Extended Blog: Teaching Philosophy

Extended Teaching Blog

My teaching philosophy/pedagogical style can be broken down into four parts: classroom structuring, activities, out of classroom, and “mechanics.”

Classroom Structure

My teaching is student-centered. In my classes, I use a variety of classroom “structures,” including whole group discussion, small group, and lecture. I feel that a student-centered classroom is essential; it gives the students the feedback of up to twenty-two people instead of just one and allows the students to learn from people who are more “on their level.” A lot of my class sessions alternate between whole group and small group work – I don’t like for the students to work on a single in class activity for too long. I use lecture sparingly because I feel it lends itself to Freiere’s banking method of learning which I see as pointless. I use lecture only to introduce a totally new topic to them, or if I feel that they will benefit from writing down the information.

Activities

In addition to the generalized organization of my classes, I have a few activities that are utilized regularly and are therefore worthy of mention as part of my teaching philosophy. Once a week, I have my students complete a “critical response.” This involves putting a quote on the board, or an advertisement on the overhead, or song lyrics and having the students respond in writing. Sometimes I give them questions and sometimes I simply told them to write for ten minutes without stopping on the topic. Then we would discuss their answers as a whole class, allowing them to have something prepared to say before facing the “embarrassment” of talking in front of the class. I feel that most students come to college without their own opinions and without much in the way of critical thinking skills, both of which seem to improve over the semester with this activity.

The other regular activities of note relate to revision – small group conferences and in class peer editing. While these are both forms of small group they worthy of a separate discussion. I was against small group conferences at the beginning of the semester. I saw no point in them, and only held them because my syllabus from August had not been altered to exclude them. But I held them for the annotated bibliography and found that my students produced better papers because they got feedback from me and their fellow students at an earlier stage of the writing process than they did with normal workshops. And I believe that peer editing is vital to student composition at the beginning level. I usually put students in groups of three, so that their papers are read twice. The first person reads for content and to see if they are “getting their point across,” and the second person reads for mechanics such as grammar and punctuation.

Prep Work/Out of Class

Part of my teaching philosophy includes what goes on outside of the classroom. I always overplan my lessons, in case an activity bombs or my students “get” a concept more quickly than I expect them to do. My grading philosophy includes an attempt at a one week turnaround with papers. I tell them (both in person and on their syllabus) to expect a two week turnaround, but I remember what it is like to be awaiting judgment on something that I worked very hard on. I use my syllabus as a contract and a way to put some of the responsibility back on the students. I used to make a syllabus when I taught high school but the importance of it at the collegiate level is much higher, and I hold my students to the policies and assignment discussed on it. I also expect them to hold me to my policies etcetera as they are written in the syllabus.

“Mechanics”

I use the term “mechanics” to describe the physical layout of the classroom and technology. The layout of the classroom affects how different activities run. For example, I put the class into a large circle for full group discussion and presentations, with desks facing for small group work, and rows for lecture and tests. Many classes my students will move their desks from one layout to another as “mixing it up” keeps their attention.

As far as technology, it is a part of my teaching philosophy, but not the basis of it. I require that students have a school email and are registered for Blackboard. I send out announcements about class changes and other vital information through email, and I post grades and copies of assignment sheets on Blackboard; both of these actions are a means to give students more responsibility for their own education. I use an overhead projector to give the occasional lecture notes.

Web Writing Woes

I all ready did my blog for this week, but today's discussion lead me to thinking about enough that I decided there was one more good ramble in me this week.

Let me start with a bit of background in my interest on this topic. My first year of teaching and, to an extent still to this day, www.webenglishteacher.com was my best friend. For someone just starting up in the world of teaching English, be it literature or composition -- this website was a godsend. It has lesson plans, unit plans, examples, citation how-tos, and links to author bios and university writing centers. But, best of all was its wide array of samples papers and projects.

