I believe learning is an act of investment in one’s self – an emotional and intellectual account into which one diligently makes a daily deposit. The value of that learning deposit has three main components that I, as a teacher, will strive to help my students possess:
- Knowledge Mastery: this is learning about the bread and butter, the core, of the subject. Here I help students find their paths to learn about, and explore deeply into, the established facts and relationships of the domain
- Personal Transformation: this is how the above Knowledge Mastery of the domain can affect the student as a learner, e.g., for many students to develop an active, inquisitive interest in the subject, perhaps even a passion, to sharpen their learning tools, and ideally for all students to simply enjoy the ride of learning something significant that they didn’t know before
- Possessing a Prepared Mind: this often quoted precondition for intellectual “luck” is what the students take with them from the Knowledge Mastery and Personal Transformation above into their next encounters, in whatever domains, that makes a difference, that helps them to do what they could not have done before.
Knowledge Mastery
An ancient Chinese proverb says “Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.” My ideas for teaching knowledge mastery would be both to teach “how to fish” and to recognize “what kind of a fish that is”, or equivalently, “how to master the domain and explore what the domain is like”.
For a given type of domain (what to fish), I would give assignments or hand-on activities that mimic the real world situations or problems that students will encounter in the workplace – tasks that meet prescribed learning objectives, are ordered based on prerequisites, and structured for skill expansions. I will pose problems that have some realism so they have a chance to hone their problem solving skills in a safe environment that is more forgiving than the workplace. Where feasible, the learning materials would be drawn from current events, issues of student interest, and core examples from the discipline.
To foster learning (how to fish), I would play the role of a community builder, whose passion and practices are focused on creating a natural, critical, collegial learning environment. Natural because students learn the skills, habits, and information while exploring the questions and tasks that are intrinsically interesting and fascinating to them. Critical so that students can understand, analyze, apply, synthesize, and evaluate evidence and conclusions. Finally, I strive to create collegial relationships between the students and me and among themselves. As a newcomer to the education enterprise, I will experiment with various types of learning environments, ranging from simulation exercises to role playing to debate. There may be opportunities to create scenarios where students can take opposite sides of a problem (e.g., protecting social media communications during a social uprising, as seen recently in Egypt, and thwarting the same from the government’s side).
Personal Transformation
I believe the abilities to think critically and to learn whole heartedly are important to personal transformation. The reasoning skills of Arnold Arons are powerful mental-medicine concentrated into just 10 little pills. These habits of thoughts, if students practice, develop, and possess them, will help them to answer the questions that their discipline raises. I see at least two uses of his ideas. One is to build the self-awareness questions into assignments (giving them a fish), and another would be to have students create a compact checklist of questions to ask, and introspective thoughts to have, while doing their reading and assignments (teaching them to fish). The checklists could really magnify a student’s ability by making them ask the right questions, questions they are capable of answering but just don’t know to ask, and questions whose answers can make a big difference. Finally, I will give them ample opportunities to practice critical thinking skills by writing short papers on open ended questions (this is something I am learning from Prof. Smith by complying with her weekly assignments).
I will also do my best to help make my students more adept and robust learners by integrating personal development into their intellectual progress. I will invite students to devote a little time to thinking about how they learn. Students may have different learning styles: some think of learning as relying on experts, getting the right answers and memorizing them, others are more comfortable with feelings-based judgments than with evidence and argumentation, some minimalists provide their teachers the bare minimum of what is asked, and still others need repeated reinforcement of what was learned. During class I might briefly point out where one way of learning may be more or less advantageous and why. This would challenge receptive students to think of consciously complementing their natural learning mode with another when that would serve them better. I could suggest how they might deal with the compromise involved in shifting styles (such as keeping a list of intriguing tangential course topics to revisit, when less pressed by the time demands of the syllabus into a more focused procedural learning mode).
Possessing a Prepared Mind
As most of my students will be undergraduates who often have an undeclared major or undecided specialty, I will strive to provide them the underlying general purpose learning concepts and tools that are portable to other disciplines. One part of developing a prepared mind is to cultivate the generic research and investigative skills that can be applied in new domains and contexts, e.g., to see the forest for the trees but also to know when to focus on one tree or to exploit analogies that relate trees and forests in one discipline to those in another. These are the powerful meta-learning techniques that allow a learner to solve a problem in one disciple by importing the analogous solution in another. These techniques allow students to mix their domain knowledge with other disciplines and create one of the most fertile areas for generating great new ideas. These well-prepared minds can then make the most of new intercultural or interdisciplinary interactions, expand what they know, and boost their contribution.
My “Secret Sauce”
I will also strive, while helping them in the above three components of learning, to give them a foundation on which, in their introspective moments, they can stand to view themselves as individuals and also to look beyond their present horizon and think about the bigger picture and contemplate their roles in society and organizations..
So much depends on the individual; I will try to understand as best I can who my students are as people. Certainly, I will be mindful of factors about their education that are revealed through their speech, writing, and behavior. But I would also, as an ideal, get to know them as individuals if possible. Since teaching will be my post retirement career, I would expect to be more extravagant with office hours and have the time to learn about my students So that I know: Who is the first college student in their family?, who wants to be a doctor?, get into UVA or Harvard?, and who might be working two jobs or sleeping in their car?
Lastly, I praise the values of their competency by setting expectations bar high but also compensate by encouraging them with the true fact that most companies quietly prize even the greenest intern because of their “new knowledge”, and even more, for their freshness of thought. They are prized because they have the power of not yet being burdened by preconceptions of what is and is not possible or what is the “right” way to approach a problem. I think that my teaching philosophy (that I will feel free to expand or revise as needed) will help me find the delicate balance point needed in preparing youthful creative energy to encounter and successfully engage with the more rigid and deeper expertise found in the professional world.