Teaching Philosophy

            At the core of my teaching philosophy is the belief that the process of education must be a positive experience for both the teacher and the student if the full power of education is to be realized.   I believe that education is society’s most powerful instrument for change. Mishandled, that power can create irrevocable damage to the individual and ultimately to society. Appropriately handled, education can inform and inspire individuals to change and to promote that same type of exchange across all of their interactions. The respect I have for the power I hold humbles me.  My humility allows me to see my role in my students’ lives as foundational yet transitory.  My humility motivates me to continue to learn from my students, from my colleagues and from my life experiences.   My humility keeps me honest.       

Education as Foundational yet Transitory

As I have pursued my teaching philosophy to more depth I have come to see the educational process as positive when a dynamic relationship exists between the teacher, the student and the content.  As that relationship evolves a bond develops between the teacher and the student, but more importantly between the student and the content.  In order for learning to occur within the time frame of a specific course or a semester, the relationship between the teacher and student is pivotal.  As a teacher, I have a responsibility to clearly present accurate and current information.  I also have a responsibility to create a classroom ambience that demonstrates respect for individual students, blends nurturing and challenging approaches, and, overall, provides an atmosphere in which each student feels uniquely supported and able to learn. The initial relationship with me is a first step in establishing the student’s educational foundation.  Ultimately, though, my goal is to connect the student to the content to ensure that the student can engage in a self-directed life-long process of learning. In order for education to succeed, then, I must be able to establish strong supportive bonds with my students but to recognize that bond as a means of creating independence in learning.

Education as Life-Long Learning… for the Teacher

            Along with the goal of establishing life-long learning as a value within my students there is a corresponding goal of actualizing my own commitment to life-long learning.  In order for education to be a positive experience for the student, it must also be a positive experience for the teacher.  One of the greatest benefits of teaching is my own continued learning.  I remember when I first began to teach and how afraid I was that I would teach everything I knew in the first two weeks of the semester and have nothing left to say!  I quickly realized the impossibility of that occurrence.   Not only do I have the responsibility to present accurate and current information to my students, I also have the obligation to learn from their questions and perspectives, to delve deeper into my current knowledge and to bring new understandings and new information into the classroom.  As I continue to learn so do my students.  My learning accelerates their learning. Our learning becomes part of the shared relationship and builds both their content foundation and their impetus for continued learning.

Education and Honesty

            Honesty is the basis for both the personal relationships I have with students and for the development of their knowledge base.  The student-teacher relationship is essentially a power relationship in which there is a hierarchy. I have to see the relationship that way so that I do not exploit the relationship.  It is imperative that students trust me and that I deserve and hold that trust. They must trust that I will not exploit the relationship, that I will teach accurate and current information, that I will differentiate my opinions from facts, and that I will have objective standards.  If I violate that trust, then there can not be a positive outcome.  I have lost my opportunity to enact change through education.

            My teaching philosophy is grounded in the beliefs that education is both for the moment and for the lifetime, that learning has to occur on both sides of the student-teacher relationship, and that honesty is the defining value of the relationship. Beyond that core philosophy, my views on teaching are ever evolving. I believe that my effectiveness as a teacher hinges on dual points of content expertise and understanding the teaching-learning process.  As I go through each semester I find that I am always reflecting on what is happening in the classroom and making both subtle and visible alterations in my views and behaviors involving “good” teaching. 

 Enacting the Philosophy

The enactment of my beliefs takes on many forms.  My first strategy is to see course development as a creative and intellectual process.  I love the artistry of starting with an idea and a blank page and seeing a course emerge!  I firmly believe that time spent in good planning pays off.  At the same time, I am extremely flexible and responsive as the semester unfolds. I can not always accurately predict in August what will happen during the 16 weeks of the semester and I must be willing to move content, to adjust timing and to clarify expectations and assignments.  My goal is for students to learn and not to adhere to a master plan that I devised in the isolation of my office.

 My second strategy is to design each class session so that I bring in multiple learning experiences and reinforce content in multiple applications.  I make detailed session plans and spend considerable time designing experiential learning activities and developing lectures so that the multiple strategies complement and reinforce each other.  Again, though, as much as I value planning, I value flexibility and responsiveness equally. I try to read the mood and energy level of the class and their understanding of the material and make changes as the class session progresses.  I routinely review each session and make notes to myself about changes to be made next year and changes to implemented later in the semester.  

           Another strategy is the active use of myself as an agent for learning.  I bring energy into the classroom.  I tell stories, use examples from my own life and experience, pull examples and stories from the students.  I convey my excitement, interest and use of the content and hope to inspire the same in the students.  This strategy is highly personal and is one of my greatest strengths but does have limitations. One of my most potent learning experiences in the last four years occurred as a faculty member in a large (120-student) inter-disciplinary administration course taught to students in six different allied health disciplines.  My personal and interactive style was not effective in a large ”mixed” group of students.  I realized this after the first year and learned to accommodate but the joy of teaching was diminished for me.  I realized through that experience that my teaching strategies were closely aligned with my views on education