I think that a similar site on a more local level for MSU would be fantastic! Regardless of whether a prof or a GTA is new to teaching itself, taking on a new class or position can be daunting. To be able to point a student (or myself) to a model position paper could save a lot of time and confusion. This is not to say that the website would replace teaching, but it would be an un-valuable resource.

As for how to do this....does it have to be large and complicated? Today, Dr.Cadle mentioned that it's easier to get grant money if the grant-givers see that something is all ready being done. Now, before I make my suggestions...let me give the disclaimer that I am not especially internet saavy. I can point and click and use it for research, but my only web design experience is two painfully set up semester long websites for literature classes as an undergrad. ANd I used geocities web-builder for those.

But my question/suggestion is: why not set up a website, using Dreamweaver or whatever the preferred webdesigner is, and put together a basic site. Have a section for models of the various types of 110 (and/or 210, etc) papers, a section assignment sheet models, unit plan ideas, etc...?
I understand that this would take time and effort in the gathering of said models and web designing, but I see more merit in starting a separate basic site than trying to somehow incorporate this level of accessibility and communication on Blackboard. I DO use Blackboard with my classes, but only for the Gradebook (as I find it easier than constantly having students email and question me on what their grade is) and to post copies of assignment sheets so that students will be accountable for that.

I will continue to ponder on this, but these are my thoughts so far.

Assessment Week

Assessment, formal assessment anyhow, is the hardest thing for me to pin down. I imagine that is the case for most teachers. I have no trouble with progressive assessment, or whatever you would call monitoring and discussion based assessment...but I have trouble deeming someone's written work as 'good' or 'bad', especially if I can tell that they have worked hard on it and/or if it's a great improvement over previous papers. With the papers that are an improvement, I always have to stop and think about whether I should give it the "C" that it deserves or to give it an "A" or "B" because it's progress.

Rose's "Language of Exclusion" was interesting for me to read. It had some of the same concepts as Lives on the Boundary did, but the presentation and his writing style were very different. I realize that the shift in style is due to the difference in audience, from that of educators and pedagogy students to a more formal academic venue; but it was still strange to go from the almost friendly tone in Lives to this article.

Reading this article also made me think about my own means of assessment. I am a fan of rubrics, both as a student and as a teacher. As a student, I like to see the areas that I need to work on. It doesn't matter if there are points or simply a checklist like the rubric we discussed in class. Rubrics also show what the teachers value...and I'm sorry, but it's important to know what the professor wants. As much as what should matter is becoming a stronger writer...you sort of have to take on the professor's values as your own for the duration of that class.

I know that Rose would not agree with most of the rubrics I use for my classes. They are not wholly grammer/usage based, but I believe that if the grammar and mechanics are so poor that it disrupts the flow of the paper....it should affect the grade.

All of the above rant aside, most days I wish that (after the basic level classes are over) there would be no grades, only comments and working on improvement in writing. My ideal writing class would have units such as: Style, Diction, Flow/Organization, Thesis. Now, I don't think this would work for basic level writing....

Sophism

Vitanza's article, unfortunately, didn't clear up any of the questions I have about rhetoric and the finer points of arguments. Or maybe it's just that I didn't read through it enough times, or even that sophist's principles aren't meant to be understood by those who do not follow the theory.

I really don't have much else to say that wouldn't be space-filling blathering, so I guess I won't count this as one of my top 10 blogs.

Rhetoric and Audience

I found Corbett’s article on classic rhetoric in the composition classroom to be the most influential for me, of the readings from this week…and no, this is not because it was the shortest of the three. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of rhetoric is close to nil; my undergraduate studies of rhetoric left me with a sort of lofty definition: “the study of argument”. Now, I know there’s more to it than that, and I could extrapolate a little, but my ability to explain rhetorical studies is vague.

Still, I found Corbett’s explanation and defense of classical rhetoric terms and practices food for thought for my composition classes. I agreed with his statement that “students find theme-writing so unrealistic” because of the vague audience that they usually have to write to – the “general public”.

