What is one teaching framework you incorporate into your teaching practice?
As I look back upon my authentic artifacts, I realized that without my conscious intention I have been following the backward design approach. Through the program, we learned a lot of different teaching frameworks and I have been trying to determine which framework aligns most with my teaching philosophy. However, I realized that right from the beginning my approach has always been student centered in the sense that I have always laid out the end goals and what my students have to take away from the course and mapped out what I need to provide in order to achieve that. Now, I have a term for this strategy- Backward design. I believe the idea to have my course be student centered comes from being a student myself. I have always thought about why I am learning certain concepts or why I am fulfilling certain requirements in my courses so far in my life. For instance, during my undergraduate program, we were required to take a biochemistry course. It was one of the most challenging courses I have ever taken and I had myself thinking about the “why”. Why am I taking this course? Or rather, why is this course required? I was a Biotechnology major and initially I felt like I didn’t need the course at all for what I wanted to pursue. However, when I was learning about protein synthesis and the structure of proteins that makes it stable, I realized that a lot of disorders like Alzheimer’s Disease or Cystic fibrosis occur due to protein instability. In order to be an efficient researcher in such fields, it is important for me to understand the fundamentals of protein structure. While all of us in class used to crib about how difficult the course was, realizing the intent of the course made it better.