Dr.TheresaTeachingPhilosophy

Theresa Overall’s Teaching Philosophy

Teaching and traveling are my two greatest passions. Though the acts may seem disparate, my philosophy towards each is very similar. Following are my "Rules of the Road" which I apply to my adventures in traveling but which also unveil my teaching philosophy.

//**Do your research.**// The more you know about your travel destination, the more you'll be able to gain from the experience. When you know the history and culture of a place, when you've researched the best routes to get to or through the location, the time spent at your destination will be more rewarding. The piecing together of all the facets of the research—transportation, sites to see, accommodations, events, prices—is the critical aspect of research that separates a good trip from a truly great travel adventure.

Teaching requires that you know your students and know your content, but that's not enough. Bringing the two together requires great planning and research as well as creativity and an open mind. Shulman (1986) described powerful teaching as the intersection of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. His Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) model of good teaching inspired Mishra and Koehler (2006) to take it a step further in the advent of technology in the classroom. Their Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK or TPACK) framework summarizes well what I strive for in and out of my classroom on a regular basis.

I know my content (technology integration, classroom management, methods of teaching mathematics, etc.) both from having studied it and from having lived it (21 years as a K-12 teacher). For me, content knowledge and technological knowledge go hand-in-hand. But I try to stay up to date as well. I attend conferences and workshops; I read journals and books; I follow bloggers in the field. I also listen to my graduate students who are teachers in the field right now and community members who are parents of current K-12 students or members of school boards. I want to know facts, opinions, and perspectives of what is happening today in the field of K-12 education. Bringing relevant and current information to my courses benefits my students' learning and keeps the material up-to-date as well as engaging. Likewise, I listen to my students to find out what's current and significant in their lives and use that to create meaningful analogies and help them find connections to the content. With college students, I am able to utilize both pedagogical knowledge and teaching strategies from the world of andragogy. One can never have enough good teaching approaches.

//**Good packing is essential.**// There's nothing worse than arriving at your destination only to find you need to drive 30 miles out of the way to pay outrageous prices for a new bathing suit you do not like only because you forgot to pack one. Making, updating, and using a packing list is a helpful tool to make sure you bring everything you are going to need. Likewise, one needs to avoid over-packing. I have my "essential" packing list, and I have lists of what to bring if I am flying on a plane versus renting a car versus going on a cruise, to name a few. This kind of organization saves time when preparing for a trip but also cuts back on stress prior to and during a trip.

Being organized and prepared for each class is essential. Each semester, I create a protected wikisite for posting all the details of that semester's courses as well as a public wikisite for students to post their assignments and projects. The protected wikisite contains the "agenda and assignments" page for each class. This one stop digital destination lists all the class meeting dates, what is planned for class that day, and what students need to accomplish prior to class in order to be prepared for class. The agenda is typically a listing of phrases describing an activity or announcement for that day's class. Most of the phrases are hyperlinks to a page that gives full details of what is going to happen and the resources needed to accomplish it. The same is true for the assignments. Often there is a section of "Advice from prior students" that helps current students be more successful in that activity. The wikis help me stay focused on what I want to accomplish that day and students can follow along and have access to the same resources during class. At the end of each class, I can edit the agenda moving items to the next class that we did not cover that day due to time constraints or adding items to a class that formative assessment tells me need to be addressed. This kind of organization (whether it's wikis or another technology) makes for efficient use of time for both the students and me. These resources also help more students be successful: during class, students who prefer hearing information can hear it, but those who need to see the information or those who benefit from both simultaneously are all able to learn in the style that is best for them; after class, students are already familiar with the resources and where to find them and can easily access them again for review purposes. Students who miss class can find out what they missed and students who like to work ahead can see what is coming up.

Because I teach pre-service teachers how to integrate technology into their teaching, I believe it is critical to model good technology integration in my own teaching. When I ask students what advice they would give to someone who is going to take one of my courses, “Read the wiki!” and “Use the wiki, it’s awesome and will help you be successful” are two recurring themes.