I also agree with and found that I have put into practice his idea that students need a solid, concise thesis statement before they can properly start an academic paper. I actually had them do an exercise in class yesterday (the day I handed out the assignment sheet for the research paper) that guided them through a self-questioning process in order to produce a thesis statement for their yet-unwritten papers.

I would be interested in what our creative writing focused people in this class have to say about his statement, near the end of the paper, of “But hasn’t the cult of self-expression had a fair chance to prove itself in the classroom? How often does the student with creative promise even show up in our classrooms?” He is basically saying, in my opinion, that classic rhetoric methodology should replace the majority of creative expression in academic writing. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive.

It seems like the theme for this week’s reading can be boiled down, yet again, to one word “audience”. In fact that seems to be one of the major themes for this class for the semester. All of which leads me to the question: How do we make a more concrete audience for our students to use for their Comp 110 papers? Or, how do we help them learn to seek their own audience? It seems that audience training is important to the English department here, but not to all of them. So, how do we teach them to help themselves in finding and/or creating an audience for future, non-110 papers?

Drafting Differences

Starting with the last article first...I have some fairly strong agreements and disagreements with Flowers and Hayes' argument for a cognitive process of writing. I agree wholeheartedly that writing is, in part, an intellectual process. To think that writing "just happens", and that it doesn't run through multiple processes of the mind is absurd. My disagreements lie with, and this is totally a worldview/personality difference, the insistence for charts and discussion of hierarchies of goals and that ilk. I guess then, my issue lies more with the need to overthink what I see as a natural process. Granted, it obviously is a learned process, but I see the potential to write as a latent, natural process, that requires teaching only to give form to the process.

I really enjoyed the Harris article, and the resulting discussion for the matter, on one-and-multi draft writers. Honestly, before dealing with this article, I had always considered one-draft writers simply lazy or procrastinators. And while I still don't know that I myself will ever be a one-draft writer, I can understand where they are coming from now. It was also neat to see practical application of previous readings for class in this one. I had struggled some with the reader versus writer based prose, and this helped me to better understand how the focus of writing can be influenced by audience.

The information discussed in Sommer's article about revision...mostly wasn't new to me, but I do feel like I benefitted from gaining an understanding of the format of the types of articles that I may someday write and publish in scholarly journals.

Elbow and the Internet

As is to be expected, I enjoyed the Elbow article more than the other two. They were not horrible, I just am an Elbow fan. I've said before that much of the Crosstalk book authors leave me feeling stupid when I read them, but Elbow is always more clear, even if I do not agree with everything he writes. I do not know if a writer can ever turn off the audience of self. I wholeheartedly believe that writers can tune everyone else out and just write for themselves, but even in a diary or journal, you are writing for the audience of the future self.

The Lunsford article on textual ownership was, once again, best understood after class discussion. It reminded me of an old friend and classmate who believed that information should never be copyrighted or classified...that it should be available for all. This is a very grey area in my opinion, because it is hard to own an idea, but that's what most information is...creative and/or informative shaping of ideas. I understand though, that this is a world where what you own is often the deciding factor of who you are, regardless of whether it is financial or intellectual capital (Dr.Burling's influence is starting to show), but I also think that information should not be hoarded. That is my head speaking, though, as my heart would want to receive full credit and ownership for any stories, poems, ideas, projects that I produced.

The narrative-based article on safe spaces for women to write should have appealed to my fairly strong feminist side, but in reality, it did not. I can understand where the woman felt like her personal space had been violated when the 'master male' student let himself into her web server, but even metaphorically, I feel that rape is a too-strong comparison. And speaking from a teaching point of view, the narrative styled formatting made it hard to pull pithy passages. There were ideas to be summarized, but not necessarily 'quotable quotes'. I agree with their concerns about creating a safe space to write, but I don't know if that need is really only for the women in our classes....it applies to every student.

Are you really out there, audience?

