Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is tethered to motivation. If students are motivated, they learn. I discovered this early in my career, while still a graduate student, in fact. I have been fine-tuning my approach for over a decade since then, but the single fundamental motivator has remained unchanged: give the students choices. Making choices creates personal investment, and personal investment is motivating.

In my courses, each student is given the opportunity to choose how he or she will be assessed. I provide them with a “menu” of choices, each with a value proportional to its level of difficulty, and every student individually crafts a package of evaluation items that he or she finds most appealing. I populate the menu with items that cater to as many student-types as I can: the all-eggs-in-one-basket student, the chip-away-day-by-day student, the shy student, the outgoing student, the jack-of-all-trades student. I also populate the menu according to the course: some courses can (or cannot) accommodate extensive writing, some need incentives to practice solving problems, some are particularly amenable to small group work. A remarkable number of creative assessment options are available if one takes the time to think through the possibilities for each course one teaches.¹

The very act of choosing creates investment in the choice for the student, and each student performs better because of it. I place a high priority upon discussing the scheme extensively with each class of students, both at the beginning of the term and at some later point in the term, to be sure that I understand what works and what does not work. I adjust the scheme accordingly (when preparing for a new course), either by adding a new selection to the menu, subtracting one from it, or altering an option to fix an issue. For graduate-level courses, I focus on relevant career-building activities rather than “busy-work” or memorization, but the emphasis on choice remains in place: if writing publishable articles, for example, will be an important activity in the graduate student’s future career, then the development of a focused, publishable research paper will be the course’s main task, with the subject matter of the paper left up to the student to decide.

The result, in each case, is a unique course that comes to life in its own way. Students are free to do what they do best, and they get rewarded for it. The participators enthusiastically discuss the material. The writers creatively take to their research. The leaders generate a plan for their small groups, and the other group members interact with their ambitious leader’s plan. And they all learn the material.

The beauty of this course design is that each student is doing precisely what I would have demanded to be done to satisfy the requirements of a “standard” course. But they get the feeling—and that feeling is not an illusion—that they have uniquely empowering control over their fate in the course. I am honest with them in a way that their other instructors sometimes are not: I respect their freedom of choice without judging those choices. I do not require attendance, I do not assign specific writing topics, and I do not blindly call on students during lecture. In fact, there is exceedingly little that I require of them. But my meetings are consistently full, I read interesting, original papers that engage the course material, and I need to keep a running queue during discussion to accommodate all who want to have their thoughts heard. The fewer restrictions I place upon the students, the richer the bounty I receive from them. By respecting their autonomy, I get them to do what all teachers want their students to do: they actively engage with the material in a creative, lasting way. My students learn, and they enjoy doing so. I know that they learn because I evaluate their performance, and I know they enjoy doing so because they explicitly express as much when they reflect upon their experiences in my courses.²

¹ Examples of many options I offer to students can be found in the syllabus samples on the Teaching Archive page.

² The complete contents of all official, University-conducted evaluations, including full sets of individually-written comments from students, are available on the Teaching Archive page.