Teaching Statement

As part of Education Studies, I have had the privilege to teach many courses across all of our programs. These programs include the undergraduate major in Education Sciences (B.S.), our undergraduate minors in education including the CalTeach program, Teacher Education Program (M.Ed.), Ed.D (JDP) in Educational Leadership, and Ph.D. in Education.

My beliefs around teaching and learning have a direct impact on the way course activities are structured. To make use of inherent advantages of UbD and UDL, I plan for student-centered course tasks that rely on Social Cultural learning theory and Cognitive Apprenticeships. Sociocultural learning ideas lead me towards activities that rely upon social interactions facilitated through language. This means that my students explore, discuss, and debate issues that are central to our topic. With the foundational theory of Cognitive Apprenticeships in mind I can leverage the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) from the sociocultural theory to provide my students with contextual experiences to help them learn through a scaffolded task. Gradually as the students gain expertise or skills in a specific area, these scaffolds can be removed while additional scaffolds are put in place around the next topic or increased level of skills required.

These core beliefs around course planning and student learning have lead me to create very specific kinds of learning experiences for my students that rely on the student becoming an active participant within a learning community, keeping in mind theories about how we naturally learn. These beliefs about teaching and learning are a blend of my practice and theories from my research, just as my work is a continuous conversation between theory and practice.

All of my course development begins with the learning objective, the skills and knowledge that I expect the students to attain, and the assessment product that demonstrates student conceptual mastery. This represents the starting point of my planning as well as the end goal I have in mind to assess the students. The rest of the planning is a matter of connecting the objective to the assessment with carefully scaffolded activities, tasks, and explorations. By having the assessment goal in mind and making this goal evident to the students, as well as clearly defining the evaluation rubrics that will be used to assess their work, my courses are purposefully criterion-based in terms of student achievement. The ideas of backwards design and criterion-based assessment couple well with the more recent thoughts on Universal Design of Learning (UDL). The basis of UDL come from our knowledge of brain based learning and cognitive development. This strategy of planning recognized that each student has strengths and preferences in how they engage in learning, process various representations of learning, and express their understandings. I can take advantage of these differences to create tasks and scaffold learning that activate these student strengths.

This leads me to how the actual course activities are structured. I plan for student-centered course tasks that rely on Social Cultural learning theory and Cognitive Apprenticeships. Sociocultural learning ideas lead me towards activities that rely upon social interactions facilitated through language. This means that my students explore, discuss, and debate issues that are central to our topic. With the foundational theory of Cognitive Apprenticeships in mind I can leverage the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) from the sociocultural theory to provide my students with contextual experiences to help them learn through a scaffolded task. Gradually as the students gain expertise or skills in a specific area, these scaffolds can be removed while additional scaffolds are put in place around the next topic or increased level of skills required.

Over time and through the pandemic, I began to change my expectations for student learning and growth over time. I broadly adopted the Mastery Learning model of assessment in my courses. Students were expected to be actively engaged in the learning process. I also understood that everyday challenges may interfere with individual student participation. I encouraged students to attempt all the course tasks, assessments, and projects to the best of the ability and current understanding. All assignments had clear criteria and rubrics. Students received extensive feedback and guidance on their assessments. The major shift in assessment came in the form of resubmission. It was my expectation that students would learn through participating in the activities as well as through the assessments. Since learning was continual and each student may be learning the content at a different pace, all work could be resubmitted for full credit until the end of each quarter. This did add work to me as the instructor, but I felt the tradeoff of allowing students to develop a growth mindset in their own learning was worthwhile.

The results that I see in the classroom stem from two areas; my beliefs about course planning that I bring with me from my own K-12 teaching experiences and the beliefs that I hold about learning, stemming from my work as an educational researcher. In course planning I rely on the Backwards Design model, as described in the Understanding by Design (UbD) work of Wiggins and McTighe (1998) as well as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as described by Meyer and Rose (1997). In the area of teaching and learning my foundational beliefs rest in the work of Vygotsky’s (Moll, 1990) Social Cultural theories coupled with the ideas of Cognitive Apprenticeships that stem from the work of Collins, Duguid, and Brown (1989).

These core beliefs around course planning and student learning have lead me to create very specific kinds of learning experiences for my students that rely on the student becoming an active participant within a learning community, keeping in mind theories about how we naturally learn. These beliefs about teaching and learning are a blend of my practice and theories from my research, just as my work is a continuous conversation between theory and practice.

Examples of this learning process can be seen in all the courses I teach. In the technology based courses, such as EDS203 and EDS204, these courses are based on exploration, success and challenges, and creativity. The students use various technology tools to create products that can demonstrate their beliefs about learning, show the interactivity of using technology to learn, demonstrate a visually engaging reflection on their own learning, or to simply enjoy the process. Often times the students will discover new tools or capabilities within the technology, teaching me new ways to use those tools.

In my Quantitative Methods courses, such as EDS288A and EDS288C the learning happens within a classroom community. Many of the students enter the course with self doubts about their own mathematical understanding. Often they have not had a math class since high school or their first year of college. My job is to make the statistical analysis process accessible to them and provide some meaningful context to the numbers. In these courses I will present a dataset with some context about where that data originated. As a class we begin by asking questions about the dataset as a “wondering” experience about the topics that the students what to find out more from the data. Then we enter the statistical analysis, discussing how to interpret the results. Here I make sure that my own thinking is make explicit to the students as a model of the analysis process.

