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Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy sorts into four pillars which I think are the most important in creating a high quality and successful professor of Anatomy and Physiology. The four pillars of my teaching philosophy are Curriculum Design and Instructional Style, Growth Mindset and Awareness of Learners, Assessment and Feedback, and Long-Term Commitment to Growth. These four pillars work to support my goal of a being a successful teacher.
Curriculum Design and Instructional Style
The first step in developing as an instructor is understanding how to create and package a cohesive unit of instruction. This takes an ability to create an objective-driven course that includes units and lessons that all work to provide students an intentional experience. That learning experience should follow a path where all learning in the course is related to the intended outcomes for both the course and provides a clear blueprint for a student that helps to motivate and provide a clear path for completion.
The best method for developing quality, outcome-driven curriculum is backwards design. Backwards design starts with identifying the desired outcome for the instruction and then developing the methods for understanding whether a student has achieved the desired outcomes before selecting content or instructional methods. By starting with the end in mind, every decision about the instruction is better directed towards an intentional path towards the desired outcome.
Tantamount to creating a great blueprint with backwards instructional design is the selection of methods of instruction that are based on solid cognitive psychology. In order to maximize the potential for learning in my courses, this means both selecting active learning strategies that fit my learning outcomes and developing metacognitive strategies that help individual learners understand how they learn in order to maximize their learning.
Active learning places an emphasis on the student becoming more of a participant in the learning environment and challenging learners to take basic knowledge and skills and apply them to higher level problem solving. By creating an environment rich with active experiences, the student becomes more extrinsically motivated and is provided an opportunity to take control of the learning process.
Metacognitive strategies help learners understand their process of learning. This is a critical step for many learners, especially learners who have experienced frustration with learning in the past. By providing students with strategies that help make their process of learning more explicit, you are helping the learners develop not just skills in your class, but life-long skills that will transfer into many other situations.
Growth Mindset and Learner Awareness
Students are all humans. They come from diverse backgrounds and preparation before landing in a college class. In my years in higher education, I have experienced a long bemoaning that “students are not ready for college.” I think that this is a very fixed mindset that ignores the reality of K-12 education, but also it sets your students up for failure. If your students are not ready for college, what can you do to help them? Instead, I think that college educators need to shift to a growth mindset where we are worried about whether our courses are student ready.
Community colleges were originally designed to provide a stepping stone for both economic mobility and college attainment that was previously unavailable to students without means. The goal was to reduce inequities in our systems. Challenging students with a growth mindset can change the dialog between student and instructor. Instead of assuming that students cannot meet the challenges of college, I need to find out where the students are in their journey. I need to use metacognitive strategies to help the set goals and show them how to meet those goals.
Assessment and Feedback
Well intentioned curriculum, great instructional strategies, providing students a welcoming space for growth, all of those require that students understand where they are on their path to meeting their goals. Where many of those intentions fail is in the use of assessment methods that do not match the outcomes or seem arbitrary and also in a lack of feedback about their performance. Planning assessment is a crucial step in backwards design and should follow the development of learning outcomes. I am placing it here as a student facing pillar, after experiencing instruction the learner will be assessed on what they have learned. Too often, assessments are created after the instruction or are used despite the intention of the learning outcomes.
Good assessment should be selected based on the learning outcomes. It should be authentic and should assess at the level of the learning outcomes. If the learning outcomes call for application, the assessment should not involve only recall of information. Additionally, assessment should provide low stakes practice that provides students with a feedback mechanism to regulate what they are learning and should authentically build towards more summative assessments of how the student meets the learning outcomes.
Long-Term Commitment to Growth
The last pillar requires me to continually challenge myself to move forward with my understanding of what it means to be a professor. What are the changes that are happening with our understandings in Anatomy and Physiology? What are our current understandings of design of curriculum and instruction? What are data-driven methods of success? I think that this means never assuming the teaching is a destination, but instead it is a continual journey.
This professional development has to take every form available. I have to attend professional meetings. I have to be involved in my campus community. I have to read, continuously. Why? I need to continually evaluate what I know and why I know it and make sure that I am doing my best to be effective.
Conclusion
The goal of my teaching philosophy is to be successful in the classroom. The foundation that my teaching philosophy is built on is the experience gained from my own higher education, work in clinical health fields, and experience in the classroom. I firmly believe that the four pillars described above build the most effective bridge between that foundation and my ultimate goal of success.