Reflective Summary

The Certificate of Accomplishment in Teaching (CoAT) program at North Carolina State University (NCSU) has been an invaluable experience for me. Prior to attending workshops, I knew very little about teaching.. the extent of my knowledge was Bloom's Taxonomy.  This is a very useful tool, but it's limited in the aid it provides you in terms of instruction.  The CoAT program has equipped me with pedagogy, techniques, and tools for many situations. In addition, I was able to practice what I learned. That is, I actively experienced the effect many of the methods had on students’ learning, whether positive or negative. This was further enhanced by the fact that I taught a class prior to the CoAT program and then taught the same class twice after beginning the program. I was able to see how the students in the second two classes were better off in many ways by my training that the students in the first class were unfortunately not able to experience.

The purpose of this portfolio is to demonstrate the evolution of my teaching style. Notice, many of the artifacts come from the classes I taught in 2014 and 2015, the years after I began the CoAT program. For example, the skeletal notes became a very significant resource in these classes, as discussed in Essay Artifact I under Professional Development. In 2013, the class had only the notes I provided on the board. This method of lecture had many issues that I became aware of only after beginning the CoAT program. One of which is the lack of accessibility for all learning types. I believe now that the skeletal notes, although not flawless, help me reach more students than I did before. They inspire attentiveness and creative questioning (by the students), and they provide extra time that is now spent working more examples together.

While the CoAT program has better prepared me, through education and practice, for future work, I believe I still need improvement.  Thus, one of my future goals is to continue the evolution of my teaching style (see Teaching Philosophy for others). For example, I still find myself using ineffective questions such as dead-end questions or questions-with-programmed-answer. In Mathematics, I believe the latter can be useful when trying to guide students to the proper method of critical thinking, but the former is always a show stopper. The Effective Questioning techniques I’ve learned still need to become part of my daily practice. One way I can fix this issue is to write out questions prior to lecture. This allows myself time to develop the best questions for my students.

My main career goal is to obtain a full time faculty position at the university level.  My goal as an instructor is to help students learn the skills necessary to take their logic and reasoning to the next level. The CoAT program has equipped me with the tools I need to do so, and I can now confidently move on to new opportunities knowing I have a skill set that will help future generations.