Dynamic Subspace

Tag: Teaching

  • Teaching Portfolio Workshop on Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology, Feb. 9

    anthropomorphic cat professor lecturing in front of a chalkboard with a book under his paws
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    I’m giving a presentation today on the Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology at City Tech’s Teaching Portfolio Workshop. It’s part of a series of events to support faculty who are preparing their portfolios before applying for promotion.

    You can find a copy of my Teaching Portfolio here.

    Below are my presentation notes and bibliographic citations for readings that might be helpful.

    General Teaching Portfolio Advice

    As with everything in your PARSE and Teaching Portfolio, the key is considering your audience. The audience for these documents are our colleagues across the campus representing very different intellectual disciplines, ways of approaching teaching, and styles for communicating information. Each reader brings different knowledge, expertise, ways of reading, and ways of thinking about teaching. While it’s impossible to accommodate every conceivable possible reader, it pays to address the needs of a general academic audience outside of your field. To do this, unpack concepts, explain the importance of people, theories, or approaches, and use an approachable writing style. If you are unsure or want additional feedback on whether colleagues outside your discipline can get what you are trying to say, ask someone in another department to read an excerpt or section of your portfolio. Avoid dumping your whole portfolio on someone to provide you feedback on unless they have offered to do that for you in advance!

    Also, I think it should be said that while it might seem that the work you put into the Teaching Portfolio is a bureaucratic hurdle for promotion, it actually serves a few different important functions. Of course, it is something to check off for your promotion package. However, it’s also a way to reckon with the teaching that you’ve done, the kinds of teaching that you want to do, and how to achieve your ideal teaching in the future. Without it being a requirement, many of us might not take the time to do this necessary professional work that helps us become better educators. Also, it’s valuable for yourself to create a Teaching Portfolio and its individual documents to keep your professional portfolio fresh and up to date. None of us knows what the future holds, but having these documents at the ready help you face change and seek opportunities.

    To write an effective Teaching Portfolio, I would suggest reading as many examples as you can given your time and energy. A good starting place is the portfolios of your departmental colleagues who have most recently gone up for promotion successfully. But, you can get lots of good ideas about what to write, how to write it, and how to organize what you write by looking at portfolios from faculty across the college. Reading others’ Teaching Portfolios is what helped me write mine.

    Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology

    For today, I was asked to talk about two sections of the Teaching Portfolio today: the Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology, which provide your readers with the framework to understand everything that you do in the classroom as an instructor. You can think of the Teaching Philosophy as the “why,” and your Teaching Methodology as the “how.” Another way to think about them is that the Teaching Philosophy is your strategy or the military general’s overarching battle plan, and the Teaching Methodology is your tactics or the smaller actions that added together help you achieve your larger battle plan. While these two documents are separate, they should be in dialog with one another and might even repeat or rephrase some of the same information but in service to the purpose of the respective document. They are simply a reflection of the work that you do in the classroom—your theory of teaching and your praxis of teaching.

    Teaching Philosophy

    • Your Teaching Philosophy is the theoretical underpinning for what you do in the classroom day in and day out. It answers the “because” for each aspect of your teaching.
    • You can use it to situate yourself in terms of being an educator or in relation to your students at City Tech.
    • Threaded together, it can include theories of learning, theories of teaching, and theories of assessment and feedback. Show how these work together to facilitate student learning and success.
    • Rigor in your Teaching Philosophy is an asset, but if you are going to name names or provide quotes, you should explain who those people are, why they are significant, and what they say means in terms of your teaching. This is a part of my Teaching Philosophy that I want to improve on.

    Teaching Philosophy Readings

    Alexander, Phill, Karissa Chabot, Matt Cox, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Barb Gerber, Staci Perryman-Clark, Julie Platt, Donnie Johnson Sackey, and Mary Wendt. “Teaching with Technology: Remediating the Teaching Philosophy Statement.” Computers and Composition, vol. 29, no. 1, Mar. 2012, pp. 23-38, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2011.12.002.

    Carnegie Mellon University, Student Academic Success Center. Writing Your Teaching Philosophy Statement. CMU, SASC, 2022, https://www.cmu.edu/student-success/other-resources/handouts/comm-supp-pdfs/teaching-philosophy-statement.pdf.

    Eierman, Robert J. “The Teaching Philosophy Statement: Purposes and Organizational Structure.” Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 85, no. 3, Mar. 2008, pp. 336-339, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed085p336.

    University of Michigan, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. “Teaching Philosophy & Statements.” U-M, CRLT, 2021, https://crlt.umich.edu/resources-publications/teaching-philosophies-statements.

