0.3 Findings  (Page 11/22)

Philosophy of teaching

Carrie’s philosophy of teaching was about empowering the students, which stood in contrast to her own graduate school instructors’ stances. She recalled their teaching as strongly teacher-centered, which manifested itself in a strictly lecture-style learning environment. Carrie was very clear that she did not want to emulate her models. The biggest difference between Carrie and her instructors was their attitudes toward the students. “I’ve tried real hard to be conscious of how I interact with my students and treat my students so that I won’t treat them like I was treated.” Carrie characterized her treatment by her instructors as condescending; they discounted students’ responses in class and acted as gatekeepers.

I don’t teach at students, I try very hard to dialogue and to encourage thinking because they’ve not been taught to think. My assumption is that when the students come to class, especially when they begin the graduate program, that there’s going to be an overall learning curve, period. And so I do whatever I can, without doing their work for them, to help them to understand. We have a lot of students who are older, and some of them may have been out of school 10 years, 5 years. It’s my role to empower them, to let them know that regardless of when they graduated from college, that they can do the work.

How she taught

Carrie taught the theories course off-campus as a hybrid. Carrie met face-to-face with the class three weekends of the semester, where she lectured, showed videos, and directed the students in experiential learning exercises. She taught all day Saturday, and half a day on Sunday for a total of 13 hours.

They do their exams online and I go up on the three weekends to lecture. They do the videos and responses to the videos online, and then we spend the time together just lecturing and asking questions, and discussing the text, and whatever.

As the students read each chapter, they took the corresponding online quiz on the Online Day website. The quizzes gave both the students and the instructor immediate feedback on their understanding of the material.

Despite having used discussion boards in previous courses she taught in WebCT, Carrie did not use the discussion board component of the Online Day; she had found it too time-consuming. Carrie described how she implemented an online discussion, posting a topic question, and leaving the discussion open for a week or two, “for the students to respond to the question, and to respond to other students’ responses.”

When pressed to explain why she hadn’t made use of the discussion board, at first she explained that there was ample time for discussion when they met face-to-face. However, in time, she began to open up and share her experience with discussion boards.

I’m going to be very honest with you here. I guess sometimes it gets to be so much, a discussion board just sometimes gets to be so much! And to have to respond to every student two or three times, it’s something that I stopped doing a while back. At the end of the semester when I would use the discussion board, I would pull the whole thing and read through it and look at the quality of the comments that the students made.