Andrew.B4RRETT.com

Teaching Statement

The following serves as an introduction to the teaching portion of my portfolio (located at the bottom of this page).  The purpose of this introduction is to establish a link between the teaching goals outlined in my candidate’s statement, my teaching and learning philosophy, and the teaching competencies I already have, as well as those I aim to achieve.

My Philosophy of Teaching and Learning

Although the original heading to this section is “My Philosophy of Teaching”, I’ve decided to add “and Learning” because I do not believe that it is possible to talk about a teaching philosophy without explaining one’s perspective on learning.  At an Instructional Systems Technology department, we know that teaching is not always the best path towards learning.

I agree with Dr. Reigeluth’s view on what a future educational system should look like to more effectively deal with the information age and that the current educational system is not well suited for our current society.  Instead of students progressing through the school system like products on a conveyor belt based on their age, progress should be based on what they have actually learned and teachers should serve less as “sages on the stage” and more as facilitators who guide students towards appropriate learning experiences based on their individualized learning history and their learning goals.  Teacher should work with students to evaluate what the appropriate learning goals in an approach that is learner-centered and focused on mastery as opposed to being teacher-centered and focused on keeping pace with students of the same age.

In the following I will discuss ideas about teaching and learning that that resonate with me, with specific focus on those that enhance teachers’ ability to facilitate student learning and that are in line with the type of educational system referred to earlier.

Evaluation of the Learner Is Critical

The importance of evaluating the learner’s knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes using valid approaches is hard to overemphasize.  Knowing what the learner knows is fundamental to a variety of learning theories and instructional approaches.  Do they have the prerequisite skills?  What do they see as rewards or punishments?  What is their level of confidence in their abilities?  What tasks can they do by themselves and what tasks can they do when they get some help?  What are their existing schemas?  How do they understand the material?

Evaluating the learner is a key part of determining what type of intervention (including teaching) should be taken.  Decisions about the role of a possible instructor, the types of activities that the learner should do, and the content that needs to be covered should all be informed by what the learner knows at the beginning and at various points throughout the intervention.  Changes in what the learner knows and other attributes (e.g. their interest level in the material) should be used to determine the effectiveness of the intervention and to possibly suggest changes to the intervention while it is taking place.

Summative evaluation is also necessary to determine the overall effectiveness of the intervention.  Kirkpatrick’s levels of evaluation (individual reaction, learning, transfer to real world contexts, and return of investment) provide important information to be used in order to determine if the intervention should be modified or possibly abandoned.

Quality evaluations are hard to conduct due to the complexity of coming up with valid ways to measure learners’ competencies.  Difficulties in creating valid evaluations can lead to their infrequent or ineffectively use in education which subsequently contributes to a lack of understanding of the learner and an inability to improve or customize their learning experience.  Instead, evaluations are typically done in the form of summative, end of course or unit evaluations used for grading purposes.  Standardized norm referenced tests are frequently conducted but they are mostly used for selection purposes (e.g. SAT) or for the comparison of schools (e.g. No Child Left Behind).  I do not deny the importance and utility of these types of evaluations, however, they do not reveal what a specific learner knows at a particular point in time, which would be very helpful in improving their learning experience.  Teachers working in isolation are unlikely to develop and apply effectively the tools to evaluate students and their own instructional interventions.  There needs to be greater collaboration between educators at all levels in across organizations to ensure a higher quality learning experiences.

Plan Obsessively and Implement Flexibly

The need to possess what seem to be drastically different, almost contradictory, skills at the same time in order to master a higher order skill has grown increasingly apparent to me.  Creating effective learning experiences or interventions requires both obsessive planning and flexible implementations.  This idea recognizes that there is a great body of knowledge about learning that can be leveraged to create effective lessons, instructional materials, learning exercises, evaluations, teacher guides, computer-aided instruction, etc.  A deep understanding of the content, sound educational approaches, and the learners helps to create a rigorous and defensible “learning plan” that will increase the opportunity for effective learning.

