Welcome to my teaching portfolio!

See my statement of teaching philosophy below.  Then click the titles in the sidebar on the right to view documentation of my teaching effectiveness and professional growth.  To comment, just type a comment and click ADD COMMENT at the bottom of any page.  [Note:  This is a sample portfolio with just enough examples to show you (1) how you can efficiently store documentation of teaching effectiveness for self-assessment, (2) how you can display digital artifacts, including photos, clip art, slide shows, animations, websites, and videos, and (3) how you can make such evidence available "anywhere, anytime" to mentors or peer reviewers. Since I have made this portfolio public, I have disabled the COMMENT option.] 

My Teaching Philosophy

(or “Why do I do what I do?”)

Curriculum Vitae.doc 

[Note:  Click Teaching Philosophy Questions.doc  to print out questions to consider when writing your teaching philosophy.]

Teaching History

When I was young, I swore that I would never teach because that was one of the only professions open to my mother’s generation of African American women.  Yet, after four years at Princeton University and a stint as a writer-editor for Time-Life Books, I decided that I needed to follow my grandfather’s call:  “Get the best education you can and give it back to your community.”   Giving back is what I’ve been trying to do for the last 22 years—20 years as a faculty member in Howard’s Department of English and 2 years as the director of its Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (CETLA).  In the English department I taught undergraduates composition and linguistics, while directing the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program for the College of Arts & Sciences.  However, at CETLA I teach not only WAC workshops for faculty but a variety of other workshops that show faculty how to enhance their teaching via technology, active learning strategies, and assessment techniques.  

Learning Theory

Whether undergraduates or faculty, my students learn in order to fulfill their needs.  Of course, those needs vary.  Some students are self-motivated, believing that what they learn from me will empower them to achieve their personal goals or attain status.  Others just want to pass my course so that they can please their parents or “fit in” with their peers.  Regardless, they seem to learn best if they can relate the course material to their lives, if they can make meaning out of the material.  The course material is most meaningful if they can “learn by doing” and use what they are learning to solve real problems for real audiences.  That is why I linked my Freshman Composition course to Introduction to Engineering—a hands-on course that requires students to design solutions to real-world problems.  That is why I have adopted web-based technologies that enable students to participate more actively.  That is also why I engage my writing students in “reading experiments”: When they experience writing problems as readers, they understand better the need to be clear, concise, and correct.  Finally, that is why I engage my linguistics students in observation:  In their journal entries, they relate classroom material to linguistic phenomena in the real world (e.g., in newspapers, advertisements, novels).  One year I even designed a class research project that required students to collect and analyze questionnaires from nonacademic professionals to determine how they responded to errors in Standard English, including errors that my students had questioned.

To facilitate this type of learning, I fulfill varied roles.  Sometimes I am a guide, “laying out the territory.”  Other times I am a coach, teaching students the requisite skills and providing opportunities for practice.  At other times, I am just an advisor, available to answer questions as they arise.  But, above all, I am a designer:  I design environments to maximize learning—environments where students will encounter rules or conventions, confront problems, and gather or access data.

However, this process works well only if students share responsibility for their learning.   As the saying goes, “you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”   To encourage them to be responsible, I clarify my expectations (e.g., policies and grading criteria) in my syllabus and during class.  (I even ask my writing students to apply those criteria to sample essays during the first week of class.)  I also encourage responsibility by requiring periodic self-evaluations:  Students must monitor their progress via  “learning logs” that identify their strengths, weaknesses, and remedies and/or via online gradebooks and practice tests that provide instant feedback.  At the same time, the feedback I receive from my students teaches me how to teach.

I know that these strategies are working when I can document progress.  My students complete a diagnostic test or essay so that I can compare their performance with a similar test or essay at the end of the course.  Also, I ask most of my students to write about their learning and “what works best” during the term—in journal entries, homework assignments, portfolios, and midterm course evaluations.

Teaching Goals

As a teacher, I’ve always tried to foster a nurturing relationship with my students.  I want to provide enough soil, water, and sunshine to make ideas take root and my students blossom.  And I love when my students, in turn, plant new seeds!

So I hope that students will grow as a result of my teaching and that their growth will empower them.   This desire is reflected in my wish list for my College Grammar students:

What are my dreams for my students?  In other words, what do I wish they could do by the time they complete my course?  What would such proficiency look like?

1.       I wish they would develop a grammarian’s “X-ray vision”—the ability to see the parts of a sentence and its transformations—so that they can fix broken sentences and tune up sluggish ones.

2.       I wish they would fill their linguistic “toolbox” with all of the different types of morphemes, words, phrases, and clauses so that they can choose the best tool for the job of writing or editing.

3.       I wish they would feel the grammatical rhythms of language so that they can discover not only how their favorite author “makes music,” but how they can punctuate and construct sentences with clarity and grace.

4.       I wish they would detect and correct confusing or stigmatizing grammatical errors before submitting their writing to me or anyone else.

5.       I wish they would understand the historical forces of change so that they would respect all varieties of English and choose what’s appropriate at the time.

6.       I wish they would think critically about grammatical “rules,” understanding how these rules originate—out of the prescriptivists’ desire to set standards of usage and the descriptivists’ desire to meet standards of science.

7.       I wish they would learn grammatical terminology well enough to discuss the grammatical strengths or weaknesses of their writing and to profit from others’ advice.

8.       I wish they would realize how much they already know about grammar so that they can tap that expertise and build their self-confidence.

9.       I wish they would take control of grammar instead of letting it take control of them!

As you can see, literacy is power.  That’s why my syllabi proclaim course goals such as the following:  “to equip you to write with clarity and grace” (ENGL 114 College Grammar), “to adapt specialized information to your audience's needs, abilities, and interests” (ENGL 009 Technical Writing), and “to use writing as a tool to ‘think through’ what you are reading” (ENGL 002 Freshman Composition).   That’s why my discipline is so important.  That’s why I want my courses to be life-changing.  However, what students learn in my courses is most valuable when my students can connect it to learning in other disciplines.  As I have tried to demonstrate through the WAC Program and Freshman English for Engineers, we need to tear down the walls dividing disciplines.

Relationships

For me, research, service, professional development, and teaching are intertwined.  On the one hand, my classroom experiences generate research questions, lead me to serve on committees beyond the classroom, and encourage me to seek more professional training.  On the other hand, my research, service, and professional development inform my teaching.  You can see this synergy most clearly in my article on interdisciplinary learning in my Freshman English for Engineers course (“Exposition by Design”), or my article on service-learning in my Technical Writing course (“In the Eye of the Beholder”), or my book on learning Standard Written English (An Introduction to African American English: What a Writing Teacher Should Know).

Self-Assessment  (or “Do You Teach What You Preach?”)

As I have written my responses to the preceding questions, I have cited evidence from my portfolio.  All in all, my portfolio suggests that I have tried to live up to my beliefs.  However, I fear that I still can’t compare with my favorite teachers—teachers who made me think outside the box or perform better than I had ever imagined.  And I worry when I talk too much that I have picked up bad habits from my worst teachers.  Perhaps that’s why I keep trying new strategies and technologies:  I’m never satisfied with my teaching.  Moreover, I know that I will always be a student—always learning not only about my discipline but about teaching and learning.  Consequently, I welcome change; indeed, my portfolio shows that I have been an agent of change, initially within my department and college and eventually across the campus and disciplines.  May I continue to grow!