Teaching

 

 

 

PHILOSOPHY

An ever-evolving process of self-reflection. My philosophy of teaching draws on my own experiences as a teacher and a researcher. I believe that research and practice are integrated activities; teaching involves putting theory and research in conversation with practice. As such, my philosophy is ever-evolving as I engage in self-reflection. Please contact me for my most recent statement of teaching philosophy.

Personal, intellectual, and linguistic growth. My overarching goal, as a language instructor, is to foster personal and academic student growth in addition to guiding students towards holistic proficiency in the second language, based on an effective language-user model rather than a native-speaker model. To guide students toward the fulfillment of this goal, I believe in target language use by both students and teachers and in the exploration of target language cultures from the first day of class forward.

A collaborative intellectual community within and beyond the classroom environment. I view teaching and learning as a dynamic and social process. Thus, I believe that creating a community of learners both within and outside of the classroom who support one-another and who engage in cooperative learning is essential for such proficiency. The creation of this collaborative community serves to address both cognitive and affective learner needs. Cognitively, collaborative learning can provide occasions for authentic communication in the target language amongst students from the very first language class and throughout a student’s academic career, which has been noted to facilitate learning. Affectively, I believe that the anxiety students may feel about language learning, especially in a target-language only classroom, must be mitigated by respect and encouragement.  This support must come from both myself and their peers in order for all students to fully engage and actively participate in ways that can lead to the growth, transformation, and cultural awareness that second language learning can engender.

Fostering motivation requires high expectations and high levels of support. I believe that when students are motivated, engaged, and given the support they need throughout the language learning process, that they will be able to become highly-effective, globally proficient language-users. To further foster motivation, I strive to increase student self-efficacy in language-use. Part of this process includes cultivating a positive learning environment where individuals celebrate each others’ successes and help one another overcome difficulties through discussion and modeling. Moreover, to promote increased self-efficacy and thus active participation by all students, I work to create an atmosphere where mistakes are accepted as part of the process of acquiring a language and are used as a way for me to know where students need additional help. In order to increase self-efficacy, students must also be given the opportunity to succeed. Specifically, I use meaningful warm-up activities and scaffolding techniques to create expectations of success. Moreover, I seek to maintain an ongoing dialogue between myself and my students about their needs and preferences through regular self-reflections. These self-reflections provide a place for students to recognize their own successes and critically consider their experiences and goals. They also serve as ongoing needs assessments, which allow students to express their voice and foster student ownership of and control over their learning process. These self-reflections reinforce a sense of a co-constructed learning community in which all voices and perspectives should be heard.

Holistic proficiency entails questions of identity. In my experience, holistic language proficiency entails identity construction and re-construction.  Student motivation seems to increase as students express themselves in the target language and understand themselves in relation to the target cultures. This sort of identity construction can be facilitated by student investigation of aspects of the target language and cultures that may interest them. Within the classroom, I actively ask students about their interests and listen to their responses in order to help expose students to material in the target language and from the target cultures that correspond to their interests. Additionally, I seek to create assignments that encourage such exploration. As an example, I have often asked students to research and present on a topic related to their major or their interests in a francophone context. Students and I would meet one-on-one in order to brainstorm potential topics and starting resources. This type of activity simultaneously gives students the agency to be an active participant in their own learning. I feel that student-directed projects also help to emphasize the fact that students bring a great deal of knowledge to the language classroom and foster connections between language and other content areas. Students also negotiate their identities in the target language when they use the target language and experience the target cultures outside the context of the classroom. As an educator, I strive to both make students aware of and create opportunities and events for this type of target language use outside of class. As examples, I have arranged for students to have native-speaker conversation partners, have coordinated French movie nights, have organized informal conversation groups, and have facilitated social networking website groups.

Content must be authentic,  as well as relevant, accessible, engaging, and applicable to students. To further maximize motivation and learning, course content should be made relevant, accessible, and engaging. Part of demonstrating the relevance of language study is making the students aware of the potential benefits of second language acquisition, including both cognitive and cultural aspects. I believe that students should also be made aware of how language skills can be an asset for them in their future careers. In my experience, this is especially true for the French language which, despite its importance in many fields including business, is often characterized as frivolous.

Furthermore I seek to create engaging and interesting lessons, which focus on authentic materials and authentic communication. Technology, when objective-driven, can help with the incorporation of authentic material as a catalyst for authentic communication in the target language. For example, I regularly have students converse with native French speakers via Skype. Typically, the conversations are thematically organized and involve cultural topics such as school systems, perspectives on work and vacation, and other cultural values. I also seek to use both traditional and virtual realia in the classroom. An illustrative activity would be having students shop with a partner on a French website. This activity could be used in units on food, clothing, or gift-giving. Students would discuss their choices with a partner, place items in their cart, and share their reasoning for their selections either in written form or orally with the class. This activity could also serve as the basis for a video blog entry.

As a part of accessibility, I strongly believe in meeting students where they are and aim to employ differentiated instructional and assessment techniques. A combination of high- and low-tech techniques can aid with differentiated instruction and assessment. I use video blogs as a way for students to practice presentational speaking and interpretive listening outside of the classroom. Twitter, a micro-blogging website, and other social networking websites may be used as an extension of the classroom for authentic interpersonal communication, presentational writing, and interpretive reading. In my experience, these high-tech tools can enhance the frequency of authentic use of the target language outside of the classroom in a way that are familiar to and motivating for students. In classes I have taught, including native speakers in these conversations has increased student engagement in these exchanges in addition to enhancing the quality and quantity of their contributions. The use of technology also can provide a certain cultural capitol in that younger students tend, in my experience, to value technology. While this has been my observation, at the essence of differentiated instruction and assessment is the idea that no two students are identical in their abilities, experiences, needs or preferences. Extending this, students may not approach high and low tech versions of an exercise in the same way; the format of an activity may impact student engagement or resistance. Furthermore, not all high-tech options are novel and any given technology is only novel for a certain amount of time. Consider for example, having students call one-another on their cell phones or having students use string-and-cup phones. The former is high tech, but is not as novel as string-and-cup phones. Here, the low-tech version also exaggerates the need for enunciation.

Technology use must be objective-driven. I believe in using both high- and low-tech techniques because language education is not only about teaching the second language, but is also about teaching media literacy and general communication skills irrespective of the presence of technology. Moreover, we live and learn in both high-tech and low-tech worlds and students need help to better negotiate between the real and virtual worlds within and outside of academic contexts. While students may or may not have the opportunity to study abroad, they can and likely will need to use the language authentically online. Furthermore, those students who are able to study abroad need to be able to connect with native speakers while abroad, many of whom are avid users of social networking websites and text messages. Students need to be literate in these forms of the target language. The availability of technology should not, however, imply an abandoning of low-tech techniques.  In fact, I understand high-tech techniques as being based on low-tech techniques; to effectively use high-tech one must have mastered the effective use of low-tech techniques. Additionally, I believe it is important to capitalize on our most important resource, one another as a community of learners and speakers. Using a flipped-classroom model, I believe that part of using technology optimally is to get the greatest amount of contact hours possible. When students and instructors are together in a space, sometimes real-life is the best technology.

 

Please see my curriculum vitae for information regarding my post-secondary teaching experience. Example lesson plans and samples of student work are available upon request.

 

 

Last updated: October 2014.