The skills required to develop the type of “learning plan” described above need to be complemented with flexible implementation skills.  I see learning as dynamic and complicated process that cannot be entirely understood and predicted.  The human brain seems infinite in its complexity and the interaction of multiple individual brains in the process of learning only magnifies this complexity.  Even the best laid plans will likely need some level of modification once they are put into practice with learners either to mitigate learning obstacles or to take advantage of learning opportunities that emerge unexpectedly.
Flexible implementation requires human involvement despite advances in computing technology and artificial intelligence.  The human implementing flexibly could be an instructor, a learner, or a combination of the two.  The capacity of an instructor to observe the performance of learners and to come up with creative ways to adjust the learning experience can have a significant impact on learning.  This is not to claim that learning can only occur with the aid of an instructor.  Undoubtedly, learning does happen when students are solely interacting with a computer and/or each other, but a competent instructor adds value to the learning experience that cannot always be matched by a technological solution.

Shared Responsibility for Learning

Instructors blaming their students and students blaming their instructors for poor learning outcomes is a well-known phenomenon.  Information technology consulting, where I worked for many years, places a strong emphasis on being customer focused.  Those in the consulting industry are expected to do everything in their power to ensure the customer is satisfied with the service or product provided.  It is not acceptable to dismiss a bad customer experience as being the customer’s fault.  This does not mean that the customer is always right, but it is the consultant’s responsibility to make clear the requirements and/or dependencies the customer is responsible for.  When expectations are clearly laid out and communication of performance is direct, it is much easier to move beyond finger pointing and focus on how to move forward towards common goals.  It is important to note that if a customer fails to meet their obligations, it also seen as a failure of the consultant to judge their capacity to meet their side of the obligation.

Teaching can, in many ways, be analogous to consulting.  As an instructor I am responsible for creating learning experiences for my students that clearly outline the shared responsibilities and the consequences of not meeting responsibilities.  If students fail to meet my expectations, it is my responsibility to communicate this to them in a clear and timely way, as well as to remain open to the possibility that my original expectations for their performance may not have been appropriate.  This requires a balance between courage and consideration:  instructors must have the courage to hold students accountable to high standards, but also the consideration to honestly evaluate if those standards are reasonable.

If a given instructional approach is only working for the best and brightest students then it must be reevaluated.  The best and brightest students will be able to overcome poor instructional approaches in order to get the grade they want or learn material they see as critical to their future.  It is the students who lack the motivation, prerequisite skills, innate ability, etc. that truly measure the success of a given instructional approach.  This is not to say that the performance of exceptional students should be ignored, but that in many cases these students are less impacted by the instructional approach taken.

Students, however, also have responsibility for their learning experience.  This involves making decisions about how to allocate their time and energy to best achieve their long-term goals.  This may or may not match the demands of the particular structured learning experiences that they find themselves in, but as learners it is also their duty to ensure that they get the most from these experiences.

Preference for a Mixed Methods Approach

I think that a single instructional approach or learning theory is not always as effective as a layered or mixed methods approach.  Similarly, neither qualitative or quantitative methods alone can yield the same results as a mixed methods approach.  Instructional design, like other design disciplines, is both an art and a science.  If the best solution to a given learning problem could be derived purely with scientific or procedural methods, it would become a problem not requiring instructional designers.

I have been influenced Christopher Alexander’s ideas about design presented in his book entitled A Pattern Language, where he envisions the process of design as a search for the most appropriate and balanced solution for a given problem (e.g. architectural design) that reconciles the sometimes conflicting elements constituting the problem (e.g. human needs, landscape, environmental issues, etc.).  The approach he suggests is iterative and draws on the application of a variety of natural patterns that can be applied to develop a design that is a good fit to the given problem.  The broad spectrum of various learning theories, methodological approaches, and instructional approaches serve as patterns that instructors can use to explore the problems they encounter and build learning experiences that fit the context in which they are deployed.

As an instructor I believe that to be passionate about teaching is as important as any theoretical argument or position that can be outlined.  Teaching energizes me and it gives me great satisfaction to see a students grasping a concept or task they had previously struggled with.  Teaching allows me to see the tangible results of my efforts and the direct positive impact that I can have on another person and their life.

Teaching Competencies I Need

I need to be able to design and teach a wide variety classes to achieve my goal and become a School of Education faculty member.  In our age of technology, there seems to be a increasing demand for classes related to technology and its integration into classrooms, as well as for instructional design oriented courses.  Teaching these types of courses requires that I have both the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary for their effective design and implementation.

A more general teaching competency that I will need to possess is curriculum design.  The ability to take the general description of a course that one is provided with and transform it into a specific curriculum with a syllabus, assignments, tests, and lessons is vital to being an effective university instructor.  The design of learning experiences that are neither too difficult nor too easy for a given set of students is a challenge I will continue to face.

