Teaching Philosophy
Continually Growing
My wife and I went to a piano recital in Holland, MI with a friend a few weeks back. The performers name was Andrew Le and he was, by far, the most exciting pianist I have ever seen. During the intermission, instead of just waiting backstage, he fielded some questions and told some stories. One of the audience members had the audacity to ask him what his most influential teacher was. Andrew Le scrunched his face the way a mother would when asked “what child do you love the most?”
He answered as diplomatically as he could, knowing some of his instructors were in the crowd. I do not remember the exact response, but it was something to the effect of “I have gained something from every teacher I have ever had,” but then he said something that I think I will carry with me throughout the rest of my teaching career; “But, I think the greatest teachers are the ones who continue to teach you even after you have left them.” I knew that that is what I have been striving for throughout my teaching, but up until now, I had not been able to so eloquently put that feeling into words.
Yes I am a chemistry teacher, but a student can only remember so much chemistry in their life. My aims and goals have to be broader than teaching students how to balance a reduction/oxidation reaction or how to find the equilibrium constant of a chemical system. Within the science practices, I want my students to be able to collect accurate data, find patterns within the data, communicate with peers about these patterns, make conclusions about these patterns, and finally construct or adjust their schema about how the universe around them works. Having the students accomplish this is a very lofty goal within a year or a semester.
Even beyond this, I want my students to have the confidence that they can learn on their own. I want them to understand that being “good” at chemistry, like playing piano, is not a quality someone is born with, but can develop. I want my students to obtain skills and confidence that can reach beyond chemistry, science, and if I am being greedy, the classroom. If I did my job the way I think I should, students will be able to “do what they need to learn effectively, develop themselves further as learners, and act in ways that support the learning effort of others” (Weimer, 2002, p.99). If these are my goals, as broad as they are, then it is not the content I teach, but how I teach it, or a more accurately, how the students learn it.
This ends up being a bit of a challenge considering where these students are coming from. Students come into my class with “knowledge [consisting] of an amalgam of facts, concepts, models, perceptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes” about chemistry, “some of which are accurate, complete, and appropriate for the context, some of which are inaccurate, insufficient for the learning requirements of the course, or simply inappropriate for the context” (Ambrose, 2010, p.13). Many of the students believe that science and chemistry is a lot of memorization of facts. Many of these students come into a chemistry class afraid that they might say something wrong in front of their peers and appear stupid. Many of the students I see come into my classroom also have little patience when attempting to solve a problem and practically beg for the solution when they have been struggling and wrestling with it for only a short period of time. I am not sure if this attitude stems from their previous educational experience or some other societal force, but it is something that must be unlearned in order to make progress in problem solving.
With as many weakness these students have, they also come in with a variety of strengths. The students today tend to be much craftier with their use of technology. They are much more willing to collaborate and learn using different technological platforms such as blogs, online videos, in class clickers, or even simulations designed to give students experiences that would otherwise be logistically unattainable. Many of them also have applicable prior knowledge and “when students can connect what they are learning to accurate and relevant prior knowledge, they learn and retain more” (Ambrose, 2010, p.15).
The students that sign up for general chemistry also tend to be generally good students. I mean this in the sense that they routinely keep up with deadlines, perform reasonably well on standard tests by studying example problems from a book, and only speak after they are prompted to do so.
The problem with this is that scientists tend to not learn this way. Experimentation has set backs and patience should reign over arbitrary deadlines. Solutions to problems are not found in a book, but in deep thought and conversation. “Even if the teacher [or book] knows an answer or has a preferred solution, the students should have a chance to come up with new solutions” (Svinicki et al., 2014, p.44). Conversation involving science are not one directional or series of “call and response” interactions. Scientific conversation consists of critiquing and defending data, ideas, and theories. Because of this, the idea of learning and “knowing” for chemistry can be quite a bit different than what the students are used to.
“Knowing” chemistry and science then becomes learning about the fundamental practices that I mentioned earlier. These practices include collecting accurate and precise data, interpreting data and discovering patterns within the data, communicating among peers about these data and patterns, and finally, making conclusions in the form of mathematical or qualitative models. Establishing these practices, in my opinion, is the ultimate goal when learning chemistry.
