The explicit goal of teaching is to share knowledge. However, college students are often in a course to achieve a specific career goal. So in addition to having the goal of sharing knowledge with students, I also have as a goal that learners leave my courses with a sense of efficacy when it comes to their ability to utilize what they learn in their careers or other personal goals. I also strongly believe that students deserve to be enthusiastically engaged with and validated in their pursuit of higher education. I am always excited to be someone who gets the chance to not just share information with students, but also to support students with encouragement and affirmation as they work towards their learning and education goals.
Conceptualization Explanation
When I entered my 30s I had no substantial background in academia. I had barely graduated from high school and did so in the lower third of my class. I started college for the first time when I was 31 and was surprised when I did not struggle through it the way I had k-12 school. On the contrary, I was able to maintain a 4.0 during both my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and my Master of Science in Human Development and Family Science, with a clinical Marriage and Family Therapy focus. I am dyslexic, ADHD, and autistic- which explained a lot of my struggles during primary and secondary education. Undoubtedly improvements in technology made education more accessible to me in the dozens of years since I had managed to graduate high school. However, I credit a lot of my ability to persevere and succeed during my post-secondary education to the enthusiasm, encouragement, and affirmation that came from many of the instructors who taught me.
When I entered my 30s I had no substantial background in academia. I had barely graduated from high school and did so in the lower third of my class. I started college for the first time when I was 31 and was surprised when I did not struggle through it the way I had k-12 school. On the contrary, I was able to maintain a 4.0 during both my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and my Master of Science in Human Development and Family Science, with a clinical Marriage and Family Therapy focus. I am dyslexic, ADHD, and autistic- which explained a lot of my struggles during primary and secondary education. Undoubtedly improvements in technology made education more accessible to me in the dozens of years since I had managed to graduate high school. However, I credit a lot of my ability to persevere and succeed during my post-secondary education to the enthusiasm, encouragement, and affirmation that came from many of the instructors who taught me.
For me, this reality of enthusiasm, encouragement, and affirmation was a stark division between my experience of education up through high school as compared to my higher education experience. One that I was lucky enough to start off with in my very first few undergraduate courses. I would quickly learn that having enthusiastic, encouraging, and affirming professors was not a universal experience. This was unsurprising to me, given my elementary through high school experiences with teachers. However, enough of my professors were enthusiastic, encouraging, and affirming that it permeated my entire higher learning experience in a way that I believe was instrumental for my ability to not only learn, but to persevere and succeed in undergraduate and beyond.
This conceptualization of the need for an enthusiastic, encouraging, and affirming instructor permeates my teaching philosophy. All the other ins and outs of instruction aside, I firmly believe that students deserve the experience of being engaged enthusiastically with encouragement and affirmation. In addition to this foundational conceptualization, I also draw from Vygotsky (1997), Piaget (1964), and others in my design and practice of instruction.
How I Teach and Why I Teach This Way
One of the ways I perceive teaching uses Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development, in that I conceptualize instructors as the “more knowledgeable other” who can help students reach a new level of ability in knowledge or practice. Toward this, when teaching, I often use a generative instructional strategy of integration (Morrison et al., 2013). This strategy incorporates the concept of schemas. Schemas are an important concept in Piaget’s (1964) theory about human development as well as concepts about learning and retaining knowledge. This generative instructional strategy works with the learner to reformat the information so that it can be incorporated into the learner’s existing schema or schemas. I begin by presenting the information, and then in order to motivate the learner to construct the meaningful relationships discussed by Morrison and colleagues (2013), I encourage open discussion where learners are invited to discuss their understandings and reactions to the material. In this way, this instructional strategy functions so as to incorporate and connect to each learner’s prior knowledge about the information being taught. This allows for the integration of new information into the learner’s pre-existing schemas and understandings.
One of the ways I perceive teaching uses Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development, in that I conceptualize instructors as the “more knowledgeable other” who can help students reach a new level of ability in knowledge or practice. Toward this, when teaching, I often use a generative instructional strategy of integration (Morrison et al., 2013). This strategy incorporates the concept of schemas. Schemas are an important concept in Piaget’s (1964) theory about human development as well as concepts about learning and retaining knowledge. This generative instructional strategy works with the learner to reformat the information so that it can be incorporated into the learner’s existing schema or schemas. I begin by presenting the information, and then in order to motivate the learner to construct the meaningful relationships discussed by Morrison and colleagues (2013), I encourage open discussion where learners are invited to discuss their understandings and reactions to the material. In this way, this instructional strategy functions so as to incorporate and connect to each learner’s prior knowledge about the information being taught. This allows for the integration of new information into the learner’s pre-existing schemas and understandings.
Integration as an instructional strategy uses generative questions and learner paraphrasing to facilitate learners to integrate new knowledge into their schemas (Morrison et al., 2013). For example, when I have taught learners about LGBTQ+ resources and experiences, I used generative questions and paraphrasing prompts during instruction that invited them to engage with the resources material through the lens of their own experiences with these or other resources. Such as by inviting learners to engage through the lens of past experiences in order to expand those schemas to include when they could or would use the resources being instructed on. This allows learners to call up their personal schemas of resource engagement and related experiences and thus allows them to integrate the new knowledge into their existing schemas and practice verbalizing or intentionally thinking about that knowledge.
It is also important to me that students are able to learn in actionable and useful ways. Both statistics and helping professions are career paths that take conceptual knowledge and turn them into something to be used. As an instructor, I owe my students no less than the ability to not just access but use the information I hope to share with them. As a result, part of how I teach is by working directly with data (in the case of measurement and statistics) or modeling interactions and experiences (in the case of developmental and therapeutic information) while engaging learners. This hands-on approach of working directly with students using dynamic examples has proven especially helpful when it comes to teaching statistical concepts to students.
Conclusion
My experiences in education have a lot to do with my motivation to instruct students. I recognize that things are often not accessible or as easy for many students as it is assumed. Further, I have been on the side of the student who is just trying to get help to understand and learn. As a result, I have my own unique perspective when it comes to approaching student learning. I enjoy helping students learn, and some of the feedback I’ve gotten from students is that my way of explaining things and working with them is both encouraging and helpful. I’m grateful for this feedback and strive to continue to work with students in a way that is encouraging and affirming as they learn to utilize the knowledge they will need to achieve their own career and other life goals. I enthusiastically look forward to helping learners achieve their higher education goals for many years to come.
My experiences in education have a lot to do with my motivation to instruct students. I recognize that things are often not accessible or as easy for many students as it is assumed. Further, I have been on the side of the student who is just trying to get help to understand and learn. As a result, I have my own unique perspective when it comes to approaching student learning. I enjoy helping students learn, and some of the feedback I’ve gotten from students is that my way of explaining things and working with them is both encouraging and helpful. I’m grateful for this feedback and strive to continue to work with students in a way that is encouraging and affirming as they learn to utilize the knowledge they will need to achieve their own career and other life goals. I enthusiastically look forward to helping learners achieve their higher education goals for many years to come.
