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Teaching Philosophy
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General teaching philosophy:
Looking at teaching broadly and independent of issues of quality of instruction, there exist two key variables—difficulty of material and harshness of grading—that can make or break the experience for a student. For simplicity, these may be presented as a 2-by-2 matrix.
There exists some minimal level of challenge that a college course offers, and minimally that ought to be that the average student, in order to obtain an average grade, should have to do assigned material, show up for class, and study for exams. Of course, in the real world of grade inflation, this ideal too often is not met. Still, a class in which a student can easily pass, or even earn grades of above average, all without doing the work assigned, is either ethically unreasonable or implies that the nature or quantity of the material being taught is lacking in challenge. Student’s may “love” such courses, but how exactly do they benefit? Alternatively, it is possible to present difficult material, but still be overly lenient come assessment time, or to present overly easy material which is then graded harshly. The latter can be sufficiently frustrating for students that presumably there exists strong selection against employing such a teaching philosophy. On the other hand, in a student evaluation-driven academic universe, one approach to “dumbing down” a course, and thereby currying student favor, is to not so much modify the material being taught as to modify instructor expectations. This would be equivalent to adhering to the letter if not the spirit of academic “law”: grading schemes that fail to distinguish among students while overly rewarding students for otherwise mediocre performance. At another extreme is the so-called “weed-out” experience in which lack of academic survival, especially by weaker or less-motivated students, is an explicit goal.
There exists a “sweet spot”, somewhere in the middle, where students are challenged, provided with incentive to do the necessary work, in so doing learn the material presented, and, in the course of these efforts, have some reasonable expectation that if they master the material then they will be rewarded with a reasonably good grade. Effectively instructed, students should go on to succeed, with greater likelihood, in subsequent courses, especially within the same discipline. Subsequent student success, of course, is the best measure of effective instruction. Naturally, in my classroom teaching I am motivated toward a goal of subsequent student success, but without providing an overtly weed-out experience. That is, toward hitting that instructional “sweet spot” of challenging students without breaking their spirit.
Classroom presentation:
Along with just about everybody, I’ve developed a strong preference for PowerPoint. In the course of employing this tool I’ve developed a system whereby I provide a series of presentation conventions that “code” my PowerPoints such that students can unambiguously distinguish between what I am holding them responsible for (which, generally, is quite a bit) and what I intend as just an aside: must know = blue borders on figures and table and blue text, in Arial font (for B&W printing); asides = black or red text, in Times New Roman, or no borders. Despite this seeming “spoon feeding” of material to my students, I’m still regarded as one of the more demanding instructors on my campus (hey, it’s biology).
Providing students with incentive to read:
I want students to read, read, read (imagine that!) and am very repetitious about making this point. It is always the first question I ask of a student who has just failed an exam: Have you been reading your textbook? Undoubtedly I’m preaching to the choir, but a good text book provides three things that an instructor cannot: greater depth or breadth of material, at least a second time through material (and, ideally, the first), and somebody else’s perspective. There’s just no substitute, people. Read your textbooks!
I provide incentive toward motivating students to read: Hybrid open-book, closed-book exams. For the first half-hour of an exam, students employ their text books on a separate “open book” portion of the exam. When they have completed that portion, or one-half hour is up (whichever comes first), they close their textbooks and then obtain what essentially is a second exam, printed on colored paper so that it is facile to notice whether a student is still employing their text. This second part represents the “closed-book” portion of the exam. The “open-book” portion is worth 40% of the student mid-term exam grade and is designed not so much to be impossibly difficult as instead to be difficult to complete absent intimate knowledge of what is in the text book. Finally, the “closed book” portion of the exam, worth 60% of their mid-term exam grade, rewards students for having actually learned (that is, memorized) the material. More stressful for the student? Perhaps, but at least there can be no question about whether reading of the textbook is optional.