Final Reflection Paper

By the time I started this transformative teaching training I had been teaching in the vicinity of eight years. So still a beginner compared to someone who has taught four or five times that number, on the one hand, but on the other hand also not without experience. Over the eight years I developed a number of what might be called attitudes or beliefs about teaching and have begun to feel myself in the past two or three years especially develop or discover a teaching style. On the one side I had developed a disposition towards my students and my teaching, which, when I bullet-point it, boils down to things like: be sincere, be myself, don’t be pedantic or pretentious, listen to my students and understand their ideas, care about their thoughts and interests and help them develop a more empowered way of thinking about the world and their life within it; to see and construct education in my classroom so that ‘mistakes’ are not measuring rods for students to try and beat one another, but rather chances to learn. I had, furthermore, developed a tendency to more often than not ‘guide on the side’, sharing what knowledge or information or ideas I have and think might be of interest or helpful to students as they develop their own sociological style. I had developed a tendency in assessments to value quality over quantity, to be flexible with deadlines, give lots of room for students to talk or write about what they want, to be respectful in my feedback and, especially, to try and make assignments relevant to their lives.  

In addition to those things I tended to think about my profession as a rather privileged one. I get to spend my time reading and thinking and teaching others about society (!), and, in addition to this, I get to participate in the further democratization of higher education by teaching online. Online courses make higher education more readily accessible to more people than ever before. Students who live in small towns or who have uncompromising schedules can now enroll… In addition to this I get to teach at my Alma Mater, and in a way give something back not only to UNO but also to the state of Nebraska in the form of participating in the production of more educated and analytically sophisticated minds of its residents. In addition to this I get to remain, while doing this, more-or-less current in my discipline while working as a consummate professional. I get to soft sell sociology as a profession or way of thinking to students (as with the time a student was inspired through one of my courses to double major in social work and sociology). And, in addition to all of this, through teaching I get to further develop my intellect, my analytical skill, and to further explore, share and develop my interests. 

While reading the text assigned for this training I felt gratified to see my sensibilities towards teaching validated. Working in relative isolation an ocean and half-continent away has drawbacks to accompany every advantage… But to say that I feel my disposition has not been challenged in this course is not to say nothing has changed. With respect to my relationship to teaching, I can pin-point at least one change or development since the beginning of this transformative teaching program. It is a stronger faith or trust or confidence or whatever that my teaching disposition, my pedagogical instincts, and my human sensibilities are calibrated in the main to point me towards better and not worst practices. 

My disposition towards teaching has not changed in a measurable way except that I am maybe a smidge more actively aware of it and in a great deal emboldened. It is therefore with a greater sense of self-confidence and competence in my pedagogical practice that I continue to develop my courses in specific ways so as to make them more engaging, more relevant, more meaningful, and, as has long been my aim, transformative in terms of having a real impact on how my students experience, think about, interpret and act upon the world around them. How could a goal any less than that be satisfactory for a course on social problems or disability and society or American society or introduction to sociology or any course I might teach? 

My greater sense of assurance can be seen in two main practical areas. First, there are the things that I have been doing for awhile now but that I wondered if what I was doing was ‘too soft’ or not demanding enough. A ‘softness’ which I see is validated if not by the book we read for this course then at least the other sources I encountered fulfilling one or another training requirement. For example, I once did an online course design training with another community college. I remember being one of the only instructors in the course who was not strict with their students about deadlines. I reminded. I pushed a little and sometimes followed-up. I conveyed the advantages of meeting or beating deadlines (moving on with one’s life, getting more feedback, having more opportunities to revise). But, except for class discussions, I never took off points for a book review that came late or some other paper or piece of writing not involved in a time-sensitive exchange between students. Meanwhile, a number of other instructors talked about their students as though they were little children; as though their students were incompetent at time management without deadlines and would never get anything done. 

