Philosophy of Teaching
On the final day of class last fall, our group discussion centered on how well the class navigated the semester, specifically English 111. After a few minutes of logistical comments concerning our class, which were quite valuable, Brad raised his hand to point out how he really started to see how writing is cumulative. In fact, he pointed out how I had chosen a career in which I continually collect ideas to be utilized later in some form. Honestly, I could not have said it better. The more skills available to each writer, the less daunting the writing situation becomes. Writing is not a trick to be taught an mastered; writing is understanding how to adapt what you want to say, your writing, to the context at hand.
As most teachers can attest, it is not every day you see your students readily grasp how you aim to teach writing, but I am pleased to know my methods, philosophies, and activities are working. Overall, the more students absorb the various processes, skills, and ideas needed to effectively communicate in any context, the more successful they will be as thinkers, writers, students, and citizens.
Because writing can be a challenge, I believe students need understandable, accomplishable, and well-practiced steps for meeting a writing challenge coupled with manageable, comfortable patterns of thinking in order to find success in all rhetorical contexts. To do so, writing classes must be a space in which theories and ideas are actually tested and practiced directly, and my classroom is a perfect example. Though students taking my classes do not necessarily clamor to become English majors, they all will write a lot while pursuing their educational goals, and I consider my teaching successful if my students internalize the work needed to produce communication that has a purpose.
Successful writing always follows a process, and the process, when it comes to composition, means having a number of tools available, ready to be deployed, to accomplish the goal at hand, whether that be reading, thinking, rhetorical, or observational skills. Teaching students how to engage in—and tailor their strengths toward—this process is the key component of my classroom. As a result, building habits required to fulfill any writing objective is the most important goal of every class session, every writing assignment, and every semester.
Class sessions always revolve around some aspect of the writing process. From day to day, offering students more information, nuance, or perspective for helping them complete an assignment not only provides the tools, but it also scaffolds the lessons discussed. For instance, when writing proposals, students must delve into the cultural and political contexts surrounding the issue by engaging in research and gathering perspectives. Neglecting this crucial step before drafting a proposal will produce a stagnant, un-informed analysis of the need for the given issue’s discussion. So when discussing how to approach the cultural and political aspects of the assignment in class, it is important students see how other authors tackle challenging ideas and contexts. It just so happens Esther Cepeda, a syndicated columnist, wrote a short piece about the help-seeking gap between minority and white students, outlining the obstacles faced by minority students when it comes to asking for help and drawing attention to their needs. The article demonstrates how good authors turn raw data into contextual analysis and key insights into important issues. Cepeda also demonstrates how authors effectively draw inferences about the contexts surrounding issues by basing implications on real-word information.
When discussing this article, the class looks at how the issue cannot be settled without understanding what surrounds, engenders, and affects the issue. Even though its length is affected by its medium (newspaper), students still see how building consensus for the issue with audiences creates interest and concern for readers. While students may not be able to begin such an analysis immediately, during this class session, they start with writing out what must be included in their proposals, what information has already been gathered, what research still needs to be done, and where such information will be found. By engaging students in this type of organization, gathering, and analysis, they begin to see the value in undertaking the first few steps of the writing process while also beginning their own pre-writing exercises. Class sessions are designed to offer students methods to bridge the gaps between what a finished project entails and work still to be done for the assignment.
In addition to carefully crafting every class session to build on previous drafts, every assignment also adds layers to the foundations built during previous projects. Preparing students for what comes next throughout the semester is invaluable, and each layer of this palimpsest develops skills needed for future projects. It is difficult to write a literature review if you do not know what some important voices have said about your subject. So, students build a short bibliography before they begin shaping their literature review. When we start the bibliography, I tell students to find competing, yet competent voices speaking about their subject. What really happens, though, is students must truly decide what question they want to answer before they can even begin finding information. Work the students did with their evaluative exercises comes into play. The right voice, the important voice must be sorted from the random spectator-come-expert. Students need an understanding of what makes information reliable before they can judge whether or not to include such information in their own work. Knowing what is ideal information and what is junk information is the product of having developed the tools necessary to discern which author measures up to high academic standards. Drawing on past writing practices is the process by which students generate a successful bibliography as well as find a place to differentiate their own voice.
However, building effective writing processes across assignments does not end there. Once students have found reliable, important information, organizing the data into a cohesive literature review propels those developed skills forward. When introducing the concept of a literature review, I like to ask students to generate a small debate around the issue of enrollment practices in post-secondary education institutions. Based only on their current knowledge of colleges across the country, including Ivy Tech, of course, two opposing groups easily list all the advantages of either open or closed enrollment schools after some lively discussion. Listing their ideas on the board is the easy part. The class was struggling with how to piece together their ideas into a cohesive debate on crucial areas of contention, and I realized I needed to take them through the thought processes I would go through in order to answer such a broad question. I asked what the most important aspects of colleges in general were. Then, I asked what is most important to students who attend college. Slowly, our own knowledge base became the means by which we could begin to form an intelligent debate.
