My Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, my primary responsibility is to put students in the best position to succeed, both in their classes and in their future endeavors. To support this, I build my courses around three student learning outcomes:
1. Develop technical skills related to your creative and professional goals: I emphasize transferable skills, as the tools and technology can change over time, but certain core concepts remain consistent. Through in-class lessons, I provide hands-on experience with a variety of tools, as well as a sound conceptual framework. Coursework consists of creative projects, with class sessions including supervised lab time where students can receive help and feedback. Students also participate in in-class critiques of their work, in order to receive a range of viewpoints, and to practice giving and receiving constructive criticism.
2. Become independent thinkers: I emphasize multiple perspectives on any given topic, and multiple methods to solving problems. I provide a variety of learning resources in different formats (accessible to different learning styles), including videos, articles, and my own slideshows and examples. I challenge students to test, troubleshoot, and revise. And I build discussion time into my classes, making them a conversation between students and myself. While students are still in the process of building their formal experience, I encourage them to leverage their own informal experiences while I relate my own, to connect the subject matter to them personally.
3. Become responsible adults: I emphasize personal accountability, time management, and communication. But I also provide flexibility and understanding. I excuse absences if a student contacts me in a timely manner with a valid excuse; I offer two free passes for requesting extensions on assignments, but the student must use these proactively; I minimize late penalties for first-time offenders, while penalties are compounded as additional deadlines are missed. I aim to help students build productive habits they can use for the rest of their lives.
To achieve these learning outcomes, my teaching process values the following:
1. Prioritization of students’ well-being: I share all university wellness resources with my classes during the first meeting of the semester and include this information on the first page of my syllabi. I am sensitive to students' external stress factors, and offer an optional, confidential survey at the start of each semester for students to disclose any extracurricular burdens such as jobs, student organizations, caregiver status, etc. This helps me learn which students may need extra support. I make myself available outside of class time, through office hours or specially scheduled appointments, to help students with course material or independent projects. But above all, I treat my students as human beings and make sure their personal health and wellness are never compromised for the sake of schoolwork.
2. A safe, comfortable learning environment: I aim to create an atmosphere where each individual feels respected and heard. I value experimentation and show that it’s alright to make a mistake. I strive to be responsive to each student’s needs and concerns.
3. Organization in my course construction and delivery: Ahead of each class session, I provide my students with the lesson slides via an email reminder for our meeting. These slides present the agenda, go into detail on that day’s material, offer technical instruction through annotated screenshots and a step-by-step walkthrough, and provide links to Canvas assignments, lesson materials, demo files, and other learning resources. Students can use these slides to follow along during class, get a refresher afterward, or catch up on any material missed due to absence. All resources for each week are organized through the Modules section of Canvas for easy access. I build in redundancies so there are multiple ways for students to access the information they need. For example, to access a demo file, students can follow a link in the slides, download the file from the Files section of Canvas, or find it in the Modules section. My faculty peers have noted the effectiveness of my organized delivery of course content in their classroom observations.
4. The value of coursework as a learning experience rather than a means to a grade: My courses revolve around creative projects; I am enthusiastic about the subjects I teach, and many of my students are studying these subjects because they love them. Thus, I do my best to keep that passion intact by minimizing the emphasis on the grade. I offer flexibility in the form of extensions, revisions, and a forgiving late policy to give students every reason to benefit from the work because I believe it is worth doing. As a result, students have produced fantastic work while expressing gratitude for the opportunity to create.
5. Continual improvement: I recognize that each of us is a work in progress, learning new things and getting better every day. So I make no pretense that I am a finished product as a teacher. Each semester, each class, each interaction is an opportunity to learn, reflect, and grow. I offer each of my classes a mid-semester survey after just a few weeks, so students can provide feedback on what is and isn’t working, which I can use to modify the course in real time. My end-of-semester course evaluation questions are also constructed to assess how well I am meeting students’ needs, consisting of both Likert scale items and open-ended responses. I habitually learn new skills to better meet the demands of the curriculum and develop new practices to better respond to an evolving student population. This is one aspect of my teaching that will never change.