Measured

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT

I believe the online classroom should create an environment that is challenging and complex but rewarding and fair. When such an environment is created, the online classroom can be a place of excitement, encouragement, and growth. I believe the actions of both students and teachers foster such an environment. As a teacher, I have primary responsibility for adapting the demands of the environment to elicit the best from students. I have developed a “Start Here” page for each course because I think students do better when it is clear what the class expectations are at the outset. I hold classes from Thursday to Wednesday each week, because I recognize that most of my students are employed and evenings and weekends are when they have most opportunity to work. Shifting the class week allows time for myself and other students to comments and discussions posted during the weekend before the end of the class week. I seek to expose students to complex materials but pose questions that guide their reading so they are clear what the learning goals are. I specify learning objectives for each class and strive to show students how the online classroom activities for that week relate to achieving those objectives. I rarely penalize for late assignments. Students in my classes are all competent professionals holding down challenging jobs, managing families, and engaging in community activities. To my mind, it is more important that the student engages in and completes the learning experience.

I believe principles of feminist pedagogy can create positive learning experiences in all teaching-learning environments. My goal in teaching is to create self-sufficient, confident learners.  I was influenced early in my academic career by feminist scholars who were attempting to reframe and reshape the nature of the epistemological enterprise. Now classic anthologies, such as Lorraine Code’s What Can She Know?, introduced me to a critical discourse on what gets counted as knowledge and who gets to transmit it. I resonate with Webb’s principles of feminist pedagogy that include empowerment, building community, respecting personal experience, privileging the individual voice, and reforming the teacher-learner relationship. Empowerment means giving students courage to try new things, to reflect on their own work and revise it. Respecting personal experience means recognizing that each learner’s perspectives have the power to positively influence other learners. Collaboration and team science are present-day buzzwords that have their roots in the feminist principle of building community. When students dialogue with each other is elevated to the role of teaching, they learn to respect each other’s voices, not just those of the teacher. Importantly, they are empowered to see themselves as key actors in other’s learning experiences.
*Finkel, DL. (2000). Teaching With Your Mouth Shut. Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc. Portsmouth, NY.
*Code, L. (1991). What Can She Know? Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

I believe paying attention to student volition is critical for engaging students in online learning. As a graduate student, I trained with the renowned scholar, Dr. Gary Kielhofner, who had developed an approach to treatment entitled “The Model of Human Occupation” (MOHO). Volition, a key concept of the model, speaks to how human beings are motivated to engage in everyday activities. Briefly, volition involves personal causation (how capable and effective you feel), values (what’s important to you) and interests (what you enjoy doing). I believe the concept of volition can be applied beyond rehabilitation practice to teaching and learning also. In designing classes, developing assignments, and responding to students, I believe it is important to pay attention to student volition. Nobody likes to take classes for which they feel unprepared, or worse, which cover material they feel they have already mastered. In the grantsmanship class, I have students who have successfully written and received external funding and students who only recently finished graduate research methods courses. Meeting this range of student needs and motivations has been one of the most challenging aspects of designing and teaching this course. One strategy I have used is developing coursework that students can tailor to their own comfort-level and learning needs (personal causation). I developed a series of classes in this course that focus on communicating with your audience. Whether novice or more experienced grant writer, we can all learn to better tell the story of why our research matters to our different stakeholders. I created modules to help students talk with project officers, identify a wider range of new stakeholders, and explain their research proposal briefly and concisely to peers who are knowledgeable but not expert in the student’s area of science. I believe in keeping it personal so that coursework provides students the opportunity to work on what matters to them (values). Throughout the grantsmanship course, students are encouraged to develop a proposal that matters to them and their future career goals. For a few, this may be developing an NIH K-award proposal but for others, this might be identifying funding for a program evaluation at their not-for-profit community group, or securing support for implementing, and evaluating an advanced training curriculum with their professional association. These learning opportunities have helped the diverse students in the class engage at the level they are at, on proposals they care about, through media they prefer. All students will not enjoy all aspects of the course but my goal is to provide enough variety in media and learning activities that all students will find aspects of the course engaging and absorbing (interests). Of the module on identifying new stakeholders, one student commented, “XXXX”
*Kielhofner, G. (2008). The Model of Human Occupation. Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, MD.

I believe every teaching opportunity is a learning opportunity for me, too. I am constantly discovering how to be a better teacher and how to improve the courses I teach. As a faculty member in a new program, I developed 5 new courses at GW since 2014. Although developing courses is exciting, one frustration I have experienced is having only a few chances to revise and improve each course. Indeed, this is what has been most satisfying about the grantsmanship course, which I have been fortunate to teach 4 times. By utilizing the feedback from students and applying what I have learned each time I taught the course, I have been able to see the course improve each semester. While this course may not meet all students’ grant-writing needs, and an advanced grant-writing course would undoubtedly benefit some students, I believe that by critically reflecting on student feedback and by applying what I have learned to each new iteration of the course, the class now better facilitates all students fundamental grant writing skills.

I believe online teaching has made me a better and more reflective (and reflexive) teacher. Prior to GW, my teaching experience involved large (50-100 student) face-to-face instruction. I had excelled, being inducted into the occupational therapy honor society for the quality of my teaching. I could have not been more surprised, on arriving at GW, to find the complexity, challenge, and frankly frustration, of teaching solely online. In the didactic setting, I could engage students a problem-solving activity and connect their reflections on that experience to the material we were learning that day. How different is the asynchronous, often stilted dialog of online teaching! I struggled mightily with discussion boards in which students appeared to want to write unstructured, lengthy “data dumps”. I struggled to design the Blackboard pages so that students didn’t fall asleep from boredom or click around madly in frustration. However, I believe that each of these “frustrations” has also been an opportunity for innovation. I took the Quality Metrics course and designed assignments that better met the course goals. I learned from other online teachers and redesigned the Blackboard pages of my courses to be more clear, logical, and consistent. And I learned that both the students and I do better when discussion boards are focused around problem-solving to achieve a task.