Expected Levels of Performance

Most of the courses I teach are in some way, writing courses, and I have developed a toolkit of different techniques to help me offer example-driven activities for individual classes. I have handouts for transitions, observation vs analysis, integration of quotations, MLA style, workshopping, and more. Revision, in particular, is a hard skill to learn, and I often use my own experience in the classroom to help students connect with the writing process. Giving examples from my own experience encourages students to approach writing and revision as an opportunity to (more) fully understand the topic at hand and what you think about it--it is a process of clarifying and refining thought. In addition to including anecdotal evidence from my own experience--how I deal with cutting passages I can't bear to cut, how I learned to write with minimal usage of the weak verb "to be," and so on--I provide students with a number of activities, exercises, and videos to guide the process. I believe it is important for students to see the process in work; to that end, I go over this handout in a discussion-oriented manner, where students read aloud from the passages that I have written myself, to model the kinds of pitfalls I often see in student work. In this example, you can see how I explain the revision process, a sample draft analysis, brief explanations of what is strong and weak about it, all followed by a revision that addresses those problems and explains what is, again, strong and (yes, still!) weak about it. We return to this handout throughout the class, and I revise it each semester to account for current class reading material.

The use of teaching strategies designed to engage and motivate students

Passion and enthusiasm are some of the most effective tools in our toolbox, as teachers. For teachers in the core, it is one of the central ways we can encourage students to be curious about the wider world around them, its history, and its people. Students tend to find my lectures and class discussions interesting, engaging, and lively, as evidenced by my teaching evaluations. I work to make my classrooms places of interest and engagement, in the firm belief that with motivation, our students can do extraordinary things.

Journaling

In my LT-2 and upper-level classes, I incorporate a variety of hands-on learning activities, including opportunities for students to interact with and learn about early modern books from our Gomatos collection, contribute to the scholarly project by helping to correct the faulty OCR (Optical Character Recognition) that results in poorly-searchable fulltexts in databases like ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), create web pages or videos that explain a key concept from class, create or edit Wikipedia pages, or travel abroad to put the literature we read into material context. I will explain several of these assignments in more detail in Outstanding teaching. You can also see a letter of support from Gwen Vredevogd on my use of our special collections, here. Engaging Lectures

I provide lively, engaging Prezi lectures organized closely around the textbook and other reading materials I assign (and change frequently in upper-level courses) with specific additions like images, surprising facts, interesting connections, or examples that students may remember more easily. These also help students make connections in other, less linear ways. My goal in these lectures is not to offer a "wall of speech," but rather more of a give-and-take narrative in which students ask questions, respond to my questions, or engage in a brief activity with peers. Here is an example of one of these lectures, which I use in EN203; a screenshot is visible below. Here is an example of one of upper-level lectures that has been viewed over 1,700 times online and referenced in a public humanities web journal. You can also see all my Prezis online, here.

• • Modeling: In my lectures, I cite all my materials, and draw attention to it when we break off for questions or group work. This helps me model how to identify important categories of information that may appear on the exams and which can also serve as effective topics for essays. When we discuss individual authors and works, I explicitly tie the thematic, historical, or formal qualities of interest to these broader lectures, and point out that this is one way students might, themselves, think of the brief essay assignments in the course. We also spend time in these classes identifying how a central concept relates to two distinct movements or periods in literary history--for instance, how the ethics of the Bakhti movement in Southeast Asia derives from both a similar and a different place as satire during the Enlightenment period. This models cognitive approaches to the material that foreground the development of categorical thinking, the application of one model to another context, and comparative, lateral thought. I try at all relevant moments to be explicit about why we're doing the same thing, to be transparent about where I am modeling something they are to do later, or to be clear about how this could be adapted for an essay or why it might appear on the exam. To the right is a sample image from a lecture where we discuss Mary Wollstonecraft, Immanuel Kant, James Beattie, and David Hume within the context of Enlightenment; please note the invitations for student engagement, the focus of close discussion that moves outward to synthesis, and the use of citation.