Teaching Competencies I Have

I have strong teaching competencies and a considerable amount of teaching experience.  I have been teaching since I was very young.  In my teens I was teaching swimming and life saving skills to students ranging in age from preschool to high-school.  In university I shifted my focus to computer science and upon graduating found employment with an IT consulting company where as a team lead I was involved in mentoring new hires and training clients on the use of the software we had built for them.  I returned to teaching in 2003 when I decided to go back to school and get a masters degree at SIU.  This move brought along an AI position where I taught technology integration courses to preservice teachers.  I was involved in this course until I graduated in 2005.  At Indiana University I taught EDUC W201 for four years, EDUC W200 for one year, and am currently teaching two freshman interest group (FIG) classes, “Get Your Game On” and “Teaching Young Children.”

AIs teaching EDUC W201 were not permitted to add or remove content from the class since all the students had to take the same four assessments in order to pass the class.  What AIs gained from the experience of teaching EDUC W 201 was the opportunity to experiment with different lesson plans and ways of covering the content of the class.  I made use of this opportunity to adjust my lessons, syllabus, and assignments in the hope of creating a better learning experience for my students.  In the teaching section of my dossier, I have included my first W 201 syllabus that I used and the syllabus I was using in my fourth year of teaching the course.  A comparison of the two syllabi shows significant modifications, even though the content of the course did not change much in those four years.  Using the flexibility of the course as much as was possible, I made changes to it over the years in a way that factored in the knowledge that students already had (e.g. by reducing the time spent on email and application software) and areas where students consistently ran into problems (e.g. web page development).

I have also modified the assignments for W201 significantly to make them clearer and more manageable for the students.  The biggest change involved breaking the web page development assignment into two so that the students were not overwhelmed with creating a website all at once and so that they could incorporate my feedback into the second version of the assignment.  In the dossier, I included the assignment descriptions for W201 and a link to the work done by my students in my forth year of teaching the class.

The students in W201 could test out of specific portions of the class by completing assessments before the assessment content is covered in class.  I found that in many cases the students were having problems following the overly complex directions in the assessments and that some of the steps were not necessary, so I took initiative of an effort to rewrite the assessments.  I rewrote three of the four assessments and incorporated feedback I received from my fellow AIs.  The dossier contains original and final versions of the assessments as evidence.

My work on EDUC W200 built on my previous experiences with EDUC W201 but added more complexity given the more in depth treatment of educational technology integration provided by EDUC W200.  I worked closely with faculty (Dr. Leftwich, Dr. Appelman, and Dr. Brush) in the design and development of W200 in the summer of 2008 and played an active role in the subsequent implementation of the class.  I took the lead on the development of the assessments for the class as well as the structure and evaluation of the ePortfolios that students created.

Included in the dossier are the student reviews that I have received as part of teaching educational technology courses.  The evaluations show that my students have seen me as an organized, knowledgeable, and approachable instructor.

Besides teaching EDUC W201 and EDUC W200 that are both preservice teacher technology classes, I also had the opportunity to teach an instructional design class to non-education majors.  In the fall of 2005 I taught EDUC R311 Introduction to Instructional Systems Technology, a 3 credit graded class.  The experience was also different from W201, because here I was given a large amount of freedom to design the curriculum.  Based on my discussions with Dr. Appelman I decided to anchor the course in Human Performance Technology (HPT) since most students would likely end up working in private industry where a HPT background can be useful.  The syllabus and the associated assignments can be found in my dossier as my evidence of my competency in teaching a more instructional design oriented class.

My most current teaching experience in the FIG program has a heavy focus on active learning and the development of higher-order skills related to success in higher-education.  My “Get Your Game On” and “Teaching Young Children” FIG classes typically involve small group activities that focus on building skills and knowledge related to game design and early childhood education respectively.  My experience in the FIG program provides balance against the heavily technology focused teaching that I have done in the past.

Outside the academic context, I have conducted curriculum level analysis for Option Six.  In this capacity, I worked with a Microsoft subject matter expert in order to design a curriculum for two online courses aimed at improving the software development skills of Microsoft programmers.

Teaching Competencies I Do Not Have

Given the continuously growing demand for online education and distance learning, gaining experience teaching such course would serve my development as an instructor well.

Supporting Evidence

Evaluations

• W201 student evaluations from sections 9762 and 9750 that I taught in the spring of 2007
• W200 student evaluations from the Spring of 2009.

Student Work Samples

• Work from my W201 class

Assessments