I’m only seriously beginning to craft something that I think of as my own teaching philosophy in my 5th year of teaching, and until now when asked for my philosophy I’ve mostly borrowed from other’s statements or simply offered a collection of opinions that haven’t meshed into a coherent philosophy. This already is an indictment of our higher education system, and the lack of preparation that most college-level instructors have for their teaching duties. My teaching philosophy is centered on a few core beliefs:
To expound a bit on each of these:
If you worry that your students might be cheating and try to prevent that by locking things down, more students will cheat. If you don’t believe some groups of students will succeed, or even if you just worry more about whether they’ll do well, they’ll do poorly. Consciously or unconsciously, students pick up on your expectations for their behavior, and those expectations can and often do burden them relative to their peers. Whether the mechanism is stereotype threat, or their use of your expectation as a justification for their behavior, expectations alone can shape behavior. Accordingly, as an instructor, I need to practice the creation and maintenance of positive expectations. I need to trust my students, respect them, and believe they can succeed. And these things need to happen both in terms of course policies but also in terms of my private beliefs and especially my communications with other instructors. Of course, optimism and realism will conflict in some cases, and this is not an injunction to ignore student’s learning struggles. But even when learning is not happening according to plan, it’s important that I believe that my students can and will succeed in the end. Especially for students whose learning is not going well, if I end up doubting their ability to ultimately succeed, their chances of success will plummet. This relates closely to the next core belief:
In order to be a good game designer, one must be able to accept player feedback while taking complete responsibility for the outcome, even in cases where players do things completely unexpected. Since the designer is in complete control of the game system, there’s never a case where a player should be blamed for “playing wrong:” Instead, it is always possible and productive to ask the question: “What can I as the designer, in control of every aspect of the game, do better to help the player avoid gameplay patterns that aren’t fun?” The same principle is found more broadly in human-computer-interaction, and applies to teaching as well: Although learning outcomes are ultimately determined by both the student and the instructor, there is never a case where the instructor can’t adjust something about their teaching to help the student succeed.
Of course there are cases where the effort required for a particular intervention is unreasonable for the instructor, but the instant one blames a student for their failures, one stops trying to think of creative ways to help that student. If a student does poorly in your class, rather than dismissing them as a bad or weak student, you should view it as your own failure to educate that student, and you should attempt to imagine what conditions would have been required for you to succeed at that task instead. This exercise is actually incredibly fruitful in improving your teaching for all of your students, not just the ones who struggle.
At the same time, paradoxically, students should also be given full responsibility for their own learning. While as a teacher I need to view their learning outcomes through the lens of what I can do to improve them, students should not be denied agency or responsibility because that is disastrous for their short- and long-term learning. The set of things that students can do to improve their learning outcomes is often different from those an instructor can do, and the best results are achieved when both parties work together to address any problems that come up, and when both are fully invested in that process and take shared responsibility for the outcome.