//**Embrace the U-turns.**// In any trip, there comes the inevitable moment where you realize that you need to make a U-turn. You took the wrong exit, missed the desired street, … something happened that you now realize it is best not to blaze a new trail but to return to the last known place where you were still on track and forge ahead from there. Instead of complaining about the delay in your planned arrival, travel is much more fun and rewarding if you embrace the U-turn. Not only did you get to see sites you would've missed had you stayed on course, but you get to see them twice: once on the way out, and once more on the way back. How often do you get two perspectives on the same thing? There may be a restaurant or a beautiful piece of architecture you never would've experienced had you not gone too far. Instead of cursing your unfamiliarity with the territory or your human nature to make a mistake, I prefer to embrace the unexpected opportunity of the U-turn.

This axiom for traveling has two corollaries related to teaching: "embrace the teachable moment" and "learn from your mistakes." Embracing the teachable moment may be a trite expression to some but for me it is one of the things that brings joy to my teaching. Perhaps it is the same adrenaline rush that improv comedians get after creating a skit on the fly, but there is nothing quite like having something unplanned happen in class that I can expand on and tie back to the intended topic of learning for the day. If nothing else, a good teachable moment captures students' attention and that alone is a teaching coup.

Learning from mistakes is a classic teachable moment but one rarely encouraged in traditional teaching. If we all know that some of our best wisdom comes from learning from our mistakes, why are students constantly penalized for making mistakes? In the American education system, the process of giving grades promotes the belief that you only get the good grade if you get it right the first time. And why do teachers try to cover up mistakes with the hopes that students will not discover the error? Though I try to avoid errors and mistakes in my teaching, when they do happen, I try to model the skills of a lifelong learner in hopes of encouraging my students to emulate that same behavior. How one recovers from the mistake is just as important, if not more so, than correcting the inaccuracy. I focus on mastery in my classes and encourage students to improve their work, correct (and learn from) their mistakes, and have a conversation about their new learning.

//**Be a traveler not a tourist.**// The interpretation of this expression comes down to the connotations of the two nouns. For me, a simplistic interpretation of the expression is that a tourist is one who is intent on traveling to new places just to prove s/he has been to the places that others have deemed important. A traveler is one who is more focused on the journey than the destination—one who soaks in the culture, the people, the ambiance, and the surroundings wherever s/he may go. The tourist comes home with souvenirs; the traveler comes home with stories.

I try to encourage my students to be a learner not just a student. The student typically focuses on the grade where the learner focuses on how much can s/he gain from this class. One way I encourage learning is by having a "no busy work policy" clearly stated in my syllabus:

//busy work: "a term for work or assignments that are felt to be time consuming, but not useful"//

I don't believe in busy work. I try to have only class activities and homework assignments that help students answer an essential question, learn something new, and/or meet a course objective. If you feel an assignment is busy work, meet with me individually and I will explain the objectives of the assignment and you can explain why it feels like busy work. Sometimes, once a student understands the objectives, the assignment no longer feels like busy work; sometimes, it still feels like busy work. If that is true in your case, speak up and together we can create a replacement assignment that will still meet the objectives but be more appropriate to your needs. (Description of busy work from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_work )

The students who actually follow up on that policy are typically surprised and almost always delighted. My favorite part is that they tend to do even more work than their colleagues after our conversation, whether they work on the original project or the personalized/modified project.

Another aspect of being a tourist and not a traveler, I believe, is to avoid trying to pack too much into a single trip. I remember the movie If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium which documented the woes of a group of tourists who were going to so many European countries in a single trip that the only way they could be sure of where they currently were was to check their itinerary. In my teaching, I do try to focus on helping students fully uncover the material, cutting back on the scope of the content if necessary. I am not a believer in the "inch deep and a mile wide" coverage of curriculum.

//**Be creative.**// This maxim applies to all aspects of my life, not just travel. But in traveling, creative problem solving is what will help you survive the missed train or the canceled flight. Creative financing is how you make sure you don't starve the last two days but still have enough money to get your car out of the parking lot when you get home. Thinking out of the box is how you can communicate via pantomime with the youth hostel clerk who doesn't speak English that you need linens for the night. Creative packing is how you get the Olympic goodies you bought in Lillehammer that you absolutely had to have for your math class into your already overstuffed backpack. Creativity is what makes life interesting and fun as well as survivable.

