Although my Research is an important part of my academic career, I was initially attracted to academia because I have a strong desire to excel at teaching. My commitment to rigorous, engaging, and innovative teaching in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, regardless of medium (face-to-face, online, or hybrid classes), has led me to use my classroom as a laboratory. Each semester, I try something new in an effort to keep the material and classroom dynamic fresh -- for my students, and also for myself.
Teaching Strategies and Styles
Although I have resisted fully "flipping" the classroom, I do tend to ask my students to complete a fair amount of work outside of class. To that end, I routinely assign a moderate to heavy amount of reading each week, and I prefer to use our class time expanding upon those readings, rather than rehashing the information. My philosophy has always been that students will perform to expectations, so I bring high expectations into my classroom. For the most part, my students do, indeed, rise to those expectations.
My grading philosophy stems from two core beliefs: sincere effort should be rewarded and grading should be as transparent as possible. To this end, I set up my grading using a points system, where 1 point equals 1 "percentage" point on the final grade. I do not generally compute an average grade for any purpose (except in cases where emergencies preclude completing all planned activities and we are short points), which means that students can always see how many points they have accumulated by doing a simple addition problem. While this often causes some minor confusion around the end of the semester, students frequently comment that they appreciate the simplicity of the grading scheme.
As a recovering journalist, I feel that a fluency in writing and communication is vital to students' later success, both professionally and personally. Consequently, I sparingly use closed-choice exam questions in my classes. Instead, I ask students to write -- response papers, research papers, short answer responses in exams, etc. Fundamentally, I believe political science is a way of tackling shared problems, and I want to see how my students' thinking evolves over the course of the semester. I want to see evidence of critical thinking and engagement with material. I also ask students to make presentations; verbal communication skills are vital in today's world, no matter the field into which my students will eventually seek jobs, and I want to give them fairly low-stakes opportunities to develop those skills in my classes.
Finally, I hope to infect my students with the enthusiasm I so keenly feel about the material I teach. For me, the questions we ask in political science are vitally important; what matters to me is not the answers to which we arrive, but the process we follow in arriving there. The most frequent comment students make in their evaluations of my classes is that I am enthusiastic and energetic about my work -- and this is unquestionably true. I love sharing my excitement about my work with my students, and I delight in having a classroom that is fun, energetic, and inquisitive. The students seem to delight in it, too.
Political Ideology in the Classroom
As a Political Science educator, I have heard from many of my students about professors who seem to use their government classroom as an opportunity to education a younger generation with a particular political viewpoint or ideology. I strongly reject this teaching norm; I instead see my role as one of facilitator and, at times, devil's advocate. I believe that the rigorous study of political science requires, on some level, a detachment from one's intellectual and philosophical commitments to any particular side in a political debate. Instead, as a scientist, I am more interested in the process by which we come to our political commitments.
For this reason, I deliberately, actively obfuscate my true beliefs with my students. Although I do not refrain from expressing opinions on matters that have a relative consensus (e.g., polarization is rising and is probably not terribly productive), nor do I refrain from expressing opinions about what is important (e.g., I often say that gerrymandering is one of the most important issues facing our country that nobody seems to be paying attention to), I do not, under any circumstances, reveal my political affiliations or ideology to students. This is an extremely important part of my teaching philosophy, and it's one I share with my students each semester repeatedly: "If I tell you what I think, then by virtue of my position as your instructor, you will inevitably feel some pressure, however minor, to convince me you agree with me. This is not OK."
Because this is such an important part of my teaching philosophy, I survey students at the end of each semester to get a feel for how successful I've been in hiding my political beliefs. To be sure, student perceptions about a Political Science professor's political beliefs default to liberal/Democratic. In Fall 2014, my students guessed that my ideology was:
When asked how confident they were in their guess about my ideology, they said:
I also gave students an opportunity to explain their reasoning. A sampling of their unedited comments appear below (the full set of comments is quite long, but I'm happy to provide it upon request):