TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
DEEP LEARNING
My teaching
pedagogy is truly student-centered and aims at encouraging my students to take
a deep approach to learning. Deep learning is a personal commitment and an
attitude toward learning, where the learner uses higher-order cognitive skills
such as the ability to analyze, synthesize, solve problems, and thinks
meta-cognitively in order to construct long-term understanding. It involves the
critical analysis of new ideas, linking them to
already known concepts and principles so that this understanding can be used
for problem solving in new, unfamiliar contexts.
Learners
learn deeply by constructing their own knowledge. And they do so by connecting
new knowledge with existing mental structures, and by interpreting new ideas in
light of their personal experiences. No one can learn deeply for our students.
They have to construct their own new models of reality for themselves. Teaching
for deep learning entails stimulating this construction of knowledge. So, I
always challenge my students’ existing knowledge structures in a way that they
care. I stimulate them to search for relationships among materials and
to reflect on the personal significance of what they are learning. I also align
all my courses. Constructive alignment is a fully criterion-referenced system,
where the learning outcomes define what we should be teaching, how we should be
teaching it; and how we could know how well students have learned it. In
aligned teaching, there is maximum consistency throughout the system and each
teaching component –outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment-
supports the other.
When I design my courses, I always start from the end. First,
I plan where I want my students to be at the end of the course. I think of the
kind of intellectual and personal development that I want my students to enjoy,
and what I want them to be able to do when they finish the course. The common
objective in all my courses is to promote a deep approach to learning. I want
my students to perform at the extended abstract level of John Bigg’s SOLO taxonomy. I also design evaluation tools –both
formative and summative- as well as metacognitive
strategies which will permit me and my students to assess whether they have
reached the intended learning outcomes. And I carefully design the class
activities which will help them reach these goals. For this
purpose, I resort to a series of theoretically grounded and empirically
supported active teaching strategies to foster students to take a deep approach
to learning such as group discussions, problem-based learning, analysis of
video segments depicting scenes relevant to Law and Justice topics, debates,
collective construction of web sites, and writing exercises. I carefully design
the classroom activities so that my students can reflect on their experience in
a critical way. I encourage them to have an active role in the production of
their own knowledge, and in the design of their own learning strategies.
Students’ response to my approach to teaching and
learning has been very encouraging and stimulating. They often tell me
that “[my] course truly
exemplifies deep learning (Tyler, unsolicited feedback, Crime and Punishment
II, 2009), that “it is nice to attend a class where the sole objective is not
to pass along information to the students but really help the students
understand” (Malene, unsolicited feedback,
Introduction to Legal Studies, 2007), that my classes
“made a difference in the way [they] look at teaching in University and
research” (Ayat, unsolicited feedback from student, Culture,
Rights and Power class, 2003). They also recognize that “[my] style of teaching
is very unique and […] remarkable. It encourages learning, class participation,
and public speaking.” (Leah, unsolicited feedback, Criminology
and Criminal Justice class, 2003-04).
DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC SKILLS:
WRITING, READING, METACOGNITION, AND
MEDIA LITERACY
Success at the university level
mainly depends on the mastery of some fundamental academic skills. These
include –reading, writing, critical thinking, presentation, and media literacy.
Despite the importance of these skills for academic success, most professors
seldom teach them. They generally take them for granted,
as they tend to presuppose that all students already acquired these skills
either as part of their secondary education or elsewhere in college. The
reality is that most students lack these skills, which is one of the main
causes of university attrition. I specifically teach these cognitive and metacognitive skills to my students as part of my courses
so that they can become lifelong learners. Most of the strategies that I use
to teach these academic skills are the result of extensive classroom action
research projects, and the resulting publications which I have authored.
Academic reading
Reading is a process shaped partly by
the text, partly by the reader's background, and partly by the situation the
reading occurs in. Reading an academic text does not simply involve finding
information on the text itself. Rather, it is a process of working with the
text. When reading an academic text, readers negotiate the meaning with the
author by applying their prior knowledge to it. But, this process is only
possible if the reader uses a series of categories of analysis, some of which
are specific to each academic discipline. Thus, working with a text and
recreating its meaning entail both discipline and non discipline-specific
reading strategies. The expert reader has incorporated these categories and
applies them almost intuitively. But, students usually ignore these categories
of analysis. So, I always teach my students both the general analytical tools
and the discipline-specific values and strategies that facilitate disciplinary
reading and learning.
In all my courses, I place academic
reading at the forefront of the curriculum. I select teaching and learning
activities that help my students interact with academic texts and use
higher-order cognitive skills to construct meaning from the text. I also
implement assessment tools aimed at evaluating whether students use such
skills.
Subscribing
to the Writing Across the Curriculum postulates, I
conceive writing as a knowledge- transforming tool, and a privileged method for
learning and thinking about social and legal problems. I also consider that the
social science field is not only a conceptual but a discursive space as well.
So, I promote writing in all my courses and foster its learning through
extensive feedback given to my students.
I
design activities to help students practice with the disciplinary language
conventions. In my experience, I have found that the standard research paper is
not enough to achieve my proposed writing objectives. So, I encourage my
students to reflect about and deconstruct the different styles of a variety of
texts through a myriad of write-to-learn and exploratory writing tasks. Another
aspect which has proved very helpful for my students is peer review. This
provides reviewers with the possibility of critically analyzing a writing
document produced by their peers, which makes the student reviewer become aware
of problems in the process of achieving superior disciplinary writing skills.
At the same time, the authors of the papers are provided with real readers who
must make sense of their writings, and who provide invaluable feedback.
Metacognition
I always help my students
develop strong metacognition skills in all my
courses. This helps them reflect about their own learning process and improve their learning.
I provide my students with both general and discipline-specific metacognitive categories so that they can use the standards
of the discipline to recognize shortcomings and monitor their success.
The
revolution in media and global communications in the last few decades has
transformed the very basic foundations of knowledge and education. Media texts
are pervasive in today’s globalized society and there is an increasing
expectation in most professions that professionals must be proficient in the
interpretation of media texts in their every day practice. So, I help my
students acquire strong media literacy skills. I help my students both
interpret and create media productions dealing with legal and justice matters.
For this purpose, I expressly teach them the conventions of media language,
media narrative structure, and media discourse. I also provide them with the
skills necessary to realize how media construct legal meanings, influence and
educate both legal and lay audiences, and impose their messages and values in
every dimension of the legal world.
SCHOLARLY TEACHING
I
approach my teaching as a truly scholarly enterprise. I am constantly
experimenting, introducing new strategies, class activities, and assessment
practices informed by the latest ideas reported in the pedagogical literature.
I conduct action research projects, collect evidence, and analyze it. I change
my teaching practice according to the results of these projects so as to
improve student learning and take it to higher levels of depth.
Additionally,
I am engaged in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. So, apart from
approaching teaching as a scholarly activity, I make my teaching public,
subject to peer review, and available so that others can build on it. I do this
by publishing the results of my classroom action research projects, by
presenting them in teaching conferences, and by leading faculty development
workshops in Canada, the United States, and other parts of the world. Some
colleagues comment that they were "delighted to see [my] article in
Tomorrow’s Professor (Eileen Herteiss, Director, Purdy Crawford Teaching
Centre, personal email, 2009). Others published in their Teaching and Learning
Center websites that “here is a great article from the Tomorrow’s Professor
Newsletter on Strategies to Promote a Deep Approach to Reading. Dr.
Julian Hermida provides some great insight into how we can encourage our
students to read critically and how we can facilitate that process.” (M. Meixner, Texas Tech University,
Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center).