    Teaching Methodology

    • The Teaching Methodology is the list of things that you do in the classroom with students to facilitate learning.
    • I don’t think there is one right way to write this. Some examples of Teaching Methodologies that I’ve seen focus on discrete activities, which might include the activities’ goals, procedures, and rationalization. Others, like mine, is a mixture of techniques for working with students, providing feedback, and encouraging learning in different ways.
    • Highlight those techniques of your teaching that you think work best and exemplify yourself as an instructor.
    • Provide context if a method works better or differently in one class versus another one.
    • Don’t assume that your reader will understand why or how a particular methodology works for your goals in the classroom. Take the time to provide explanations, discussion, elaborations, and rationalizations.
    • Review all of your past classes as you brainstorm what you want to include in your methodology. The things that you include do not necessarily have to be big tent activities. There are likely big, medium, and small techniques in your teaching that are worth discussing. Also, the small techniques might yield bigger results than the bigger techniques. If so, include those and explain how.

    Teaching Methodology Readings

    Brookfield, Stephen D. The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. John Wiley & Sons, 2015, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/citytech-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1895929.

    Misseyanni, Anastasia, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Paraskevi Papadopoulou, and Christina Marouli, editors. Active Learning Strategies in Higher Education: Teaching for Leadership, Innovation, and Creativity. Emerald Publishing Ltd., 2018, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/citytech-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5116698.

    University of San Diego. The Complete List of Teaching Methods. USD, 2021, https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/USD_Complete-List-of-Teaching-Methods.pdf.

  • Spring 2025 Semester Begins

    an anthropomorphic tuxedo cat wearing pants, shirt, suspenders, and tie, standing in front of a chalkboard covered in equations
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    While Spring 2025 semester classes began this past Saturday at City Tech, my teaching schedule begins today. I’ll be teaching two classes in the Professional and Technical Writing Program: Introduction to Language and Technology (ENG1710) and Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing (ENG2700).

    In Introduction to Language and Technology, I have students read an article (though, we begin with Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling), which they write about in the following class and we discuss it. We work out what we mean exactly when we say “language” and “technology” before looking more closely at how these two aspects of humanity interrelate, interoperate, and influence one another. In parallel to our class discussions, students research and write a paper about one specific technology and its relationship to language. I’ll include a past final exam review below, which will need updating due to some additions to the reading list.

    For Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing, I developed a dual approach that combines theory and praxis as a general welcoming of students to what the field they are entering is like. For each class, students read about the history, work, and deliverables created by technical communicators, which they write about in short in-class assignments and we discuss together. The final readings in the class include one paper about how reading Science Fiction can make you a better technical writer and William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome.” Additionally, students are given short deliverable assignments (e.g., write an email, a letter, a memo, a technical definition, an instruction manual, etc.) each week or so. They receive one grade on these first drafts, and they revise them and write reflections on them for creating a final portfolio, which receives a separate grade.

  • Online Class Production Studio at Home

    For my online, asynchronous Science Fiction (ENG 2420) class at City Tech this semester, I am recording my weekly lectures at my desk at home. I think the setup that I created for the second week’s lecture shown above will work out well for my recordings.

    I have a 1080p Logitech webcam with stereo mics on the left of my monitor. I have a 2 x 3 ft. foam board propped up on the right side. Originally, this was to cut down on the sound from the living room air conditioner. But, tonight, I setup a temperature controlled LED light to reflect light off the foam board onto me. This produced a much better picture than with the overhead pot lights and even provided nice illumination with the overhead lights turned off as shown.

    I used OBS Studio to record my lecture, and I edited the footage with Shotcut. Then, I uploaded the edited MP4 to YouTube.

  • 10 Year Anniversary at City Tech

    New Entrance to the Namm Building at City Tech on Jay Street, Brooklyn.

    It’s hard for me to believe that it’s only been 10 years since I started teaching at City Tech in Brooklyn. My gray hair seems like a testament to it being far longer.

    I’ve been able to accomplish a lot of things since landing in Brooklyn as evidenced by my CV and Teaching Portfolio. I’ve had the joy of teaching great students, and I’ve enjoyed the collegiality and comradery of excellent coworkers.

    Some of the greatest hits of things that I’ve done–some alongside the best colleagues and others by myself–include:

    There’s a lot left to do. What can I accomplish in the next 10 years?

  • Busy Preparing My Fall 2024 Science Fiction Class

    An anthropomorphic tuxedo cat wearing a leather jacket is working at a computer terminal. Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    Fall 2024 classes begin on Wednesday, August 28. Originally, I was hoping to teach City Tech’s ENG2420, Science Fiction course in person this semester, but the in-person section had too few students to run. Thankfully, after the administration switched the class to being online, asynchronous and sending a message blast to prospective students, the new online class quickly filled up. Since City Tech recently switched to a new learning management system (LMS) called Brightspace, I’m going to experiment teaching the class on it instead of using our open learning system, OpenLab. However, I will still create my video lectures as YouTube videos, so they will be public facing for anyone interested in following along or using them in their own classes. Also, this will be my first time teaching the class using my open educational resource (OER) Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook. Here’s to a positive and productive semester!