In 21 years of being a K-12 teacher and 10 years of teaching at the college level, I have found creativity to be my greatest asset. Creativity is what I use to make lessons come alive and be relevant, it is what is necessary for most good problem solving, and it is what will keep teaching and learning fresh and engaging. I find it disheartening that many educational practices in place today discourage creativity. I doubt that it is the intention, but that is often the end result. I try to bring creativity to all things that I do and I try to encourage it in everything that my students do. The first semester that I asked students “What surprised you?” about my course, the first student who responded said, “I was surprised how creative I could be.” I asked for clarification. “Did you mean how creative you were allowed to be?” “No,” she said. “I never knew I had so much creativity in me until this class when you forced us to use it.” Another student spoke up and said, “Well I wrote down, ‘I was surprised how creative we were allowed to be.’ And I never knew that learning could be so much greater when you use creativity.” Hopefully, the next generation of teachers will model creativity and encourage creativity in their students.

//**Ask the locals.**// On a business trip, a colleague and I were staying in a condo hotel in Mid Town Manhattan. While on our elevator ride down to the lobby, a man got on at the floor beneath ours. We were going to be sharing a 22-floor ride, so we struck up a conversation. By the end of the ride, he was recommending a nearby local restaurant that we never would have found without his sanction and directions. To this day, Michael's is one of the best dining experiences I've ever had. That kind of information just doesn't show up in the guidebooks. If “ask the locals” is going to be a rule you live by, the corresponding postulate must be: “be flexible.” If you ask a local, “What should I see or do while I am here?” it would seem a pointless exercise in conversation unless you then followed through on the suggestion. Being flexible implies that you should not ask the question if you do not want to take action on the answer. One must be willing to adjust plans accordingly.

In my classes, I ask for feedback and I take the input seriously. I try to create an environment where students feel safe to express what might be considered difficult questions or opposing viewpoints. I welcome these opportunities for rich discussions and deep learning. Often a simple question or statement by a student can lead to a great spontaneous conversation that leads to a follow-up assignment that becomes a rich part of my course in future semesters. In EDU 101, I first used The Joy of Teaching by Hall, Quinn, and Gollnick as my textbook in fall 2007. The first assignment was to read chapter 1 and come to class prepared for discussion. In the next class, Jay A. was the first to raise his hand for discussion. "Dr. Theresa, the book lied," he simply stated. I was taken aback but kept my composure and replied, "How did it lie?" He explained, "The book is called ‘The Joy of Teaching’ but there is no joy in chapter 1." He was exactly right. The first chapter is about the realities of being a teacher and that can be a pretty bleak picture. I now have "The Jay A. Chapter 1 Assignment" which is to read the chapter and keep a running list of the joyful and the not-so-joyful things you find in the chapter. Not only do the students appreciate the warning prior to reading the chapter, but the in-class discussions are much richer.

My class notes are full of resources and ideas shared by prior students (with proper acknowledgement of the contribution), which encourages current students to share their knowledge and findings. This practice has enhanced the resources available to current students and, I believe, also promotes collegiality and models a Professional Learning Community environment that I hope these pre-service teachers will find or establish in the schools in which they teach.

//**Take lots of pictures.**// A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it can also bring back a thousand memories. Each time I look back through scrapbooks, photo albums, or web pages of photos from a trip, I bask in the glow of fond memories. I try to journal or blog about trips also, but sometimes there just is not time to write down my thoughts in the moment. With a photo, I can often look back after the trip and re-capture some of those memories. I am less of an artist in my photography and more of a "documenter." I have photos of signs to chronicle the fascinating fact about the natural wonder or the name of the restaurant. I have photos of thermometers, menus, food items, and even manhole covers to remind me later of important details of my travels.

In my teaching, formative assessment (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006) is the equivalent of travel photos. I need to be able to capture where my students are in their learning. How can I ask them to apply what they have not learned? How can I clear up misconceptions when I don't know what their understandings are? By having students fill out an "exit ticket" and turn it in as they leave class, I can make appropriate adjustments to my plans for the following class. A "quiz" that gets turned in (but not for a grade), tells both the students and me what they know and do not know. To me, the purpose of teaching is not to penalize students for what they have not learned but to help them learn what they need to know.