I take a sort of joy in the fact that I am writing in my blog, where I know who my intended audience is, about the concepts of addressed versus invoked audience. It's all very post-modern and 'meta'.

I agree, to an extent, with Chris' confusion in class yesterday about the idea of a fictionalized audience. I think though, that I have more of a problem with Ong's belief that an audience is more real for an orator than it is for a writer. There is always a real, actual audience for any piece of writing, even if the audience is simply the writer-as-a-reader of their own work. It is, instead, a matter of 'determining' who the audience is, not a matter of creating a previously non-existing audience.

I also do not understand how a reader can take on a role that requires them to ficitionalize themselves. I understand the part about taking on a role; I have two reader roles -- with pen in hand and for pleasure.

Maybe I am too caught up in semantics here, but fiction to me means 'not real'. Therefore, the audience is never fictional or constructed because the reader all ready exists (regardless if the reader is the writer or someone else).

The Lunsford/Ede piece was interesting to read as a direct follow up to Ong's writing. I've never before read a (partial) critique of an author that I had just read. I enjoyed that this essay mostly dealt with the strengths and weaknesses of several theoretical models, instead of taking the usual very distinct bias that some of the other essays in the book take. I understand that the purpose of writing a paper on a specialized topic (or almost any writing at all) is to make an argument, but at the level that I am at in the world of composition theory, it is occasionally good to just become more informed on something.

It's Friere Day, Yeah!

So, once again, I found twice as much benefit in discussion yesterday as I did reading the essays and chapters by myself. Friere is infinitely more relatable than some of the other topics we've covered, but I'm learning that I simply "get" more out of talking about something. I've always been a very verbal learner, but before taking this class, I could usually get a good grasp of the things I've read. I also kind of (read: arrogantly) felt that because my undergrad degree was in English EDUCATION that I would somehow magically understand all the pedagogical stuffs. Tis not the case, though I am learning, bit by bit.

Now my reactions to the readings themselves: I had heard, vaguely, of the banking method before this week, but had never really read much about it. After three years teaching high school, in a place that virtually required the banking method, my knee jerk reaction was to hate it on principle. It seemed, and still somewhat seems to me, common sense that students need dialogue and to be questioned and challenged. And it seems equally common sense to me that there needs to be mutual respect and a general love for humanity in order to create an environment (in the classroom or out) where good dialogue can be generated.

And while I do believe all of the above, I truly think that the banking method is not only useful, but necessary in almost every classroom. Depending on the class, the extent of which the banking method would be useful fluctuates. Even within the English and Composition classrooms, students need basic vocabulary and knowledge of formats. And while these could be taught in a 'discovery' or dialogue method, it would be a waste of time.

Tardy Post for week of 9/5 - 9/8/06

First and foremost, I wanted to comment on the discussion about the readings before I talked about this week's readings, themselves. Class on Friday was, for me, one of the most beneficial classes I've had this year. Sometimes with the articles we are assigned, I get bogged down in the length and the big words, and I end up only understanding half (if that) of what is being explained in the article. But the group mini-presentations left me going "Oh!" a lot, in my head.

Now, as for the readings themselves, I "got" the most of the Royster article on cross-boundary discourse and the least from Bizzell's article on cognition. I feel that the monitoring and modeling how to blur the line of the "Other" is something very practical, and can be applied both to our classrooms and our everyday lives. I mean, being more consciously aware of what we say about people who are something we are not, be it race/gender/religion, seems common sense. And being that we are teachers, regardless of our political pedagogy, we have the need to model that way of thinking for our students. And it has to be modeled, because I don't believe that is something that can be taught.

The Kirsch/Ritchie article on politics of location seemed to be mostly about how to handle research subjects. I probably need to go back and read this one again; not because I didn't understand the concepts in it, but because the idea of human subjects as something that I might be working with is so new to me that my focus was on that. I guess part of my brain always thought that English majors only studied the literature and writings themselves, but I am seeing now that there is more to it than that.