Now, someone might ask: but “What about the chemistry!?” The content is absolutely a vital part of knowing chemistry, but I would not say that it is the most important area of focus when learning chemistry. “Strong allegiance to content blocks the road to more learner-centered teaching” (Weimer, 2002, p.46). One could argue that these scientific practices mentioned earlier are the means in which we learn the content, but I take a different approach. I believe it is the content that guides us, but it is the practice of chemistry that is learned.
A helpful analogy would be that of learning piano. Imagine the content in chemistry as the sheet music a musician reads from. Imagine the act of playing the piano as the fundamental practices I spoke of earlier. You would not say that someone knows how to play piano if they have only memorized the sheet music. Without any music however, learning to play the piano at all would be a very difficult task. The piano player uses different pieces of music literature to challenge themselves and grow as a musician much like how a chemistry student follows the content the instructor provides in order to improve their practices.
With this in mind, chemistry students do not learn chemistry as much as they learn how to do chemistry. Laboratory instruction is then required as it “permits learners to experience phenomena directly as well as understand how new knowledge is constructed” (Svinicki et al., 2014, p.277). Chemistry is an activity much like playing the piano; it takes repeated practice and tries patience.
This requires active learning from the students. I can attend as many piano recitals as I can, but I would be no closer to becoming a concert pianist myself. I could read books upon books on music theory, but I could not proclaim to people that I have “learned” piano. I would need to spend hours a day practicing piano, getting guided instruction from teachers, and attempt piano recitals on my own before I could ever tell someone I have “learned” piano.
As I cannot learn piano from just watching and reading, nor can my students learn chemistry through the same method. Students learn chemistry through doing chemistry. Doing chemistry means physically being in the lab and collecting data using laboratory equipment. This also involves them being able to problem solve and troubleshoot when a procedure does not go as expected. This type of learning involves “developing skills, increasing understanding, and acquiring information that enables [students] to take all kinds of matters into their own hands” (Brookfield, 2013, p.3). The process of attempting to answer a question through experimentation is the process of student learning in this context.
The difficult part as an instructor becomes knowing whether or not they have learned the chemistry. This assessing should be done throughout the semester as the students participate in various classroom and laboratory activates. Many of these activities inherently have assessments embedded into them that are “’virtually indistinguishable from the everyday classroom [or laboratory] activities” themselves (Svinicki et al., 2014, p.82). These could include observations of the students within the laboratory setting, listening to discussion among peers, viewing student data and asking questions about it to find what the students understand about the data, and overall, how the students present their findings to the class through some form of a presentation or a lab report. This type of assessment is “more authentically related to later uses of learning than are conventional tests” (Svinicki et al., 2014, p.78).
Ultimately, as a general chemistry teacher, we are typically held accountable on how well our students understand the content. My argument is that if there is this much time spent on practicing chemistry, the content becomes second nature. This is not just serendipitous, but it is the effect of careful planning of activities that concurrently exposes students to the content while they are doing chemistry in the laboratory. In many teaching and learning settings, summative assessments for chemistry classes look much like problem based tests used to identify if the students have reached a certain level of proficiency within the context of the course. These type of assessments are focused heavily on the content because it is hard to determine if someone is proficient in doing chemistry from a written test, much like how it would be difficult to determine someone’s proficiency on playing the piano with a written assessment.
So my role as a teacher becomes somewhat defined by looking at how these students must be assessed; the students must learn the content that is very carefully laid out in the form of standards and objectives. These are given to me from the institution I am working for. This content must be taught by “[combining] structure or intentionality with flexibility” found in inquiry based laboratory activities (Palmer, 2001, p.69). By doing this, I am providing “clarity about my [and their] objectives but openness to [the] various ways of achieving them” (Palmer, 2001, p.69).
In this sense, I merely provide selected problems and laboratory activities for the students and only “guide and facilitate [their] learning” (Weimer, 2002, p.74). I guide and facilitate this learning using multiple strategies that involve discussion using whiteboards in order to display ideas and findings, I allow for in class practice so that I may provide immediate feedback to the students, and make myself available before, during, and after laboratory activities so the students may have a sounding board of sorts to bounce ideas off when they are stuck. I must remind myself, however, to never become the expert in the room. The focus must always remain on the learner and in order to truly provide learner-centered teaching, “we must move aside, often and regularly” and eventually, leave them entirely while they continue to develop into life-long learners (Weimer, 2002, p.74).