1. Description of Competency

It is essential for instructors to understand discipline-specific philosophies and to equip discipline-specific teaching practices as it improves the effectiveness of students' learning about knowledge and skillsets relevant to the discipline.

2. Artifact(s)

To acquire discipline-specific teaching strategies, I took the course (CAS892-304 Effective Teaching) in the Department of Communication during the summer of 2019. You can find the syllabus of CAS892-304 here.

3. Artifact(s) Rationale

The course was designed for students to be effective instructors in higher education. The topics included: managing classrooms, understanding students, utilizing lecture techniques, constructing learning objectives and a syllabus, and creating a teaching statement.

4. Materials Developed during Course

I created the syllabus for the health communication and campaign class and wrote the teaching philosophy as assignments for this course.

5. Rationale for these Materials

Through taking this course, I learned how to design a course syllabus, and how to utilize activities to help students better understand a subject related to communication. I also realized what motivates me to teach students and the goals I have for teaching.

6. Interpretation and Reflection

I found two major themes related to teaching communication: (1) understanding situational factors matters (e.g., specific contexts of a teaching situation, nature of the subjects, characteristics of the learners, et cetera), and (2) connecting theories and students' real life helps them better understand the subject especially when the subject is abstract.

I applied these two themes whenever I teach. At the beginning and in the middle of the semester, I required students to reflect on themselves and evaluate the course to understand the situational factors from barriers to facilitators of learning. Given individuals process messages and information differently based on their personalities and backgrounds, I adapt course materials based on students' perceived barriers and facilitators of learning.

I also apply theories to students’ own experiences using class activities and assignments. For example, when teaching the intercultural communication course as an instructor of record, I conducted a social experiment (Tajfel, 1970) with students to demonstrate how people easily divide in-group and out-group and attach meaning to those group memberships. I found that it is relatively easy to understand the concepts of in-group and out-group. However, it is not easily understood in an instinctive way how randomly people categorize others and how easily this categorization results in prejudice.

To help them to understand this, I showed students a slide containing numerous dots and asked them to estimate the number. Students were told that performance on this task had been shown to be associated with differences in personality. The slide was displayed briefly, so counting the number of dots was impossible. Students wrote down the dot estimates on a provided form (you can find the provided form here), then I let them know the number of dots. According to the previous study, people tend to underestimate the number of dots, the number of dots I let students know was less than the actual number of dots. Students identified themselves as either overestimators or underestimators and judged the personalities of overestimators and underestimators. Students were likely to evaluate their in-group members more positively compared to their out-group.

In the next class, I showed how students evaluated their in-group and out-group differently based on this artificial information. I revealed that I lied about the number of dots so that students knew that the group they thought they belonged to was even more bogus than they realized. A lot of students expressed surprise after doing this activity and realized how easily people could categorize and prejudge others based on the categorization.

Still, I found that it is not always easy to create an activity for students to help them to connect theories and their real lives. To design better class activities for students, I am still exploring what I can do. As a part of the efforts, I have started to subscribe to relevant journals such as Communication Teacher, and Teaching of Psychology.