Asking students to jot down what they think about different colleges across the country is easy, but having them shape their ideas into manageable areas of contention, the foundation of debate, is difficult. Despite their trepidation, the students already developed a depth of knowledge on their subjects. When students tackle the more difficult questions they intend to answer in their final paper, these organized areas of contention help students decide what matters, what is vital, what is crucial. When Danielle wanted to write about whether rap music was harmful to adolescents, she found a few books and articles dealing with the issue, but when I asked her to outline what areas of debate these authors focus on, she was stumped. We went through the early stages of the writing process together. She found certain authors to sound credible and unbiased, which is a great start. Then I asked her how they built their claims. She pointed out how one author talked about rap music as pure entertainment teens easily see as shallow, feel-good music, but another author questioned whether adolescents easily distinguish between reality and virtual reality. When she found this kind of information in her bibliography, she was able to see how work she had done in the past perfectly situated her to make important moves when crafting a debate on her chosen subject. Connections between different assignments are the means by which students develop their own skills, their own techniques, and their own tools based on the processes introduced from one writing project to the next.
While these class-to-class and project-to-project skills are developed, students also need to know how to navigate any future courses on their path to graduation, which proves to be the most challenging and important part of the writing classroom. It is difficult to know whether students take these developed skills with them into other classrooms, but ensuring they cannot neglect any part of the writing process during their time in English lays a foundation for future success. When a nursing student later must write a literature review, the skills developed in building contexts will prove vital; however, those context-building skills will be based on framing the research question appropriately in order to collect the right kind of information in order to fully depict the surrounding issues. When a business major later must write a proposal, knowing how to discern a need will be the most important tool learned, and by learning the steps needed to develop an issue into a problem into a need is the foundation of successful business proposals.
In this way, my classroom focuses on how writing actually happens, meaning the processes learned and the skills developed must be adaptable ready-to-use tools appropriate for myriad situations. If what is learned in my classroom is not applicable to other classrooms, then students have not learned how to successfully tackle a writing project, and instead, they have learned how to write English papers. Taking the skills from semester to semester, then, means my classroom offers students effective approaches for completing writing situations in general. When students engage in the approaches offered, students will produce more effective, more interesting, and more meaningful prose. While these goals seem lofty, they are not out of reach. Even though internalizing such approaches is challenging, students also remark how writing assignments in their other classes are becoming less daunting. My philosophy centers on empowering students to overcome impediments and obstacles in order for writing to become a more seamless function of being a successful college student.
On the final day of class last fall, our group discussion centered on how well the class navigated the semester, specifically English 111. After a few minutes of logistical comments concerning our class, which were quite valuable, Brad raised his hand to point out how he really started to see how writing is cumulative. In fact, he pointed out how I had chosen a career in which I continually collect ideas to be utilized later in some form. Honestly, I could not have said it better. The more skills available to each writer, the less daunting the writing situation becomes. Writing is not a trick to be taught an mastered; writing is understanding how to adapt what you want to say, your writing, to the context at hand.
As most teachers can attest, it is not every day you see your students readily grasp how you aim to teach writing, but I am pleased to know my methods, philosophies, and activities are working. Overall, the more students absorb the various processes, skills, and ideas needed to effectively communicate in any context, the more successful they will be as thinkers, writers, students, and citizens.
Because writing can be a challenge, I believe students need understandable, accomplishable, and well-practiced steps for meeting a writing challenge coupled with manageable, comfortable patterns of thinking in order to find success in all rhetorical contexts. To do so, writing classes must be a space in which theories and ideas are actually tested and practiced directly, and my classroom is a perfect example. Though students taking my classes do not necessarily clamor to become English majors, they all will write a lot while pursuing their educational goals, and I consider my teaching successful if my students internalize the work needed to produce communication that has a purpose.
Successful writing always follows a process, and the process, when it comes to composition, means having a number of tools available, ready to be deployed, to accomplish the goal at hand, whether that be reading, thinking, rhetorical, or observational skills. Teaching students how to engage in—and tailor their strengths toward—this process is the key component of my classroom. As a result, building habits required to fulfill any writing objective is the most important goal of every class session, every writing assignment, and every semester.
Class sessions always revolve around some aspect of the writing process. From day to day, offering students more information, nuance, or perspective for helping them complete an assignment not only provides the tools, but it also scaffolds the lessons discussed. For instance, when writing proposals, students must delve into the cultural and political contexts surrounding the issue by engaging in research and gathering perspectives. Neglecting this crucial step before drafting a proposal will produce a stagnant, un-informed analysis of the need for the given issue’s discussion. So when discussing how to approach the cultural and political aspects of the assignment in class, it is important students see how other authors tackle challenging ideas and contexts. It just so happens Esther Cepeda, a syndicated columnist, wrote a short piece about the help-seeking gap between minority and white students, outlining the obstacles faced by minority students when it comes to asking for help and drawing attention to their needs. The article demonstrates how good authors turn raw data into contextual analysis and key insights into important issues. Cepeda also demonstrates how authors effectively draw inferences about the contexts surrounding issues by basing implications on real-word information.