As it turns out, I was being kind and treating my students with respect which, in turn developed respect and trust between us. And, as it turned out, students still turned things in by the deadline most of the time even though they knew it was relatively flexible. Since then I have tried to find ways to make more parts of my course self-paced. Part of some of my courses is objective in nature. It is demonstrating knowledge of sociological concepts and knowing some key facts. In a course where chapter quizzes are one assessment used (which students can take more than once), I have the students do these at their own pace. All quizzes are opened at the start of the semester and the deadline for all quizzes is the last day of the semester. I had wondered if I am being too easy with my quizzes, allowing two takes, having a self-paced format… but as it turns out I was giving the students some control over their learning and letting them learn from their mistakes.

Another way I had given control in a way that sometimes had me wondering was having more assignments and points in the course than the total points listed in the syllabus, e.g. 20 or so quizzes when the total points in the syllabus only demands 15, and 13 or so discussions when the syllabus demands 10. And then additional discussions and quizzes not required but advertized and revolving around more focused or in-depth reading. This had the effect of giving students more control over their learning so that they could decide whether to do more discussions and fewer quizzes or vice versa and, of course, as many students do, choose to do them all. In a survey course of almost 20 social problem areas, they had some wiggle room to focus a little less on one or two areas that do not interest them much. But, on the other hand, they are required to put in extra effort in one discussion on a topic of their choice… I now feel rather proud of this ‘choose your own adventure’ approach. 

Another change I had made over the past year or two was to do away with a syllabus quiz. I had never used them before, but started doing one after I temporarily took over another instructor’s course and saw they used one. I thought at that time, ‘I should do this too!’ But then I realized I still got questions about the syllabus, and, on top of that, here was extra work for me (to update the syllabus quiz every semester, or to answer emails about where to find it and so on…) and work for my students. Then I thought, ‘if I were a student, I would find this tedious, annoying, and somewhat patronizing’. So I deleted it, but sometimes looked back and wondered if I was just rationalizing my own laziness. As it turns out, I was trying to move away from a juridical approach to the syllabus toward one where the syllabus is a document to engage and capture early interest. 

There are more examples, I’m sure.    

In addition to feeling much more at ease with things I feel are somewhat idiosyncratic to my online course designs, I feel more confident to make further adaptations I have been toying with or preparing for or mulling over or was in the process of making-happen as my courses and my teaching continue to evolve and grow. For example, in approaching my Major Social Issues course this spring I am taking a new approach. I am going to demand a lot of reading, but the students will be able to read the assigned texts in any order they choose (possible because of the asynchronous nature of online courses!) and there will be mechanisms in the grading structure of the class discussions to make it possible for students to choose where in the several books they will focus their reading and where they will scan. We will start the course asking all the students to share in a discussion forum everything they know (or think they know) about drugs, drug use, and the war on drugs in the United States. We will then move on to getting a grasp of what the students want to learn in the in-depth exploration of the war on drugs while getting an idea of the things vital for them to know given what they know and what they are interested in. Then throughout the course we will work on developing expertise, not just in the topic itself, but in academic reading skills, analytic skills, some basic research skills, theory building and so on. While I have not decided if it will be done as group projects or individual projects, the students and myself will use discussion forums not only to discuss the books as sociological research narratives, but also to expand and refine our knowledge on the war on drugs and especially fuel our confidence through drafting a short policy paper in support of a specific policy recommendation, reform, or whatnot as a final project. 

Moving forward I have decided I am going to more conscientiously apply these kinds of transformative teaching approaches. Of particular interest to me is a transformative pedagogical approach I read about recently in a book by Jim Cummins (2000). Language, Power and Pedagogy I am reading as part of my research on multilingual children in Dutch primary education. In the last chapter of the book he outlines two different transformative approaches or styles or methods or whatever to use in the classroom. These approaches follow, more or less, the pattern described above: 1) figure out what students already know, 2) offer instruction and access to skills they need to know more and succeed in the course and in learning, 3) create space for students to work collaboratively and to self-evaluate their work-in-progress, 4) have students take action and make what they have learned relevant to their lives and communities.