Adaptation of subject matter and instruction to the needs of students

• • Writing help: In the core, I often teach second-language students, which can be challenging in reading- and writing-focused courses. I know that these students can find the act of writing and revising difficult, but I believe it is important for me as a teacher to be as equitable as possible in grading--for these students, I offer many opportunities for in-office and phone conferences; I offer more electronic feedback; and I routinely direct these writers to the CTL as well as BrainFuse for writing help. Confidence boost: I also routinely suggest to my students that they might consider submitting their work for the class to a campus magazine like Magnificat: Marymount's Journal of Undergraduate Nonfiction. Students do not need to earn an "A" to be recommended in this way; instead, I select student work that is exceptional in some unexpected way, whether actually or potentially: a student with a "B" or even "B-" essay featuring a surprising thesis and effective analysis, but rather poor writing, often greatly benefits from the confidence boost of such a recommendation. I am sure, of course, to let the student know why I have made the recommendation, that revision is necessary, and that submission isn't a guarantee of acceptance. I typically do this in the overall comment space available in Canvas speedgrader.

• Grade explanations and availability of materials: I make all of my materials--lecture/discussion presentations, in-class activities, and reading guides--available on Canvas so that students can easily access them at their leisure, and I put material on reserve that is unavailable electronically. This ensures that, outside of time management, students can always access the course materials. I accept late work discretionally, and it is marked down each class day late. I make it clear to students that in-class activities are not accepted late, and I may not accept formal writing assignments late if they are more than 2 weeks late. Additionally, I have begun to use Canvas gradebook to hold all my grades, so that students can see in real time where they are headed. I take one day at the beginning of class to show students how to use Canvas, explain how I use it as a teacher, point out the "what-if" grades, and how to Google instructions for making use of the feature.

• Access to me: Finally, by being consistently available to students, whether in person, online, or by phone, I can make sure that all questions students have are addressed. To the right, for instance, is a screenshot of my email correspondence with a student who needed accommodations; as you can tell, the student contacted me both via email and through Canvas, on multiple occasions, all of which were responded to in a timely fashion. Videos: Whenever we miss a class for weather or when I feel that students need more help with an assignment or other aspects of the course content, I prepare videos available on YouTube or Vimeo. These are almost all "just in time" teaching tools, though I sometimes reuse them for particular purposes. This strategy enables me to meet students where they are.

Current Version on Canvas (term-specific text sections indicated):

These assignments have been revised in several ways, and in each case my goal was to produce a more tightly refined essay that helps students understand the historical/thematic context and situate a piece of literature within it appropriately. These assignments are meant explicitly to help students on the midterm and final exams. In one iteration (2011), I moved away from the shorter essays 3 times a term, opting instead for slightly longer essays twice a term, but these were less helpful on the exams as they were due at the same time, roughly, as the exams were offered. I refined the assignment language to pinpoint more precisely what I meant by "introductory material" (reiterating in-class instructions on Canvas as specific sections in the text), because students were sometimes using the author-introductions, my lectures, or inappropriate broader selections instead of the appropriate historical introductions. I also made explicit how these essays were to explain the key context, and what I was expecting in terms of the illustration. Students were also working with texts that were (sometimes) in the text, but which we had not been assigned. By integrating language about summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation, the assignment reinforces work in Composition. Since refining this assignment, I have received stronger essays. These refinements have also allowed me to add a simple but specific rubric that I use to grade.

Other examples

The last time I taught EN424: Senior Seminar, I received some very useful feedback; in particular, Senior Seminar students felt it would be helpful to start on the final thesis project sooner, and this is a good point; I plan to implement this in my schedule the next time I teach the course (likely in the next 2-3 years).

EN340: Major Women Writers is a course I began teaching more regularly in 2015, and this is where my future improvements will be largely focused. While perhaps there is no "magic bullet," I have been trying to find ways to strike the balance between content, coverage, writing, and interest. I had been using an audiobook experience in upper-level major course EN490, but in Fall 2016, I began to incorporate more regular reading aloud activities in EN340 to help students understand humor, tone, plot, and character. EN340 typically enrolls non-majors and often students for whom English is a second language. Students commented positively on this in final evaluations from Fall 2016, and so I developed a more robust audiobook assignment which I plan to continue to use and refine in my upper-level literature courses in the core. I implemented it informally in Spring 2017, but because it was also a Global Classroom course (time considerations), my primary goal was to create a sense of familiarity with the somewhat archaic syntax and diction of the material.