When discussing this article, the class looks at how the issue cannot be settled without understanding what surrounds, engenders, and affects the issue. Even though its length is affected by its medium (newspaper), students still see how building consensus for the issue with audiences creates interest and concern for readers. While students may not be able to begin such an analysis immediately, during this class session, they start with writing out what must be included in their proposals, what information has already been gathered, what research still needs to be done, and where such information will be found. By engaging students in this type of organization, gathering, and analysis, they begin to see the value in undertaking the first few steps of the writing process while also beginning their own pre-writing exercises. Class sessions are designed to offer students methods to bridge the gaps between what a finished project entails and work still to be done for the assignment.
In addition to carefully crafting every class session to build on previous drafts, every assignment also adds layers to the foundations built during previous projects. Preparing students for what comes next throughout the semester is invaluable, and each layer of this palimpsest develops skills needed for future projects. It is difficult to write a literature review if you do not know what some important voices have said about your subject. So, students build a short bibliography before they begin shaping their literature review. When we start the bibliography, I tell students to find competing, yet competent voices speaking about their subject. What really happens, though, is students must truly decide what question they want to answer before they can even begin finding information. Work the students did with their evaluative exercises comes into play. The right voice, the important voice must be sorted from the random spectator-come-expert. Students need an understanding of what makes information reliable before they can judge whether or not to include such information in their own work. Knowing what is ideal information and what is junk information is the product of having developed the tools necessary to discern which author measures up to high academic standards. Drawing on past writing practices is the process by which students generate a successful bibliography as well as find a place to differentiate their own voice.
However, building effective writing processes across assignments does not end there. Once students have found reliable, important information, organizing the data into a cohesive literature review propels those developed skills forward. When introducing the concept of a literature review, I like to ask students to generate a small debate around the issue of enrollment practices in post-secondary education institutions. Based only on their current knowledge of colleges across the country, including Ivy Tech, of course, two opposing groups easily list all the advantages of either open or closed enrollment schools after some lively discussion. Listing their ideas on the board is the easy part. The class was struggling with how to piece together their ideas into a cohesive debate on crucial areas of contention, and I realized I needed to take them through the thought processes I would go through in order to answer such a broad question. I asked what the most important aspects of colleges in general were. Then, I asked what is most important to students who attend college. Slowly, our own knowledge base became the means by which we could begin to form an intelligent debate.
Asking students to jot down what they think about different colleges across the country is easy, but having them shape their ideas into manageable areas of contention, the foundation of debate, is difficult. Despite their trepidation, the students already developed a depth of knowledge on their subjects. When students tackle the more difficult questions they intend to answer in their final paper, these organized areas of contention help students decide what matters, what is vital, what is crucial. When Danielle wanted to write about whether rap music was harmful to adolescents, she found a few books and articles dealing with the issue, but when I asked her to outline what areas of debate these authors focus on, she was stumped. We went through the early stages of the writing process together. She found certain authors to sound credible and unbiased, which is a great start. Then I asked her how they built their claims. She pointed out how one author talked about rap music as pure entertainment teens easily see as shallow, feel-good music, but another author questioned whether adolescents easily distinguish between reality and virtual reality. When she found this kind of information in her bibliography, she was able to see how work she had done in the past perfectly situated her to make important moves when crafting a debate on her chosen subject. Connections between different assignments are the means by which students develop their own skills, their own techniques, and their own tools based on the processes introduced from one writing project to the next.
While these class-to-class and project-to-project skills are developed, students also need to know how to navigate any future courses on their path to graduation, which proves to be the most challenging and important part of the writing classroom. It is difficult to know whether students take these developed skills with them into other classrooms, but ensuring they cannot neglect any part of the writing process during their time in English lays a foundation for future success. When a nursing student later must write a literature review, the skills developed in building contexts will prove vital; however, those context-building skills will be based on framing the research question appropriately in order to collect the right kind of information in order to fully depict the surrounding issues. When a business major later must write a proposal, knowing how to discern a need will be the most important tool learned, and by learning the steps needed to develop an issue into a problem into a need is the foundation of successful business proposals.
In this way, my classroom focuses on how writing actually happens, meaning the processes learned and the skills developed must be adaptable ready-to-use tools appropriate for myriad situations. If what is learned in my classroom is not applicable to other classrooms, then students have not learned how to successfully tackle a writing project, and instead, they have learned how to write English papers. Taking the skills from semester to semester, then, means my classroom offers students effective approaches for completing writing situations in general. When students engage in the approaches offered, students will produce more effective, more interesting, and more meaningful prose. While these goals seem lofty, they are not out of reach. Even though internalizing such approaches is challenging, students also remark how writing assignments in their other classes are becoming less daunting. My philosophy centers on empowering students to overcome impediments and obstacles in order for writing to become a more seamless function of being a successful college student.