To understand me as a teacher is to know the core ideas that drive my work with students. My passion is creating course content. In fact, I consider myself a content specialist; a pedagogical ninja who is continually improving, tweaking, creating, and recreating learning experiences for students that are innovative, relevant to their lives, and current. I also seek to make the world a better place with my teaching when possible.
Clearly my student’s experiences are at the forefront of my mind. In my 25 years in the academy, I have witnessed a sea change in students; even the adult learners have changed in the last two decades, and I’ve come to learn a different set of teaching skills than I started with to be the best teacher I can be to them and give them a valuable learning experience.
In short, students today have greater social emotional needs than their predecessors, and I believe the successful professor must recognize and help fulfill those needs. Thus, I frequently communicate compassion towards my students, and I articulate my appreciation for my students regularly.
Online students are busier and more distracted than ever, and I work incredibly hard to communicate clearly and frequently with them to accommodate this. I place due dates for assignments in a variety of places for them to find, I communicate with them in a standard, organized way with friendly weekly updates and reminders, and I give feedback on every assignment in a timely manner so they can improve before the next assignment is due.
INNOVATION
I am constantly on the lookout for valuable teaching innovations that enhance the learning experiences of my students. Moreover, like the notion of Kaizen, I seek continual improvement in my course materials in terms of their learning value. I always seek to be innovative with my approaches; it's a primary goal.
This is a sample of what I have done in just the last 4 of my 24 years of teaching:
* With an undergraduate student, in my theory course I developed content for and then utilized a phone app called “EdApp," based on the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. It sends review materials, games, and quizzes on course content to students’ phones at specific times – exactly when the research says they will start forgetting what they learned in lecture (approximately every 3-4 days all semester long).
* When we went online for COVID, I purchased whiteboard video generating software and redesigned my lessons into short, interactive experiences for my students to make the learning digestible and interesting.
* I've started using Nearpod (more interactive) instead of Power Point (entirely fixed) in my classroom. It's an absolute game changer. It has made my lecture hall more interactive, and allows me to assess where students are in their understanding of my materials immediately. We play learning games, have competitions, students draw pictures and submit them for the class to see...(it's amazing!).
* With a team of undergraduate students, we created and executed a Twitter conference for undergraduate students to publicly present their research.
*I frequently use MURAL as a collaboration site in class, interacting with lesson materials in class while also creating study materials for out-of-class learning opportunities.
Relevancy and Currency
For maximum impact and retention, I feel like learning materials need to meet today's students where they're at, so when designing and redesigning my courses, I try to make content relevant to my students. I'm always asking myself, "how/where can the students use this in their daily lives?" I'm lucky that communication, my field, is omnipresent, and even the most dense or esoteric theories we study offer practical utility so it's a fun challenge to undertake.
Also, I continually work to make my material current, which in media is an ongoing struggle. The mediated, technological world is constantly changing and so I must chase it, ever trying to find where my students are located in it so I can help bring lessons to life for them in their space.
These are just a few of the ways I've redesigned my courses and assignments in the last 4 of my 24 years to make them more personally relevant to students and keep them current. (In doing so, I'm also accommodating a variety of learning styles, so: win!):
* I redesigned one form of assessments in my class to be more student-driven: students record vlogs instead of write papers to communicate how they anticipate their readings will be useful in their professional futures.
* I redesigned summative assessments in my media class to be more media-and-student centered. In one, students critically examine their own social media use and deeply reflect on its effects in their lives through a series of activities including a phone-free-48-hours.
* My course lectures are peppered with current media I'm constantly updating: TED Talks, Stephen Colbert clips, Jon Oliver episodes, South Park episodes, etc.
* In one class we do a cell-phone scavenger hunt. It used to be that students had to collect physical items, but that's so 2000. Now it's mobile, though they still work in groups, and they really have a lot of fun with my from-1999-assignment redesigned.
Altruism-Directed Pedagogy
I believe in using my role as a teacher to help make the world a better place, or at least to help positively impact some part of the community we all share. As a result, when it’s possible and appropriate, I try to build classroom assignments around the philosophies entrenched in community and civic engagement. I actively seek to build entire major course projects around helping others or actively improving a situation.
To that end, the most recent projects I have helped my students undertake which improve larger situations and individual lives include:
* Creating a public opportunity for student majors to showcase their work to the department and their student peers.
* Planning and executing an etiquette dinner for students to learn valuable professional skills.
* Executing a food drive for the campus food pantry.
* Collecting oral stories from alumni to help preserve the rich history of the university as part of a service to the university and its library.
A Flipped learning methodology
In my face-to-face classes I employ a flipped classroom approach.
In the past few years I have come to recognize many changes in students. First, their attention spans in my class have shortened. In fact, if I wasn't edutaining them as I lectured in my big class, I've discovered there is no way I can keep their attention (and even then, the lure of technology addiction is shocking).
Second, not everyone learns best from just reading and lectures. And while this has always been true because of learning style differences, this has never felt more real than now; all students need some kind of interactive experience. All of them. Students' heads are just everywhere.
Therefore I have taken a flipped classroom approach to my teaching. This means I expect students will consume topic materials (readings or videos) before class, and arrive with some level of understanding about the day's content. In class we will then have some kind of active learning experience in class related to whatever material they consumed. This not only helps students take responsibility for their learning to some degree, but also helps create more opportunities for higher-level learning related to the material when we're together.
Communicating Clearly and Frequently
If you take an online class from me you'll find it exceedingly well organized and communicated clearly up-front.
* With rare exception, everything for the course is uploaded in advance.
* Assignments and their due dates are posted on day 1 on the syllabus and in the modules.
* Every week's "To Do" page with clear instructions, objectives, and due dates is available on day 1
* Anticipated times to complete each assignment are listed for every assignment.
Additionally, every week I send out Monday morning notes which outline clearly what's going on in the class that week, what's due that Sunday, an inspirational message to keep up the great work, and an authentic expression of gratitude for the work already done.
I also work to return written assignments quickly. My feedback on them always indicates where the problem parts are and how to improve any issues as well as how to tackle the next assignment if this one didn't meet expectations or didn't yield the grade a student sought.