In addition to formative assessments of the learning by my students, I believe in formative assessment of sorts of my own teaching. Being a reflective practitioner (Schön, 1987) is a goal that UMF wants its pre-service teachers to attain and it is a goal of mine as well. I constantly make notes of improvements I can make, both big and small, to what I teach and how I teach. I constantly edit my wiki resources based on clarifying questions students ask (if they asked the question, then my information was not informative enough or worded well and can be improved); I keep a page in all my wikis of "ideas" for the next time I teach the course. When using a rubric to assess student projects, I make an extra copy and label it "EDITS" and keep it nearby. As I assess the projects and find things I wish I had assessed or confusing verbiage or changes I want to make in expectations for the next time, I jot them down on the EDITS copy of the rubric and put it in a file in my office called "quick edits." The following semester, before I give out the rubric, I find the notes in the file, make the edits, look through the ideas page, and make appropriate adjustments to this year's version of that project. UMF has a policy to encourage faculty to try new teaching techniques or make major adjustments in their courses—file a form prior to the start of the semester describing what the plans are and how it may impact student perceptions of the course and that will be filed with student course evaluations. I constantly make minor and major adjustments to my courses, but never fill out the paperwork. Instead, I practice what Arvidson and Huston (2008) call "transparent teaching" which "entails a willingness to be candid and adventurous in the classroom and the confidence to be honestly self-critical" (p. 4.). I tell the students what the changes are and why I made them and invite them to participate in the journey with me and give feedback. In sharing my objectives and motivations, I am hopefully modeling good teaching habits that cannot be taught from a book. As pre-service teachers experience a specific project or activity, reflect on the pros and cons of the purpose and implementation of the project or activity, and give their insights from the student perspective, I am able to make adjustments as we go and they get ownership in their own learning.

//**Document the journey.**// Pictures are great, but the written documentation--the captions for the photos, the postcards sent to friends, the Facebook status updates, the travel diary pages filled out, the descriptions to accompany the artifacts--are what will really solidify and capture for all posterity what happened to the traveler on this journey. I have an agreement with my parents that I will send postcards to them from my travels but I get the postcards back upon my return. It is a win-win as they feel like they are "in the moment" with me on the trip when they receive the cards, but they don't feel guilty for throwing the postcards away after they have read the cards because they get to give them back to me. I then have thorough documentation of my trip (or at least certain aspects of the trip) that was rather painless to create in the moment. I also have web pages and scrapbooks of travels that I love to look back through and relive my journeys. I also have boxes of photos with no documentation because I never got around to it and I only feel remorse for not taking notes or doing some kind of writing while on that trip because those details are lost forever.

My teaching philosophy is based on constructionism (Papert, 1980), which is built on Piaget’s epistemological theory of constructivism. A structured implementation of that is project-based learning (Moursund, 2002). Most individual projects that I assign are finished creations that can actually be used in student teaching or future classes. But the process of getting to the finished creation is where most of the actual learning takes place. I do not believe that a traditional "test" can serve as an effective summative assessment of a student's learning when the learning is deep and meaningful. Though projects are harder and more time-consuming for students to carry out and more time-consuming and difficult for me to assess than a standardized test, I believe it is worth the effort on all of our parts to demonstrate the profundity desired in my courses.

As part of that process of constructing ones own knowledge and understandings, I work hard to help my students finish their semester with documentation of their learning journey. Reading reflection assignments use prompts that get to the heart of the reading but give students a chance to express their opinions in their own voice and in a professional voice. Those reading reflections are captured in blog entries and at the end of the semester, the blog is a compilation of professional writings that truly surprises most students—they did not know they could write so much or write so well or think so deeply. Additionally, group projects and presentations have a required documentation component of some sort that can be a record of the learning in both content and leadership.