Course and curriculum development is an activity of constant refinement, improvement, and sometimes out right overhaul. I have been teaching courses at UC San Diego for more than 20 years. Some of my current courses have been taught over that entire period, or at least some version of that course, others are in their adolescence of development, and some in their infancy. Courses at varying stages of their development require varied approaches to change and innovation.

A Long History of Change (EDS203)

EDS203 (Technology, Teaching, & Learning) has been one of my courses since 1998. This course began life as "EDS180", but change its course numbering when the M.Ed. was introduced to the program.The course has always been focused on the technology supported tools of teaching. In the early history of this course the main focus was on teacher use of email, Microsoft Word, and classroom simulation applications such as the Oregon Trail. There was a time when these skills were considered cutting edge in the classroom.

In the early 2000's, the course received a new name (EDS203) and a new focus. This was the early years of the internet reaching into classrooms. The course was intended to support pre-service teachers to explore and evaluation resources that could be found on the "world wide web". Google had just been introduced in 1998 and there was an explosion of resources on the web. These resources could fairly be described as the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The resources were new, reliable internet connections in schools was new (or still non-existent), and teachers were new to this tool.

As the time went on, the course was in almost constant change, aligning content and tools introduced in the course to the actual tools being used by veteran teachers in the field. The current focus of the course in to leverage interactive web-based tools that support in-class and out of class collaboration among students, teachers, and the broader community. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced another high need in technology - the ability to create synchronous content that support remote instruction.

Changes and improvements in this course have been mainly dictated by the field and needs of the teaching profession, student learning, and technology capabilities in the classroom.

A Course in Its Adolescence (EDS204)

EDS204 (Technology and Professional Assessment) has gone through significant but modest changes. The course was introduced at a time when video production and editing has recently come into the consumer realm. Video editing tools had become more accessible and easy to use. A one of the capstone courses to the Teacher Credential/M.Ed. program, the course has always been focused on professional reflection and assessment. In these early years of the course, students would produce and edit a video documentary of their growth and development from pre-service teacher to fully credentialed teacher about to enter the workforce. These video projects were powerful, authentic, and often heart-felt as the students transitioned from being a learner to becoming a professionals.

Over time through changes in available technology, instructor assessment of course objectives, and student feedback, the focus of the course had to change. It was no longer fully meeting the course objectives. It was also about this time that access to web content creation became easier for the novice. Google sites introduced webpage creation to its suite of tools. The course focus changed to guide students in creating an online professional teaching portfolio to showcase their beliefs, accomplishments, and skills as new teachers. Each section of the portfolio was purposefully designed to meet the job market needs that employers would look for when hiring a new teachers. The course did retain the multimedia project highlighting the students growth and progression towards being a professional, but this was now only a part of the overall portfolio.

A Course in its Infancy (EDS103)

EDS103 (Introduction to Quantitative Methods in Education Research) is the newest course in my schedule. This is a course designed to be part of the EDS Education Sciences (B.S.) major in the research methods domain of the program. The course was part of my plan for the major and one of the courses that I took on for its design. The purpose and focus of the course was to introduce undergraduate researchers to the basic quantitative research methods used in educational and social science research. The major was introduced in Fall 2019 and this course was first offered in Winter 2021.

If you recall from other parts of my teaching statement, at the core of my instructional beliefs is the requirement for learning to happen in a collaborative environment facilitate through langauge, debate, and discussion. The course was first offered in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the university was in fully remote instruction and we were all experiencing extreme isolation from one another. the context of my teaching was in direct opposition to my beliefs about learning. The students completed much of their work independently. True collaboration in remote courses was limited at best and non-existent at worst. Very little discussion and dialogue happens in remote courses. Student only are afforded superficial interactions with the instructor and their peers.

While there were learning successes at the end of this course, after reviewing the student work, the video recordings of the class sessions, and student comments, as few things became clear to me;

• there was too much introductory content not embedded in the context of analysis

• there were too many course tasks and assignments

• the students needed the structures to support deeper, more meaningful collaboration

• the work being done in the course needed to reflect the way actual research happens

• the students needed a variety of practice data that came for a real learning setting

So began the overhaul and refinement of the second offering of EDS103 in Winter 2022. Thankfully, this course could be offered in-person rather than fully remote. Unfortunately, since the university began the quarter in remote instruction, I ended up offering the course in both modalities to better support the students. This choice was only possible because I had experience teaching in synchronous environments, I had access to the resources to make it work (microphone, headphones, screen sharing, etc), and I had a Teaching Assistant who could focus on the remote students whole I focused on the in-person students. We would bring both groups together for direct instruction and to clarify ideas when one group had conceptual challenges.

I was able to put into place all the lessons learned from the previous quarter. The remote students engaged in collaborative work through breakout rooms and the in-person students work in small groups in the classroom (which was intentionally setup for group work). At the conclusion of this course, I felt that the students had gained a deeper understanding of the concepts, performed better on the assessment tasks, and had a more positive outlook on the methods. And still, differences in performance persisted between the remote and in-person groups. I am looking forward to teaching this course to a fully in-person class.