The biggest change to EN340 has been in the reading assignments. From 2014 to 2017, I cut the number of pages in half, from ~1300 pages to ~800 pages. As you can see in this spreadsheet comparison of the assigned texts (some of which we use in class; I have not incorporated them into the page count, only homework reading) over the course of 3 years, I not only cut the total pages of assigned reading, but I also adapted the spread of genres, to include in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 more poetry and drama. I made these changes specifically to address concerns about workload, as well as my worry about coverage and to accommodate students who may be better at reading in non-prose genres. I discuss the issue of reading load more fully in the Teaching Evaluations section.

To achieve more student buy-in in my EN101 composition courses, and to familiarize students more organically with research, I developed the essay share assignment, which I discuss at more length in Outstanding teaching.

Adherence to procedural guidelines and policies regarding teaching

I adhere to all procedural guidelines and policies about teaching, including fulfilling accommodations requests, documenting academic integrity violations, collecting assessment materials, notifying the school office as well as my chair in the event of a canceled class (as well as informing about makeup work), and creating alternative online classes in the event of a snow day. I also submit my syllabi for prior review as well as midterm and final grades by deadline. I hold regular office hours--typically an average of 6 hours per week, as you can see from the Starfish calendar page to the right--and I am also available to my students for important issues by cell phone (I have held phone conferences on individual drafts to accommodate students who cannot visit during office hours, as well). Not only do I use Starfish to ease the scheduling difficulties of office hours, but I also show students how to use it to set up appointments. I adhere to all FERPA guidelines regarding grade discussions.

Participation in seminars or workshops with evidence of application to teaching

I routinely participate in Marymount's campus teaching workshops and conferences, including Teaching Toolbox, Teaching with Technology, and Innovations. I also attend various scholarly conferences on an almost annual basis, where I engage my peers and colleagues in discussion and hands-on activities related to pedagogy. For instance, this summer I was granted additional funds from the School of Arts & Sciences to attend Keystone DH, "an annual conference and a network of institutions and practitioners committed to advancing collaborative scholarship in digital humanities research and pedagogy across the Mid-Atlantic." Among the sessions I participated in were Emily Sherwood's (Assistant Director, Digital Pedagogy and Scholarship, Bucknell University) workshop on "Effective Digital Pedagogy Workshop Design" (collaborative notes available here) and a session on "DH in the Classroom" (collaborative notes available here). When I attend the annual American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, I have found that the pedagogy sessions are among some of the most enlightening and useful sessions available, and my attendance is divided approximately equally between pedagogy sessions and traditional scholarly sessions.

Incorporation of applicable, up-to-date subject matter in courses

As a direct result of my attendance at conferences like ASECS and Keystone DH, I routinely incorporate new material in my courses. EN340 and EN490 in particular have been adapted according to new subject matter and methodologies I encounter as I pursue my scholarly goals, and the textbooks I use in EN203 and 207 are themselves updated approximately every two years. In the last ten-fifteen years, academic access to full-text databases of varying kinds has also become more common, and if scholars labor under the illusion of completeness these databases represent, students are even more compromised--the explosion of digital tools and information online has made informational literacy even more imperative. I have developed several assignments to address this, like the "essay share" assignment described elsewhere, and a variety of activities around conducting research in full-text primary source databases like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. Despite the prevalence of these resources, they give us far from perfectly reliable information; learning about the material inadequacy of the full-text search options at our disposal has led me to develop activities and assignments that involve students in the correction of so-called "dirty OCR," which results from poorly-scanned textual data appearing, uncorrected, in scholarly databases like ECCO. I describe this assignment in detail in the Outstanding teaching section. I am constantly seeking new ways to incorporate current thought and practice into courses, in ways that are appropriate, hands-on, and targeted for specific outcomes.