Central to effective teaching is learning. As an instructor, I engage in ongoing learning about the students who enroll in each institution where I teach broadly, about the individual students I work with, about myself as a teacher, mentor, and advisor, about how learning works, and about instructional practices that have been empirically vetted to promote learning and development among students from different backgrounds. My instructional philosophy is founded on the potential of education to be transformative and liberatory. As such, my pedagogy stems from the application of cognitive, social, and motivational theories of learning, as well as best practices in instructional design and assessment.
I believe that my primary role as an instructor is to support students’ development as lifelong learners. As such, I position the content of each course as a tool that not only allows students to develop a deeper and more complex knowledge base, but also gives them the opportunity to practice thinking, communicating, and connecting ideas across the curriculum and their lives. In particular, I support students’ continued motivation for learning through academic validation and satisfaction. In the Introduction to Research Design course I taught at the University of Southern California in Spring 2020, I collaborated with the faculty member teaching the other section of the course to align our course readings, schedule, and assessments. Throughout the semester, student groups designed and conducted an exploratory research project. While previous iterations of the course asked students to turn in a long group paper as a final product, we revised this assessment to include a shorter paper and an academic poster, scheduling a research poster symposium where students across sections would present their findings. The symposium was designed to increase students’ satisfaction by allowing them to engage with faculty members, student affairs practitioners, and one another about their work.
When the university moved online because of COVID-19, we had to reassess the purpose of and vehicle for this activity. Because of the motivational benefits students receive from engaging publicly with their work, I designed a website to host their posters, enabling comments so that students could receive feedback on their projects. We also organized a live event on Zoom, grouping projects into topically-organized live sessions, so that community members could attend sessions of interest. The live event garnered nearly 100 attendees, including not only faculty members and institutional leaders from a number of different institutions, but also students’ work supervisors, family members, and friends. Through this experience, I realized that situating academic coursework in ways that bridge students’ educational, professional, and personal lives can provide students with more holistic and inclusive opportunities for academic validation. The research symposium was held again in 2021 with success, and videos and posters from both years can be found here: PASA Research Poster Symposium
In my student-centered classroom, I expect that students can take responsibility for their own learning when the right supports are in place. Students are more motivated to engage in, and persist at, learning when they believe that they are capable of mastering the content, have expectations for success, and feel self-confident. One way I foster these positive outlooks is by choosing course readings by scholars and practitioners with diverse identities, whose work reflects varied research paradigms and conceptual lenses, so that students have a wide range of expert models. At the same time, the labor of learning can be messy and frustrating, and so I often provide materials like guiding questions for assigned readings and grading rubrics for writing assignments in order to support students as they learn and work independently. Using a backwards design framework, I also ensure that the activities and assessments that I use are clearly connected to the course learning outcomes and relevant for students.
I prioritize the development of students’ cognitive traits in my courses. Skills and dispositions such as critical thinking, creativity, and curiosity are crucial for students to become engaged participants in their communities. Because research suggests that students’ learning approaches are influenced by their perceptions of the expectations and requirements established by instructors, I use scaffolded learning activities that ask students to demonstrate increasingly complex levels of understanding.
For example, many graduate students who enroll in Research Methods and Design have difficulty mastering abstract course concepts like reliability. When I co-taught this course with Ernie Pascarella at the University of Iowa, then, I designed an experiential learning component to supplement his weekly lectures. Over the course of several weeks, students worked with a subset of data collected as part of a national, publicly available, longitudinal study of education. Students practiced cognitive organization by working in groups to identify variables as nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio, for example. They also evaluated validity and reliability by analyzing published studies that used this dataset. At the end of the semester, students engaged in activities designed for cognitive elaboration. They collaborated in pairs to create a research question that could be answered using these data, generated a hypothesis based on prior research, articulated a linear regression model based on the form and function of specific variables, and evaluated the strengths and limitations of using this dataset to address their research question. These activities promoted students’ use of deep approaches to learning, while also acting as a model of the quantitative research design process. To foster their curiosity, I also offered them the option to run their regression so that they could see (and interpret) the results.
A constructive classroom environment stems from a social climate characterized by interaction, cooperation, peer learning, tolerance, inclusion, and trust. Informal discussions, both in class and in online spaces, play a pivotal role in my courses, not only as an effective means for students to learn with and from one another, but also as an opportunity for students to practice articulating their ideas to others. Because of the many benefits that stem from a collaborative, rather than competitive, environment, I actively attend to making my classroom an equitable and inclusive space. In Spring, 2018, I taught Teaching and Learning in Higher Education which enrolls doctoral students from departments across campus; it is a recommended course in several programs and fulfills elective credits for students who plan to complete the Graduate Certificate in College Teaching at the University of Iowa. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the course, I spent time in the first several weeks building community by having students engage in activities that allowed them to share their academic and personal interests. Throughout the semester, I often asked students to begin discussion in pairs or triads, where a more intimate peer environment often increases their openness to assessing their own understanding of concepts and readings. Some students also gain confidence after sharing their ideas with a few others, fostering a wider variety of participants and perspectives in the class discussion that follows. I also integrate online opportunities for discussion and questions, as I have learned that these tools often promote participation among students who may still be reticent to talk in class, including students who face stereotype threat, may be introverted, prefer reflective learning, and those who are non-native speakers of English.
As someone who taught undergraduate courses for many years before pursuing doctoral-level knowledge about teaching and learning, I have always viewed teaching as a process rather than a product. Now, as a scholar of postsecondary teaching and learning whose research includes a focus on instructional improvement to increase equity, I have a more profound understanding of the mechanisms underlying many of the pedagogic choices I made as I saw how my actions in the classroom influenced students’ outcomes. The ways that my research and practice complement one another reflects my passion for supporting students’ learning, challenges me to continue learning through teaching, and invigorates my practice.