Welcome back! I’m excited to return to this blog as another way to share ideas and resources, and to foster conversation on campus on how we can provide our students with the best possible learning experience.
As some of you know, I was on sabbatical this spring, examining ways to provide more support and professional learning opportunities to our adjunct faculty. As part of my research I conducted a survey, focus groups and interviews, and I want to thank all the adjunct faculty who offered their input. One consistent message I heard was a desire for practical teaching strategies and ideas faculty can directly implement in their classes. That was useful feedback for me, someone who loves a good “teaching tip” but is also very interested in broader ideas about pedagogy and the science of learning. I’ve tried to include practical strategies in this blog, and I plan to put an even greater focus on those in the future.
In this entry, however, I want to briefly highlight the importance of one abstract element of teaching: the value of a teaching philosophy. A teaching philosophy is simply a rationale for why we do what we do, from the way we spend class time to kinds of assessments we use. Especially as we’re planning for a new semester, it can be useful to articulate this rationale for ourselves, and to put our teaching philosophy in the front of our minds. That can help us ensure our courses are coherent and easy for students to follow – and it can help us identify places where our actions might not actually reflect our philosophy as much as we think they do.
Writing in the Journal of Effective Teaching, Mary Bowne of South Dakota University poses some excellent questions faculty can use to clarify their teaching philosophy. Among my favorites Bowne asks are:
I would add a few foundational questions as well, such as:
There are, of course, no right or wrong answers to these questions; they are simply designed to get us thinking about the why of our teaching, before the semester starts and we are deeply caught up in the day-to-day how of teaching.
Bowne’s article focuses on writing a formal teaching philosophy (which many universities require in faculty tenure review), but the process does not need to be formal. You can jot down ideas about your philosophy in a notebook or ponder them over a good cup of coffee. And here’s the good news: you already have a teaching philosophy, whether you think so or not. Everyone who teaches has reasons for why they do what they do. For some of us, however, those reasons are unconscious: they lie beneath the surface, and once we get into the frenzy of mid-semester, it can be easy to lose sight of what we find most important. So before we jump into the fray, it’s useful to articulate our reasons behind our teaching, to make them visible to ourselves. That makes it easier to emphasize our values and priorities while we’re tweaking our syllabi or designing a new assignment.
Articulating our teaching philosophy can also reveal gaps in our rationale, or places where we might be inspired to dig a little deeper. Many college professors (including me!) learned to teach by doing it, and we have a tendency to teach the way we were taught, especially early in our careers. There is nothing wrong with teaching the way we were taught, but if that is the reason for part of our practice, we might stop and consider whether we still think that is the most effective way to teach our students. We might even discover that we don’t have a reason for certain parts of our practice – and that isn’t a failure, it’s an interesting place to reflect and re-think. A teaching philosophy can certainly include elements of teaching we want to know more about, or areas of our practice we still haven’t quite figured out.
Personally, I’ve found that periodically articulating my teaching philosophy has led to important changes to my curriculum. For example, part of my philosophy when teaching English Composition is that critical thinking skills – learning to build an argument, see an issue from multiple points of view, etc. – are the most important elements I want students to learn. I frequently tell my comp students that what they have to say is more important to me than the more mechanical aspects of writing like grammar, citation format, etc. However, a few years back I noticed that the essay rubric I was using gave language and grammar equal weight to other aspects of writing I think are more important. I realized that I was sending my students mixed signals: I was telling them that content was the priority, but I was showing them that mechanics counted quite a lot on the rubric. This realization led me to revise the rubric so that the aspects of writing I value the most clearly have the most weight in my assessments. And making that change then led me to re-think the first unit of my curriculum, so that I emphasize what I think is most important about writing more clearly from the start.
We all have a million details to juggle as we prepare for a new semester. I hope that somewhere among those details, you’ll find a few moments to step back and consider (or re-consider) your teaching philosophy. That is time well spent that can help you set yourself and your students up for a successful semester.
0 Comments.