Current teaching persona
My score on the introductory questionnaire was 13. This wasn’t a surprise. My over-arching goal in any philosophy course I teach is to get students to do philosophy (i.e. to engage in sustained dialogical analysis regarding philosophical topics, and reach their own well-supported conclusions by doing so). My hope is that they also come to enjoy doing philosophy, and leave my classroom looking at the world with new (more thoughtful) eyes. To achieve this, I spend a lot of time facilitating discussions, providing many opportunities for reflection, and taking pains to show students how the philosophy we’re studying applies to their own lives (e.g. comes up in political discussions, arises in pop-culture, and so on).
I view myself more as a guide, leading students on a journey of discovery (of their own ideas, and of their philosophical nature). Philosophical questions are hard. I don’t know the answers. I am better than students at spotting bad answers to these questions because I have more training and practice (ideally, the leader in the cartoon would have a slightly less opaque eye mask than the others), and I can show them what I know with respect to this. But ultimately, they have to answer the questions we face, as best they can, for themselves.
There is a bit of lecturing and leading that is required to help students understand the difficult concepts that come up in the also difficult passages we read, and to help them to sharpen their critical thinking skills. But once they have a grip on this, our learning experience is very much a joint one, as we (happily?) fumble around for answers.
My persona and the online classroom
A. Fruitful discussions, workload, self-evaluation, rubrics
I think that much of my teaching philosophy/strategies can be translated to the online classroom rather well. My biggest concern is to make discussion boards a useful educational experience for students, and to minimize my workload with respect to them. I found this guide to be useful. I especially like the suggestion of asking students to complete a self-assessment (based on a rubric) of their posts, along with their posts. I have found that asking students to complete self-assessments (at least for the first time I give a particular type of assignment) can be a valuable learning experience for them, usually results in them producing higher quality work, and limits the amount of feedback I need to give them (and, really, allows for me to give richer comments). I’m going to work on constructing some different rubrics to suit my particular purposes, but these seem like a helpful place to start.
B. Adopting (more of) a constructivist approach
It has never really occurred to me to let students decide how they would like to learn. I have heard of faculty doing so, and even allowing students to determine the content of the course to some extent. But, this never seemed like an enticing possibility to me. But, a lot of research, e.g., suggests that individuals are more productive when they browse the internet for leisure. I don’t kid myself that work for a philosophy course can be leisurely for most individuals, but I wonder if giving the students many options for learning can achieve a similar result.
This is all a bit hand-wavy. I don’t really have any well-formed ideas or plans with respect to this goal, but this seems like an excellent resource guide for beginners wanting to incorporate student choice into their classroom.