This week's readings were clearer and more beneficial to me personally than some of the previous ones because I feel like I finished the week understanding (at least the main point) of each of them.

New-old Revelation

So, I was reading Tobin Lad's "Process Pedagogy" last night, when I came to a realization: we (profs/teachers) want to teach process writing, and they (our 110 students) don't want that. I looked back over the diagnostic essay that I gave my students last week, at the part about 'expectations for the class', and realized that all of them expected, and sort of wanted, to be taught how to write the form-perfect essay.

How do we overcome that? I, personally, am an advocated of writing as a process. But I also realize that the student and the teacher kinda have to be on the same page of what's being taught and learned. (This is not to say that I am the only teacher in the classroom, but that is a discussion for another time).

And now it becomes a much bigger issue that "are they understanding what I'm teaching", because they are only listening for how to write 'correctly', and I am only teaching how to write 'from the heart'.

Food for thought....

Week 2's Readings-- some of it anyhow

My responses to the readings for this week were, again, varied. The James Britton article, “Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing”, was virtual nonsense to me until we discussed it in class. Maybe it is due to the fact that I just spent three years reading, writing, teaching and grading at a 9^th grade level, but I came to grad school with the belief that reading and writing were simply forms of communication and connection. Every discussion I have, both as a grad student and teacher, is showing me that I know nothing.

Emig’s article, “Writing as a Mode of Learning”, was half confusion and half good, common sense. Towards the end of the article, she discusses several points about learning to write that make a lot of sense to me, namely that you have to write at your own pace and that writing is slower than talking, and therefore, allows the learner more time to grasp a concept.

The Elbow article was pretty much the redeeming one for the week, or at least it was the only one that I enjoyed in its entirety. As a cook, a gardener and an English teacher, I found the analogies for the writing process entertaining and beneficial. It also stressed the method of writing until the ideas run out, even if it’s crap, and then revising the information into a written work of art. Trashing one’s written words is hard, even for me, but a necessary part of a successful writing habit (in my humble opinion).

Comp Tales - A Lamenting Review

Comp Tales leaves me with very mixed feelings, so far. On one hand, I enjoy reading about the experiences of other teachers. It makes me want to write down some of my favorite, or craziest, experiences as a high school teacher and get them published and out into the world to be seen and understood my the fellows of my profession.

On the other hand, the chapters that we have encountered read very much like the end-of-article anecdotes in Reader’s Digest Magazine, only many of them (especially in Chapter 6 about students) aren’t even uplifting or humorous. I keep getting halfway through a comp tale, when I find myself anticipating the ‘punchline’, so to speak; the moment when the light bulb when on for that teacher or the moment of glory for the student. Many of the tales have comments by the teacher that lived the tale, explaining when and why they tell this story to new teacher and/or TAs, but I seem to be missing their point. Maybe the future chapters will affect me differently, but the ones read so far leave me feeling discouraged with the teaching world and not inspired to go out and become a teacher.

My last viewpoint on this book is that maybe it is attempting to give a more realistic, nitty-gritty look at the world of teaching, so the new TAs, teachers and profs do not go into their classrooms disillusioned by their idealistic hopes and plans for their students.

All in all, I finished reading the four assigned chapters feeling discouraged by Haswell and Lu’s collection of stories. In my three years’ experience teaching high school to inner city teens, I have learned that not every child succeeds (at least not in the time that I am acquainted with them). Yet, I have also seen some of the most ‘hopeless’ of kids reach goals beyond their imaginations.

I guess I need to hang onto my idyllic teaching mentality in order to go into an often otherwise unthankful job. I will try not to lose my grain of salt, the one that would lead me to despair with every student failure, but I need to read these Comp Tales believing that every student CAN make and reach goals.

First Post

I am just writing this to establish my blog. I plan to use this space to write academic reflections, first for my ENG 620 class....but who knows where it'll go from there!