My Teaching Philosophy

I believe that learning is a journey. If this is so, then the role of a teacher should be that of a guide.

Within this context, I ask myself two questions when approaching a new course:

First, where do I want students to go? Obviously, this question has to do with learning objectives. What do I want students to know when they come to the end of my course and what do I want them to be able to do with that knowledge? However, when designing a course I think it's important to frame these questions within a broader context than simply my classes. Learning should be a life long endeavor and any class I teach is nothing more than one leg of a very long trip. A better way to frame these questions, then, is to focus on the students. What do students who take my class hope to learn? What skills can I impart that will help them on the rest of their journey?

Second, where have my students been? It may seem obvious, but just as a travel guide has to meet his clients wherever they happen to embark on the journey, an instructor must meet his students where they happen to be when they get to his class. Sometimes, a class may be filled with students with widely different backgrounds and that is, no doubt, a challenge. However, that is no excuse for leaving students lost in the woods. Moreover, it is no excuse for not taking those students as far on the journey as you can.

Once I have answers to these two questions, designing a course becomes a matter of getting my students from where they are to where they need to go in a way that is both challenging and engaging.

Of course, other questions naturally follow from this metaphor as well. One of the most challenging is, how do I convince my students to take the journey I have planned for them? One of the primary courses I teach is a service course. Most of the students signed up simply because it is required for their majors, not because they have an intrinsic curiosity about the course material. If I want them to do more than go through the motions, then, I have to work to show them that the skills they practice in my class will help them no matter where they may go professionally. Even when I am teaching a course for majors, though, I still find this a challenging question to address. I tend to use unorthodox teaching methods that can make students uncomfortable. Convincing students that, in the end, their discomfort will be worthwhile is a continual effort.

Another challenging question is, how do I convince students to carry their own bags? If I spend thousands of dollars on a package tour, it is probably not unreasonable to expect that part of that expense is to pay for someone else to carry my luggage. Unfortunately, many, perhaps even most, students view education as a commodity rather than a process. As such, many of them expect that once their tuition is paid, someone else should be doing all the hard work of learning for them. These students expect their instructors to distill all of the information relevant to the course into discreet, easily memorizable packages of information to be delivered to their brains in the most efficient means possible. Any information outside the bare minimum necessary to pass the final exam is wasteful in this "philosophy" of education. Real learning, however, does not happen this way. Education is not the simple transfer of information from one brain to another. Rather, learning is a transformation of the mind. Just as reading about weight lifting and watching a body builder work out will do nothing for a person's physique, reading about someone else's understanding of the material and listening to a talking head at the front of a classroom is usually not sufficient to learn. Learning is hard work. Learning is messy. Convincing students that this is a necessary part of the process is a challenge especially if, in their minds, they have paid someone else to make it easy.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this metaphor, however, is knowing when students have reached their destination. People take guided tours for many reasons, some for the sense of adventure, some for the camaraderie, some for beautiful vistas, some to learn new skills, etc. Everyone on the tour may follow the same path to reach the same destination, but what each person takes away from the experience is necessarily unique. Education is really no different. Even the most carefully crafted assessments are limited in what they can tell you about each student's personal journey in a course. Students who perform well in the class may have learned relatively little while those who earn relatively low grades may have improved their intellectual development tremendously. Moreover, the real measure of what students have taken away from a class is often in what they use much later in life. Not only is this something no final exam or term project can truly predict, oftentimes what leaves the most lasting impressions are those things that are not listed in the curriculum or in the course learning objectives.