a week preparing for lectures. The recommended time allocation is one and a half hours of prep time for every hour teaching. I can't even fathom that. It takes me 5 or 6 hours to prepare for one hour of lecturing! Grrr!! I want to know why I'm so slow. It's not like I'm trying to be thorough, I'm just trying to present the material in a way that is not presented in the book so that students can hear something new. But, it just takes me way too long. Grrr!!!

School is starting: Whimper!

Well, I just got back from my conference in which I presented two posters. It was a small conference and people weren't that interested in chatting with poster presenters. They preferred to read a few lines on the poster and move on. Oh, well. I preferred it that way because I didn't really have good explanations for my research anyways. It's still too preliminary. But, now I'm back and facing the fact that school is starting next week. I'm still not happy about that fact and I think the sole reason is that I know I'll have to teach.

I could be getting excited about the two classes I'm taking and the research into my dissertation topic, but instead I'm focusing on the fact that I'm teaching again. Such dread...it's inexplicable. I wish I didn't view teaching with such dread; maybe I'll be lucky and the dread will dissipate once I'm into the semester. Sigh....I looked at my class roster today and found a few familiar names. Some of the students I had while teaching social psych two years ago are now in my class for child & adolescent psych. Yelp! I was so hoping I could start fresh and wouldn't have any students who witnessed my total flop at teaching social psych! Sigh...

Summer is Definitely Over

Well, I'm a little late to jump on this end-of-summer bandwagon thing. I've been noticing Karen and Jael write about how the end of summer has affected them by shocking them out of blissful summer complacency and into fall preparedness. I, on the other hand, am exceptionally good at denial. I have denied the fact that summer is almost over until very recently. So recently that I left myself one week to write a 25-page paper for my dissertation proposal independent study. I was supposedly "researching" all summer long. But, no...I wasn't. So now I have managed to resurrect a paper that I wrote during my short-lived stint as a project coordinator. As I looked back through my documents, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of work done by one who did not know what she was doing. It made me feel better about my current predicament for about 2 seconds. Then I realized that the resurrected paper covered only one topic in my "survey" of "issues" about my "dissertation topic." Back to the drawing board.

Alas, while the proposal research is one thing weighing heavily on my mind (as looming deadlines will do) there are plenty of other things that I could have been spending my time on over the course of the summer that would have made things much easier right about now. One major thing I can think of is teaching. I don't know about you, but I didn't go into this field because I wanted to teach. But, teaching is one of those things you can't just place on a lower rung of importance. And for some people, including myself, it is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Therefore, I think the one thing that is contributing most to my end-of-summer angst is the concept that I'm going to have to fly by the seat of my pants in teaching this fall instead of having a nicely planned course built from the ground up prior to the start of the semester. Wouldn't that have been nice. Oh, well.

I suppose I should get back to that "paper" I'm supposedly "writing."

Teaching Update

I met with the graduate student mentioned in the previous post. She was very nice and we had a good old time chatting about teaching. Therefore, I've decided that there's nothing wrong with me. The problem lies in the other person. And I think the problem is that the first unpleasant grad student was in the school psych program. I've concluded that I should avoid school psych people like the plague. This is not the first school psych grad student that I've butted heads with. That program just breeds uppity, competitive, and snippy females. Those are characteristics that I despise, and I simply do not get along well with people who embody those characteristics.

On teaching...and the Self...again

I got another email from a graduate student requesting to meet with me to chat about teaching next fall. This is a different graduate student than the one I discussed in the previous post. I had actually met this graduate student last spring at the TA orientation. She's a really sweet person and we had fun chatting. I ended up offering to assist her if she needed anything because this fall is to be her first time teaching. So I see this as an opportunity to redeem myself for my idiocy at the last meeting with the other graduate student. I think it will be much easier to respond appropriately to her because she is asking for help, she is sweet, and she is not egotistical. The other graduate student was not asking for help and she was too much like me; me ego felt instantly threatened. You know those silly questionnaires you pass around to your friends? Well, one of the questions was, "If you were another person, would you be friends with yourself?" I answered "No" because if I was another person, I could not help but be myself. Now there would be two identical Kikis hanging around. And I don't think it would be easy for me to be friends with myself. We would start competing with each other.

Perhaps the root of it all is that I think very highly of my opinions and attitudes about things and other people pick up on that. Some people are offended and find that to be threatening. But, others might instead laugh at me and humor me. But, those who are threatened respond in a way that threatens me and then let the games begin.

I was just reading Karen's blog and one of the things she said is that you aren't responsible for other people's actions and reactions. Well, that is quite true, I can never predict which way someone will go with their reaction to me. But, I do think that if I could somehow make myself NOT convey such attitudes, I might avoid a whole lot of trouble.