//**Share.**// Being able to share the adventures and pass on the advice gained from my experiences is yet another opportunity to enjoy each trip. I first met my Uncle’s new wife at a family reunion nine years ago. We have only met one other time, but when she asked to be Facebook friends three years ago, I accepted. This year at the family reunion, I saw her again. She and my uncle do not travel but oh does she travel vicariously through my Facebook postings! She asked so many questions about trips I hadn’t thought about in a long time. She remembered every photo, every blog entry, and she even listed which places she wanted to go to if they ever did travel. You never know how your experience, when shared, will impact the life of another.

And so it is with advising. I had no experience with academic advising at the college level prior to coming to UMF. My first semester, I was given two advisees who were to graduate at the end of the semester but whose advisor was on sabbatical and they needed someone on campus to be their liaison. But my second semester, I took on 20 first year students! Fortunately, I had good mentoring. I advised secondary education majors with a concentration in English for two years and then was asked to switch to social studies concentration students because there was a need. I average 20 to 35 advisees at any point in time. One semester, I had 41 advisees. And then there are my unofficial advisees. Because I teach EDU 101, I work with students who are not in the major and want to transfer into the major. As part of the coursework, I help them with the application process. I work with our admission office advising applicants who want to transfer from another university. I have advisees who change their major but who still stop by for “unofficial” advising (academic and otherwise). It is a lot to keep up with, but it has become one of my favorite parts of teaching. It provides an opportunity for me to share my passion for the field of teaching and help future teachers find theirs. In some cases, advisees discover that they do not have a passion for teaching and they are always comforted that what I really want for them is not to become teachers but to become who they really are—to find their passion and pursue it. At the same time, I always try to figure out if there is a way for them to follow their non-teaching passion at UMF.

//**Find a good travel companion.**// Traveling alone and traveling with someone are both great adventures for me. However, they are two very different experiences. With a travel companion, you prepare for the journeys quite differently, decision-making is more complex, and you can get distracted from the travels if you focus too much on the relationship during the travels. That being said, traveling with someone gives you new perspectives, lightens the load, gives you someone to laugh with when things go awry (as opposed to crying by yourself), and opens up double the possibilities. The riskiest part about traveling with someone is that both a good trip and a good relationship can be ruined if the person you are with is not a compatible travel companion.

Team teaching is just as risky. You have the potential to bring double the knowledge, perspectives, approaches, and excitement to your teaching in a good team teaching experience. You have the potential to create a bad learning experience for your students and yourself if you do not choose your co-teacher wisely. In my K-12 experiences, I was part of some amazing teams that personified the excitement and depth of integrated learning. I did not know until I came to UMF that that option was possible at the college level, but I have found some wonderful teaching companions who have helped me raise the level of my teaching and the depth of my knowledge. One example is the introduction of a mentoring program in EDU 101 in combination with SED 101. The courses were designed to be companion courses. They are required courses for both secondary general education majors and secondary special education majors. The two courses are taught in half a semester and with few exceptions, all students take both in the same semester and stay with the same classmates for the whole semester, they just switch professors and courses halfway through. I am now team-teaching this course with my fourth special education faculty member. Each one has brought unique insights and opportunities to the course. Most recently, a new faculty member was at the local middle school to have a conversation with the staff about her son who would be attending there. In the midst of the conversation she revealed that she was a professor at UMF and the guidance counselor mentioned that she sure wished she could get more university students as volunteers to mentor the at-risk students at the middle school. In a surprisingly short period of time, we were piloting a mentoring project in our EDU and SED classes. It met with such huge success for all parties involved that it is now a required component of both courses. Even though the initiator of the project has left UMF, I am proud to carry the project (and the ensuing research) on with my new colleague. His specialty is service learning and he was thrilled to have such a project in place for his course. He brings an expertise that I look forward to learning more about and that I know will only improve the program. I am particularly proud of the way that we have modeled the power and potential of team teaching to our pre-service teachers.

I am and continue to be a lifelong learner—it is the greatest journey of them all.

__References__ Arvidson, S., & Huston, T. (2008). Transparent teaching. Currents in Teaching and Learning, 1(1).

Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6).

Moursund, D. (2002). Project-Based Learning: Using Information Technology. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Papert, S. (1980). MINDSTORMS: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Schön, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(4).

Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2006). Understanding by Design (Expanded 2nd Ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.