Teaching

In my third decade of university teaching, four practices inform my philosophy of and approach to teaching.

Foremost, students achieve the most success when my courses use active-learning pedagogies. In the last six years, I have significantly adapted my course designs to incorporate significant team-based learning exercises. In both my CJUS-POLS 205: Information Literacy and POLS 141: Governments of the World courses, team-based learning assignments have improved both critical thinking and academic performance in future classes. My in-class use of electronic opinion polling not only engages students but also helps me assess their understanding of course materials. Next spring, I will teach an honors seminar that utilizes the “reacting to the past” role-playing game to encourage students to engage deeply with historical figures, events, philosophical arguments, and social trends. These examples illustrate how I design my courses to improve students’ intellectual and academic skills, improve their collaboration, cultivate creative thinking, and practice persuasive oral and written communication.

Active learning relates to my second principle: my instruction should accommodate diverse learning styles. Although I am primarily a visual learner, early in my career I appreciated that some students learn best through kinesthetic learning while others may prefer auditory learning. Today my instruction uses techniques to support all three types of learning. In a couple of classes, I require student teams to create a research poster or an infographic, assignments that require the manual manipulation of visual and textual media, collaboration, and creativity. In my information literacy course, I require students to find examples of graphs, tables, illustrations, tweets, or other media that use data effectively or, conversely, misuse data to mislead the reader. Whenever I lecture, I make sure to complement my oral presentation with visual media—photographs, maps, timelines, scatterplots, and so on—that relate to the ideas or concepts we’re discussing. As these examples suggest, I always seek to accommodate auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learners.

Third, I seek to nurture integrative thinking in my students—that is, to achieve the higher levels in Bloom’s taxonomy. For example, while teaching my introductory course to comparative politics, students may easily remember and understand the differences in legislative, executive, and judicial functions of political systems. To nurture their evaluative and creative skills, I ask the students a simple question: from the various political systems we have studied, what one institution or practice would you adopt for the United States? Together students work as teams to craft a proposal; identify the necessary regulatory, legal, or constitutional changes; compose a research poster; and present their proposal to me at our annual public service colloquium. Not only does this project combine active learning and team-based learning, but it also requires students to evaluate critically content we have studied and to apply creatively these insights to a topical public issue. This is one of many ways I seek to develop higher-level analytic, evaluative, and creative skills in my students.

Finally, I strive to be a learner as well as a teacher. I am committed to continuous self-evaluation and improvement of my pedagogy. While it feels like only yesterday that I was a student, this generation of college students are younger than my own son. They have received an entire elementary and secondary education in a pedagogical ecosystem that did not exist when I was a student. To reach this generation of students, to accommodate diverse learning styles, and to mentor them, I must constantly evaluate and re-evaluate my pedagogy as well as keep apprised of best practices in higher education pedagogy. For example, three years ago I integrated the “seven pillars” paradigm of information literacy (and adopted an open textbook) into my undergraduate research design course. While at ODU, I applied for and received two faculty innovator grants from the Center for Teaching and Learning to develop new teaching technologies and integrate them into my course designs. One of these grants resulted in a peer-reviewed publication (with Jennifer N. Fish, “Visual Sociology in the Classroom: Using Imagery to Teach the Politics of Globalization,” Politics 34, no. 3, (September 2014): 248-262).

My instruction has received several awards, including the Doctoral Dissertation Mentoring Award (2014); the Robert L. Stern Award for Outstanding Teaching (2013); and the Faculty Member of the Year Award (2022).